From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wupost!emory!gwinnett!depsych!rc Mon Dec 16 11:01:32 EST 1991
Article 2083 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Carlson's claim that dialectic cannot be formalized
Message-ID: <1uuucB4w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>
Date: 12 Dec 91 18:36:11 GMT
References: <40425@dime.cs.umass.edu>
Lines: 76

yodaiken@chelm.cs.umass.edu (victor yodaiken) writes:
> There seems little point in pursuing this further. You advance something
> you call "dialectic" as a framework for reasoning, and you puport to
> find examples of this "dialectic" in the infamous Eternal Golden Braid.
> To my untutored eye, this "dialectic" seems like either triviality or
> mystification.  You have not advanced any reasons which would cause me
> to change my opinion.

I agree.  I want to get into the Chinese Room a little more
anyway.

But let me tell you how I "get into" a discussion and you can
judge whether or not dialectical reasoning is either trivial (so
obvious you don't need to state it) or mystifying (gets in the way
of understanding by introducing considerations irrelevant to the
discourse under consideration).

If you see the "discourse" as the unit of analysis (the "strong
AI" discourse, the "logical analysis" discourse, the "Platonic"
discourse, the "Semiotic" discourse, and so on), even if we
personify "it" (the discourse) and attribute "motives" and an
"agenda" to it, I think we understand better what is "really"
going on.  The discourses interact dialectically, almost as if each
was a person engaged in a bull session.  Logical analysts may
focus on the individual proposition as the preferred unit or level or
analysis.  But looking at language as comprised of many levels,
form the phonological, through the morphological (semantic),
syntactic (logical) and discourse (ideological) enables us to
understand the moves being made in the game or dialogue.

On one side we have the Strong AI discourse and its associated (if
occasionally incommensurable) allied discourses.  Sometimes that
boils down to an implicit assumption that all thought is
algorithmic ("syntactic" or "formal" or "squiggles" or whatever),
although the rhetorical point is occasionally made that "in
principle" probabilistic or connectionist or associationist or
fuzzy processes are not excluded. (So presumably a
pattern-matching "right brain" or "graphical" type of process,
which in another context might be opposed to a "propositional" or
"left brain" process is thrown in as one of the types of routines
admissible.)  The motives for this discourse seem to be diverse.
Certainly there is something normative about it.  Moving thought
out of the head and onto paper or into a computer seems to be an
attempt to gain certainty.  Historically the Aristotelian
analytics, which is really the first attempt at AI, emerged in the
historical context of post-sophist and early universalist thought,
when "traditional" answers to questions about the meaning of life
had already been effectively deconstructed. There is also an
anti-spiritualist, anti-materialist feeling about this point of
view, a kind of debunking of the special nature of human
consciousness, while at the same time there is a kind of
mentalization of physical processes which has a spiritualizing
thrust to it, making "mind" a privileged part of reality, so
strong AIers could have confused and mixed motives at a deep level
in their personalities.

Against them, on the other side, we have the claims which largely
boil down to free will, agency and meaning ("semantics"), a notion
of a moral universe where the mind-stuff has an ethical quality to
it:  Intentionality and the _Gestaltkreis_.  People on this side
generally fall into two subcamps, the theists and the
existentialists.  The existentialist see humans as saddled with an
absurd meaning that is itself meaningless while the theists see
the universe as containing moral precepts which are knowable
through some nonlogical (or nonalgorithmic) process which cannot
be explicitly described.

When you look at the interactions of thought from that,
essentially dialectical perspective, I think you can understand
the game better, like having a scorecard at a ball game.

--
Richard Carlson        |    rc@depsych.gwinnett.COM
Midtown Medical Center |    {rutgers,ogicse,gatech}!emory!gwinnett!depsych!rc
Atlanta, Georgia       |
(404) 881-6877         |


