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From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: Intensionality in science. (Was FIRST order? was: why...)
Message-ID: <1995Jul16.171214.19486@media.mit.edu>
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Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 17:12:14 GMT
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A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk "Aaron Sloman" writes:

>> the way I don't  believe Minsky ever subscribed to the view you
>> are sketching, if I've understood it correctly. But I don't know
>> which 1986 publication you are referring to: it wasn't in your
>> appended list of references.)


Yes, I can't remember ever feeling that the idea of "rational
thinking" has much value except as some sort of social comparative.  In
mathematics, where one assumes some axioms, there is some value in
trying to invent faultless systems for logical inference-making.
However, there's no such thing for deciding what inferences to make.

David@longley.demon.co.uk writes:

>'The Society of Mind'. As to what MM believes now, that may have changed 
>since he joined in on the debate last time I wrote about this - a couple 
>of months back in the thread on SoM. 

In fact, I don't think the idea of "what MM believes" is much use,
except in shallow, short term discussions.  The idea of "what X
believes" is a sloppy psychological approximation.  Sadly,
philosophers take it too seriously, as a consequence of their
generally unquestioning adoption of the Single Self concept of the
mind.  Aaron Sloman (seen as a philosopher rather than a psychologist)
is I think the most notable exception.

However, if I were to try to present a single view, I'd say that for
the purposes of real life, the value "correct thinking -- if that's
what you mean by 'rational' or, perhaps, 'logical' -- is seriously
limited because of the unavailablity of perfectly true axioms.  So,
because you need (informal) heuristics to evaluate your assumptions,
you might as well do the same for your methods of inference: in other
words you have to make assumptions like "rule of inference r-7 seems
pretty good under circumstances c-3".

Anyway, my search program finds only one significant occurrence of the
notion of rationality in "The Society of Mind":

	"There is another way our intellectual growth is not so
different from our emotional development: we can make intellectual
attachments, too, and want to think the way certain other persons do.
These intellectual ideals may stem from parents, teachers, and
friends; from persons one has never met, such as writers; even from
legendary heroes who did not exist. I suspect we depend as much on
images of how we ought to think as we do on images of how we ought to
feel. Some of our most persistent memories are about certain teachers,
but not about what was taught. (At the moment I'm writing this, I feel
as though my hero Warren McCulloch were watching disapprovingly; he
would not have liked these neoFreudian ideas.) No matter how
emotionally neutral an enterprise may seem, there's no such thing as
being "purely rational."  One must always approach each situation with
some personal style and disposition. Even scientists have to make
stylistic choices."

The search for 'rational' also finds this relevant quotation from
Gilbert Chesterton:

"The world has kept sentimentalities simply because they are the most
practical things in the world. They alone make men do things. The
world does not encourage a perfectly rational lover, simply because a
perfectly rational lover would never get married. The world does not
encourage a perfectly rational army, because a perfectly rational army
would run away."
