Filling the gaps: Hume and connectionism on the continued existence of unperceived objects

Hume Studies

Volumn 25, Issue 1-2, 1998, Pages 155-170

  Collier, Mark ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 42549089395     PISSN: 03197336     EISSN: 19479921     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. See H. H. Price, Hume's Theory of the External World [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963], 18.
2. D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed. revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978)
3. Price, Hume's Theory of the External World, 20.
4. Barry Stroud, Hume (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 101.
5. Hume attempts to clarify his account in a later footnote. He tells us that there are in fact two resemblances at work: first, there is the resemblance between the items of constant series; this causes the imagination to pass smoothly from one element of the series to the next; second, this smooth passage of the mind resembles, and is thus confounded with, the passage of the mind as it "surveys" complete series (T 205 n.).
6. The worry is that the law of resemblance explains why the various A's are associated, but not why they are conflated. The same worry applies to the resemblance between the mind's passage over complete and gappy series; the resemblance explains why we associate these two types of series, but not why we confound them. The tendency to conflate resembling series is an additional propensity which Hume employs solely for the purpose of explaining the origins of our idea of identity.
7. Stroud, Hume, 108-109.
8. Jonathan Bennett, Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 328.
9. This realization is one of Hume's rare careful moments on this point, and when he turns to his second formulation of his hypothesis, coherence drops out of the picture completely.
10. Bennett, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, 329-330.
11. See Andy Clark, Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts, and Representational Change (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), ch. 2 for a clear overview of prototype recognition in connectionist networks.
12. Paul Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 280.
13. Paul Churchland, The Neurocomputational Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 211.
14. Clark, Associative Engines, 17. Clark considers superposition part of the "USP," or Unique Selling Point, of connectionism.
15. Y. Munakata, J. McClelland, et al., "Rethinking Infant Knowledge: Toward an Adaptive Process Account of Successes and Failures in Object Performance Tasks," Psychological Review 104 (1997): 686-713.
16. Munakata, McClelland, et al., "Rethinking Infant Knowledge," 699. Technical note: Simple Recurrent Networks.
17. Jeff Elman, Elizabeth Bates, et al., Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 51'.
18. Munakata, McClelland, et al., "Rethinking Infant Knowledge," 700.
19. Elman, Bates, et al., Rethinking Innateness, 45
20. Kim Plunkett and Jeff Elman, Simulating Nature, Nurture: A Handbook of Connectionist Exercises (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 20.
21. Technical Note: Methods of Analysis. In order to distinguish the network's representation of the hidden object, the researchers used the method of "stimulus subtraction." "[T]o isolate the network representation of the ball during events involving a barrier, we record the pattern of activity across the network's internal representation units at a particular time step in a particular 'ball-barrier' event and subtract from it the pattern of activity from the corresponding time step in the corresponding 'barrier-only' event"
22. Plunkett and Elman, Simulating Nature, Nurture, 30.
23. Hume clearly has Locke's Representational Realism in mind when he refers to the "philosophical system."