CONNECTIONISM AND THE PROBLEM OF SYSTEMATICITY (CONTINUED) - WHY SMOLENSKY SOLUTION STILL DOESNT WORK

Paul Smolensky has recently announced that the problem of explaining t he compositionality of concepts within a connectionist framework is so lved in principle. Mental representations are vectors over the activit y states of connectionist ''units'', but the vectors encode Classical trees, whose structural properties in turn ''acausally'' explain the f acts of compositionality. This sounds suspiciously like the offer of a free lunch, and it turns out, upon examination, that there is nothing to it.