It looks like an interesting book. Published in 1995, it is mostly focused on cognitivist / functional approaches in computational linguistics rather than the current ML paradigm, though there is a section on connectionism, a decentralized bottom up approach which favored the emergence of linguistic behaviour and reasoning from artificial neural networks over cognitivist ideas of implementing symbolic reasoning directly.<p>The authors agree with the connectionist critique of cognitivists like Fodor (correctly, and on good Wittgensteinian grounds, IMO) but then critique the positive views of the connectionists that "connectionist modelling will pave the way for a better understanding of brain-behaviour (or, more contentiously, brain-'mind') relationships" as "incoherent". I think that latter claim of incoherence is looking a bit tattered now in view of the undoubted practical linguistic interest of LMMs.<p>After locating the book at one of the popular public academic material utilities, my first instinct was to look for my my favorite anti-cognitivist anti-nativist quote from <i>Philosophical Investigations</i> about the operation of meaning (or <i>intentionality</i>, to use the technical term):<p>> "There must surely be a further, different connexion between my talk and N, for otherwise I should still not have meant HIM."<p>> Certainly such a connexion exists. Only not as you imagine it: namely by means of a mental mechanism.<p>(PI, §689)<p>This isn't directly quoted in the book, but they do say:<p>> one of the points that Wittgenstein is making with respect to rules and language is that there are no mechanisms of grammar, no calculus of determining rules, behind reasoning, behind language. Rules can be a guide to action, but they do not constrain it in the way in which the viewpoint nourished by computational linguists proposes.