 Fodor and McLaughlin (1990) grant that distributed representations may have constituency structure “in an extended sense”. But they insist that distributed representations are ill-suited to explain systematicity. They focus especially on the systematicity of thinking, the classical explanation for which postulates mechanical operations that respond to constituency structure. Fodor and McLaughlin argue that the non-concatenative conception cannot replicate the classical explanation and offers no satisfactory substitute for it. Chalmers (1993) and Niklasson and van Gelder (1994) disagree. They contend that a neural network can execute structure-sensitive computations over representations that have non-concatenative constituency structure. They conclude that connectionists can explain productivity and systematicity without retreating to implementationist connectionism.