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We are big fans of propositions. But we are not big fans of the "propositional approach" proposed by Mitchell et al. The authors ignore the critical role played by implicit, non-inferential processes in biological cognition, overestimate the work that propositions alone can do, and gloss over substantial differences in how different kinds of animals and different kinds of cognitive processes approximate propositional representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans, including preschool children, exhibit role-based relational reasoning, of which analogical reasoning is a canonical example. The "role-less" connectionist model proposed in the target article is only capable of conditional paired-associate learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]