Stipulating versus discovering representations
David C. Plaut, James L. McClelland · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · 2000
Page's proposal to stipulate representations in which individual units correspond to meaningful entities is too unconstrained to support effective theorizing. An approach combining general computational principles with domain-specific assumptions, in which learning is used to discover representations that are effective in solving tasks, provides more insight into why cognitive and neural systems are organized the way they are.