I have a few beefs with Chomsky; his ongoing critiquing of connectionism can be over simplified. But I see him as s product of his computing era, fundamentally (and rightly) enamored by Turing machines. Many people still are to this day and it’s understandable.
But while he misses the boat on connectionism imo, he has a nice quote that’s related:
”
If you take a look at the progress of science, the sciences are kind of a continuum, but they’re broken up into fields. The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say physics — greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else.
If a molecule is too big, you give it to the chemists. The chemists, for them, if the molecule is too big or the system gets too big, you give it to the biologists. And if it gets too big for them, they give it to the psychologists, and finally it ends up in the hands of the literary critic, and so on.. So what the neuroscientists are saying is not completely false.
-Chomsky
”
He goes from there to criticize connectionism but he does give credit where it’s due in some part, so I’m glad for that.