 Paul Churchland’s allegiance to functional role semantics goes back to his earliest views about the semantics of terms in a language. In his (1979) book, he insisted that the semantic identity (content) of a term derives from its place in the network of sentences of the entire language. The functional economies envisioned by early functional role semanticists were networks with nodes corresponding to the objects and properties denoted by expressions in a language. Thus one node, appropriately connected, might represent birds, another feathers, and another beaks. Activation of one of these would tend to spread activation to the others. As “connectionist” neural network modeling developed (as discussed in the previous section above), alternatives arose to this one-representation-per-node “localist” approach. By the time Churchland (1989) provided a neuroscientific elaboration of functional role semantics for cognitive representations generally, he too had abandoned the “localist” interpretation. Instead, he offered a “state-space semantics”.