The resons Clark gives to support his claim that systematicity is a conceptual fact are unconvincing:
- thought ascriptions are not necessarily holistic, because "organisms can have individual thoughts involving a host of concepts in the absence of evidence from the versatile deployment of those concepts” (p.39)
- thought ascriptions do seem to have something to do with in-the-head mental processing.
So it appears that systematicity is an empirical (not a conceptual) issue, and whether the connectionists can account for it remains an open question.
Keith Butler, 1993b.