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From: David E. Weldon, Ph.D. <David.E.Weldon@DaytonOH.ATTGIS.COM>
Subject: Re: Chomsky on Consciousness and Dennett
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Date: Wed, 14 Jun 1995 22:51:25 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu sci.lang:40200 sci.psychology:43219 comp.ai.philosophy:28863


}==========David Longley, 6/12/95==========
}
}In article <JMC.95Jun12013106@SAIL.Stanford.EDU>
}           jmc@cs.Stanford.EDU "John McCarthy" writes:
}
}> My approach to the problem of referential opacity is to use 
}different
}> variables for objects and concepts.  My paper on this, "First 
}order
}> theories of individual concepts and propositions" is now 
}available
}> from my web page http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/ in Latex, 
}dvi,
}> postscript and now even in html.
}> 
}> If you want to go directly to the paper, it is
}> http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/i6/i6.html.
}> 
}> -- 
}> John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 
}94305
}> *
}> He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
}> 
}> http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/
}> 
}Before burying myself in the papers John McCarthy has kindly 
}made 
}available,  I'd like to re-assert one point. 
}
[A bunch of stuff on Quine deleted]
}
}Until I read John McCarthy's comments on opacity in this  thread, 
}I  had thought that the merits of AI from Frege onwards  was  the 
}mechanisation of the principle of extensionality. At first blush, 
}I  would say that any attempt to regiment the intensional  within 
}the  predicate  calculus must be akin to absorbing  alchemy  into 
}chemistry or astrology into cosmology. 
}
}So I ask again, why ? 
}-- 
}David Longley
}
And I say, "Why not!"

To use your metaphor, thoughts and other internal activities of the brain are
behaviors and I know you will agree that behavior is a legitimate area of
study.  Admittedly, brain behaviours are a little harder to see than gross
motor behaviours, but that is hardly a reason to deny their usefulness.

When I was a fledgling graduate student, I had the joy of learning a
"behaviourist's" classification system so I could spend long hours observing
videotapes and recording what the "behaviourist" considered to be key
behaviours.  During that rather long semester, I received some striking
insights about behaviourist dogma that I've never forgotten:  (1)  "behaviour"
classification systems are quite arbitrary and often miss the target
completely; that is, behaviour is _continuous_ and any attempt to beak it into
discrete categories for the purpose of analysis destroys the pattern it was
originally embedded it.  (2) the pattern is often more important than the
apparent acts produced by the classification system.  (3) Sometimes
behaviourists slip badly and put those bad intensional constructs in their
category descriptions; so they aren't measuring behaviours at all, but
something that is at least one abstraction away from the overt behaviour.  (4)
Inter-rater reliability is higher for the abstracted behaviour descriptions
than for the "pure" behaviour categories.  (5) It was a lot easier to score
the behaviours in the conditions where verbal behaviour was recorded as well
as other motor behaviour; i.e., significant clues were in the verbal reports
of the subjects.  (6) Being a "behaviour coder" is just about the worst job a
graduate student can have.


