From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!psych.toronto.edu!christo Mon May 25 14:06:14 EDT 1992
Article 5742 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!psych.toronto.edu!christo
>From: christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green)
Subject: Response to Brian Yoder
Organization: Dept. of Psychology, University of Toronto
Message-ID: <1992May19.161929.18226@psych.toronto.edu>
Date: Tue, 19 May 1992 16:19:29 GMT

Brian Yoder sent me e-mail about the Helen Keller analogy to AI.
My replies to him bounce, so I'm posting my response, along with
his e-mail.

The message was:
Subject: Re: on what meaning means
To: rothko.norton.com!brian@norton.norton.com (Brian K. Yoder)
Date: Tue, 19 May 92 12:13:05 EDT
In-Reply-To: <9205190831.AA00466@rothko.norton.com>; from "Brian K. Yoder" at May 19, 92 1:31 am
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL1]


> In comp.ai.philosophy article <1992May17.230428.18664@psych.toronto.edu> you  
> (christopher) wrote:
> 
> > She knew "water" and few other words BEFORE she became deaf and blind;
> > enough to get started. Imagine a person born with NO sensation. Such a
> > person would never "train up" (except, perhaps logic and math :-)

> 
Brian replied:
> I hope you weren't serious about that!  There are plenty of folks out there 
> trying to make intelligent machines who make exactly the error of thinking  
> that math and logic can somehow exist apart from experience and perception  
> of the existents being manipulated.
> 
Christopher re-replies:
Only half-serious (note the smilie).  I'm not sure that what you call a 
"mistake" is widely accepted to be one.  I could just as easily retort
that it is one of the classic mistakes of freshman philosophers that they
think they can map all of logic and math on to experience, but they can't.
After all, they are *formal* systems, and formal system need no semantic
interpretation.  That's one of the primary reasons many are loathe to
consider them a sound basis for cognitive models. Your statement smacks
of a radical empiricism that I don't think can be defended in this day
anymore. Surely there's lots we know through reason alone. Plato and 
Descartes and Kant weren't so dumb after all, just too extreme. 
But no more extreme than Hume and Mill and Mach and their cronies


-- 
Christopher D. Green                christo@psych.toronto.edu
Psychology Department               cgreen@lake.scar.utoronto.ca
University of Toronto
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