This response agrees with Stanovich's emphasis on the need for decentering, and, in response to Beyth-Marom, attempts to clarify the normative-prescriptive-descriptive distinction and point in the direction of prescriptive models. It takes issue with Cabanac and with Lindsay & Gorayska.

I argue that SHRUTl's ontology is heavily committed to a representational view of mind. This is best seen when one thinks of how SHRUTI could be developed to account for psychological data on deductive reasoning.

Shastri & Ajjanagadde (1993) (S&A) argue convincingly that both structured connectionist networks and parallel dynamic inferencing are necessary for reflexive reasoning - a kind of inferencing and reasoning that occurs rapidly, spontaneously, and without conscious effort, and which seems necessary for everyday tasks such as natural language understanding. As S&A describe, reflexive reasoning requires a solution to the dynamic binding problem, that is, how to encode systematic and abstract knowledge and instantiate it in specific situations to draw appropriate inferences. Although symbolic artificial intelligence systems trivially solve the dynamic binding problem using computers' registers and pointers, it has remained a difficult problem for connectionist systems (see Fodor & Pylyshyn 1988). S&A's temporal synchrony solution to the dynamic binding problem using synchronous firing of argument units and the entities that are bound to them illustrates one way in which connectionist networks can do thisusing a constrained but important class of long-term knowledge rules. Their structured connectionist solution allows dynamic inferencing to proceed in parallel and therefore has a number of advantages for reflexive reasoning over most other connectionist and symbolic systems.

Lange & Dyer misunderstand what is meant by an “entity” and confuse a medium of representation (synchrony) with the content being represented. This leads them to the erroneous conclusion that SHRUTI will run out of phases and that its representation of bindings lacks semantic content. It is argued that (1) the limit on the number of phases suffices, and (2) SHRUTI can be interpreted as using “dynamic signatures” that offer significant advantages over fixed preexisting signatures. Bonatti refers to three levels of commitment to a representational theory of the mind (RTM) and states that SHRUTI is committed to RTM at levels 1 and 2. He acknowledges that SHRUTI is not committed at level 3, but argues that an extended SHRUTI would have to make such a commitment. We agree that SHRUTI is committed to RTM at level 1 and, in a sense, also at level 2. SHRUTI, however, is not committed to RTM at level 3 and, even though it has been extended in several ways, it has retained its original representational character.