When discussing an associative implementation base it is important to distinguish questions of associationist structure from questions of representational reality. Connectionists have often been followers of the Skinnerian anti-representationalist tradition (Skinner 1938). Because of the distributed nature of the nodes in connectionist networks, the networks have tended to be analyzed as associative stimulus/response chains of subsymbolic elements. However, the question of whether connectionist networks have representations which are distributed in patterns of activity throughout different nodes of the network, or whether connectionist networks are best understood as containing no representational structures at all, is orthogonal to both the question of whether the networks are purely associative or computational, and whether the networks can implement classical architectures.