How can unity of content be obtained from the diversity of expression; from symbolism to connectionism

Abstract

Adopting a symbolic paradigm, reading can be considered as an act of communication leading a reader to intentionally build in his mind, from the perception of printed symbols and from the aid of non-verbal elements, a substance of content similar to the one the writer wanted to express by means of a verbal written message. Nowadays we see that the strictness – typically signalized by the staticity of mental epresentations (symbols) and the seriality of the information process (classical artificial intelligence) – with which the symbolic paradigm explains the cognitive processes of the reading process in our mind clearly contrasts with the flexibility – characterized by the use of dynamic “ad hoc” configurations obtained by means of parallel distributed information among the interneural connections – with which the connectionist paradigm tries to explain the sequence of processes (hidden units in our brain) interpolated between input and output data. In a connectionist paradigm, reading consists of constructing, in the brain of the reader, a network of synaptic connections as answers to individual stimuli and experiences. It follows that the new text built in the reader’s brain, even keeping the cultural unity, will show diversities reflecting the way each reader experiences the world. The diversity in communicative acts can more easily be noticed in a translating