Language & Cognition: re-reading Jerry Fodor

In my opinion the late Jerry Fodor was one of the most brilliant cognitive scientists (that I knew of), if you wanted to have a deep understanding of the major issues in cognition and the plausibility/implausibility of various cognitive architectures. Very few had the technical breadth and depth in tackling some of the biggest questions concerning the mind, language, computation, the nature of concepts, innateness, ontology, etc. The other day I felt like re-reading his Concepts -- Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong (I read this small monograph at least 10 times before, and I must say that I still do not comprehend everything that's in it fully). But, what did happen in the 11th reading of Concepts is this: I now have a new and deeper understanding of his Productivity, Systematicity and Compositionality arguments that should clearly put an end to any talk of connectionist architectures being a serious architecture for cognition -- by'connectionist architectures' I roughly mean also modern day'deep neural networks' (DNNs) that are essentially, if we strip out the advances in compute power, the same models that were the target of Fodor's onslaught. I have always understood the'gist' of his argument, but I believe I now have a deeper understanding -- and, in the process I am now more than I have ever been before, convinced that DNNs cannot be considered as serious models for high-level cognitive tasks (planning, reasoning, language understanding, problem solving, etc.) beyond being statistical pattern recognizers (although very good ones at that).