AbstractIn this article, I survey the integrated connectionist/symbolic (ICS) cognitive architecture in which higher cognition must be formally characterized on two levels of description. At the microlevel, parallel distributed processing (PDP) characterizes mental processing; this PDP system has special organization in virtue of which it can be characterized at the macrolevel as a kind of symbolic computational system. The symbolic system inherits certain properties from its PDP substrate; the symbolic functions computed constitute optimization of a well‐formedness measure called Harmony. The most important outgrowth of the ICS research program is optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004), an optimization‐based grammatical theory that provides a formal theory of cross‐linguistic typology. Linguistically, Harmony maximization corresponds to minimization of markedness or structural ill‐formedness. Cognitive explanation in ICS requires the collaboration of symbolic and connectionist principles. ICS is developed in detail in Smolensky and Legendre (2006a); this article is a précis of and guide to those volumes.