Distributional semantics (Turney and Pantel, 2010), and data-driven, continuous approaches to language in general including neural networks (Bengio et al., 2003), are a success story in both Computational Linguistics and Cognitive Science in terms of modeling conceptual knowledge, such as the fact that cats are animals (Baroni et al., 2012), similar to dogs (Landauer and Dumais, 1997), and shed fur (Erk et al., 2010).
distributional representations are notoriously bad at handling discrete knowledge (Fodor and Lepore, 1999;Smolensky, 1990), such as information about specific instances.