From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!neat.cs.toronto.edu!cbo Mon May 25 14:05:26 EDT 1992
Article 5657 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!neat.cs.toronto.edu!cbo
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
>From: cbo@cs.toronto.edu (Calvin Bruce Ostrum)
Subject: Re: AI failures
Message-ID: <92May14.134243edt.47895@neat.cs.toronto.edu>
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
References: <1992May12.081742.22060@norton.com> <upsnbINNk2c@early-bird.think.com> <1992May13.173251.17396@organpipe.uug.arizona.edu> <1992May13.234419.17060@news.media.mit.edu>
Date: 14 May 92 17:43:03 GMT
Lines: 44

Marvin Minsky applauds Bill Skaggs:
| >  The problem with all this theorizing about morality is that it's
| >inescapably circular.  This is immediately obvious once you
| >realize that the fundamental question is:  "What is the right
| >system of morality?"
| Bravo.  Below is a page from "The Society of Mind" about that.

I am not really quite sure this deserves a bravo...
 
Professor Minsky backs himself up by quoting an eminent authority:
| Section 5.2 UNANSWERABLE QUESTIONS ...
|   What caused the universe, and why?  
|   What is the purpose of life?
|   How can you tell which beliefs are true?  
|   How can you tell what is good?
| 
| These questions seem different on the surface, but all of them share
| one quality which makes them impossible to answer: all of them are
| circular! 

And it also seems to me that this segment does not back up Bill's original
intention. Perhaps I am wrong, but I think he was disparaging moral 
reasoning in general, as opposed to highly abstract reasoning about
"ultimates", be they moral or otherwise. Even if I am wrong, his sentiment
and Marvin's boosting of it help to promote a discouraging, and perhaps even
a dangerous, view, which is that there is no point to moral reasoning since
"it's all circular". 

But, as Marvin points out in the above quote, reasoning is circular in ALL 
domains, when carried on at a sufficiently abstract level.  Nor is it 
obvious that all such circularity is vicious, as opposed to virtuous, 
another point which Marvin makes clear. Many professional philosophers 
making epistemology their special concern, such as Keith Lehrer and 
Laurence BonJour, certainly believe something like this.  The notion of 
Wide Reflective Equilibrium, as made famous by John Rawls, has elements 
of circularity about it, but that does not necessarily render vacuous 
reasoning which employs Wide Reflective Equilibrium or a similar notion.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Calvin Ostrum                                            cbo@cs.toronto.edu  
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
	"Bee eye jee enn you tea aiych eye enn" -- The Roches
---------------------------------------------------------------------------



