Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

ather they explored variations within this form in attempts to heighten its emotional
expressiveness. “Strictly speaking, no doubt, musical Romanticism is more
style than language” (Whittall, 1987, p. 17). Romantic composers developed radically
new approaches to instrumentation, producing new tone colours (Ratner, 1992). The
amount of sound was manipulated as an expressive tool; Romanticists increased
“the compass, dynamic range, and timbral intensity of virtually all instruments”
(Ratner, 1992, p. 9). New harmonic progressions were invented. But all of these
expressive innovations involved relaxing, rather than replacing, classical conventions.
“There can be little doubt that ‘romantic’ musical styles emanate from and
comingle with ‘classic’ ones. There is no isolable time and place where one leaves off
and the other begins” (Plantinga, 1984, p. 22).
Connectionist cognitive science has been portrayed as a revolution (Hanson
& Olson, 1991) and as a paradigm shift (Schneider, 1987). However, it is important to
remember that it, like musical Romanticism, also shares many of the characteristics
of the classical school that it reacted against.
For instance, connectionists don’t abandon the notion of information processing;
they argue that the brain is just a different kind of information processor than
is a digital computer (Churchland, Koch, & Sejnowski, 1990). Connectionists don’t
discard the need for representations; they instead offer different kinds, such as distributed
representations (Hinton, McClelland, & Rumelhart, 1986). Connectionists
don’t dispose of symbolic accounts; they propose that they are approximations to
subsymbolic regularities (Smolensky, 1988).
Furthermore, it was argued earlier in this book that connectionist cognitive science
cannot be distinguished from classical cognitive science on many other dimensions,
including the adoption of functionalism (Douglas & Martin, 1991) and the
classical sandwich (Calvo & Gomila, 2008; Clark, 1997). When these two approaches
are compared in the context of the multiple levels of investigation discussed in
Chapter 2, there are many similarities between them:
Indeed, the fact that the two can be compared in this way at all indicates a commitment
to a common paradigm—an endorsement of the foundational assumption of
cognitive science: cognition is information processing. (Dawson, 1998, p. 298)
Copland (1952, pp. 69–70) argued that the drama of European music was defined
by two polar forces: “the pull of tradition as against the attraction of innovation.”
These competing forces certainly contributed to the contradictory variety found in
musical Romanticism (Einstein, 1947); perhaps they too have shaped modern connectionist
cognitive science. This issue can be explored by considering connectionist
approaches to musical cognition and comparing them to the classical research
on musical cognition that was described earlier in the current chapter.
Classical Music and Cognitive Science 285