  Connectionism is relevant to the Nativism-Empiricism in two related ways. In the first place, Connectionism provides a natural format for the Empiricist idea that perception provides the basic elements of the mental system (ideas/network-nodes) and experienced regularities among ideas strengthens their connection (associations/weightings) and in this way accounts for learning. But a more important idea is that if Connectionism could be established as a real alternative to the Classical symbol manipulation approach (and not simply as providing implementations of Classical systems), it could help undercut a key argument of Chomsky-style Nativism. Here is a simplified version of the target  argument.[26] Chomskyans, as we noted (section 1.1.2), argued that grammars—and by extension, the rules governing other domains of knowledge—are ‘psychologically real’. If they are, and the Classical view is correct, then it would seem that such rules are present in the mind as symbolic constructions. But these rules, as linguistic grammars make plain, involve abstract concepts that are not perceptually available in the data. So if the rules are symbolically represented, then these abstract concepts, which are the constituent elements of the rules, are also internally represented. But if the relevant concepts are not perceptually available, how could they be learned by Empiricist-style mechanisms that only track regularities in the stream of experience? This sort of Nativist argument was developed in Fodor 1981. Connectionism rejects the view of mental representation on which this argument depends. For the Connectionist, information is not in the mind as the semantics of mental symbols; as the meanings of terms in the language of thought. For the Connectionist, information is distributed as a pattern of weightings in a network in which none of the nodes represents anything. So: if this sort of anti-Classical Connectionist approach is successful, this particular version of the Poverty of the Stimulus argument for Nativism is blocked. 