Is cognition associationist or symbolic or both (Pinker)?

• One view of cognition is that it is statistical, associationist, and similarity-based (Hume, Pavlov, Skinner, Hebb, Rumelhart, McClelland, Hinton).

• Another view of cognition is that it is rule-governed and symbolic (Hobbes, Descartes, Chomsky, Newell & Simon, Pylyshyn, Pinker).

  A object within a pattern (rule) can be represented by variable, which ignores similarity, getting its meaning from its role in the pattern (rule).