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Article 3734 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: zeleny@brauer.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Robotic Follies
Message-ID: <1992Feb14.103120.8809@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: 14 Feb 92 15:31:17 GMT
References: <1992Feb13.134208.26140@oracorp.com>
Organization: Dept. of Math, Harvard Univ.
Lines: 73
Nntp-Posting-Host: brauer.harvard.edu

In article <1992Feb13.134208.26140@oracorp.com> 
daryl@oracorp.com writes:

>Mikhail Zeleny writes:

MZ:
>> As I said to Pontus Gagge, this is not meant to attribute the above
>> view [about the impossibility of a formal theory of belief] to the
>> esteemed author of "The Society of Mind" himself; indeed, Minsky seems
>> to be arguing against his own coreligionists like John McCarthy and
>> Daryl McCullough, who make claims to the effect that the human mind
>> may be taken as functionally equivalent to a formal theory.

DMC:
>Mikhail, I don't have any particular disagreement with Minsky's
>statements about belief, and I don't think that they contradict the
>claim that the human mind is functionally equivalent to a formal
>theory.

Minsky seems to think otherwise.  Please refer to his original article for
more details.

DMC:
>         The claim that the human mind is formalizable does not imply
>identifying beliefs with the formal consequences of any theory.

Quite so.  However this claim does imply that the ascription of beliefs can
be made on the basis of the formalized theory of mind, provided that this
theory recognizes them as bona fide cognitive states.

DMC:
>Obviously human beliefs are not like the consequences of a formal
>theory; they can be inconsistent without succumbing to triviality,
>simply because people do not necessarily believe all the logical
>consequences of their beliefs. I don't think that totality of the set
>of beliefs of a real human being is in any sense logical.

I agree with all of the above.

DMC:
>							   Because of
>this, a "logic of belief" cannot capture the way humans think, except
>in restricted, well-defined domains.

Not so.  You are confusing the totality of the proposition of a putative
formal theory of belief, which must be closed under logical consequence,
with its subject matter, the belief content, which needn't be so.

DMC:
> 				      When I was talking with you about
>formalizing human beliefs, I was specifically concerned with such a
>domain, namely beliefs about arithmetic held by a competent
>mathematician.

Perhaps what you ought to have considered instead is the deontic closure of
such beliefs, which is arguably closed under logical consequence.

>Daryl McCullough
>ORA Corp.
>Ithaca, NY


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