Putting distributed representations into context

The merits of distributed representations are widely discussed but, I believe, largely misunderstood. My purpose in this paper is to put the issue of distributed representations into context. I will argue that the term distributed is only meaningful with respect to that which is being represented and that degree to which a localist or a distributed code is more desirable depends on the goals of the computation to be performed. I will also argue that localist codes play an essential role in symbolic neural computation.