The Proper Treatment of Semantic Systematicity

Connectionist-minded philosophers, including Clark and van Gelder, have espoused the merits of viewing hiddenlayer, context-sensitive representations as possessing semantic content, where this content is partially revealed via the representations' position in vector space. In recent work, Bodén and Niklasson have incorporated a variant of this view within their conception of semantic systematicity. Moreover, Bodén and Niklasson contend that they have produced experimental results which not only satisfy a kind of context-based, semantic systematicity, but which, to the degree that reality permits, effectively deals with challenges posed by Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988), and Hadley (1994a). This paper examines the claims of Bodén and Niklasson. It is argued that their case fatally involves a fallacy of equivocation. In addition, it is argued that their ultimate construal of context sensitive semantics employs lax, incorrect standards.