Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the microstructures of cognition. By David E. Rumelhart, James L. McClelland, and the PDP Research Group. Vol. I, Foundations; Vol. II, Psychological and biological models. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986. Pp. xx, 547; xii, 611.

作者：Geoffrey R Sampson · 发表于：Language · 年份：1987 · DOI：10.2307/415721 · 被引用次数：740 · 研究领域：Cognitive Science and Mapping、Language and cultural evolution

1. Very rarely, a book is published which not only advances our knowledge of a particular topic, but fundamentally recasts our methods of investigating and thinking about large tracts of the map of learning. Linguists remember 1957 as the publication year of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic structures-a book whose ostensible subjects were the structure of English grammatical rules and the goals of grammatical description, but which can be seen with hindsight as the first shot in an intellectual revolution which ended by radically changing the texture of day-to-day research activity and discourse throughout almost all of linguistics, and in substantial parts of other cognition-related disciplines. In decades to come, perhaps 1986 will be remembered by academics as the year of publication of the pair of volumes reviewed here: they constitute the first large-scale public statement of an intellectual paradigm fully as revolutionary as the generative paradigm ever was (there have been scattered journal articles in the preceding four or five years). I would go further and suggest that, if the promises of this book can be redeemed, the contrast in linguistics and neighboring disciplines between the 1990's and the 1970's will be significantly greater than the contrast between the 1970's and the 1950's. (I need hardly add, of course, that it is one thing to fire an opening salvo, but another to achieve ultimate predominance.) The new paradigm is called Parallel Distributed Processing by the s...