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Article 1515 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: smoliar@hilbert.iss.nus.sg (stephen smoliar)
Subject: Re: Is dialectical thought an "informal logic"?
Message-ID: <1991Nov23.012231.3630@nuscc.nus.sg>
Sender: usenet@nuscc.nus.sg
Organization: Institute of Systems Science, NUS, Singapore
References: <5RPRBB5w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>
Date: Sat, 23 Nov 1991 01:22:31 GMT

In article <5RPRBB5w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM> rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard
Carlson) writes:
>When I was going to high school in the 50s I had an English
>teacher who used the Socratic method in her teaching and who
>thought that Socrates was the wisest man who had ever lived.  I
>also had a history teacher who believed that the adversarial
>method of American jurisprudence was the greatest guarantor of
>both individual liberty and societal justice.
>
>Both of these teachers also thought that "dialectical thought" was
>evil, totalitarian, authoritarian, Communistic, Fascistic,
>imprecise, unscientific, foreign, un-american, fuzzy-headed,
>Germanic and generally bad.  If I had told them then that both
>Socrates and Perry Mason were "dialecticians" I would have failed
>their courses and earned their eternal enmity  as a champion of
>all that was dark and a foe of everything that was good and
>decent.

I went to high school in the Sixties.  Things were beginning to change;  but,
for the most part, high school teachers were a pretty dumb lot.  It did not
take me long to realize that self-study was the only way I was going to get
any education until college started.  However, I hope you do not fall into
the same trap than ensnared your teachers--that of confusing "dialectical
thought" with "dialectical materialism."  To throw out all of dialectical
thought because of what Hegel did to it and the ensuing consequences is to
discard the baby with the bath water.

>  To me at that
>time a "dialectician" was a wild-eyed man with a long, scraggly
>beard wearing foreign, Russian-looking clothes and spouting angry
>nonsense.
>
This deserves citation of a delightful anecdote offered up by John Kenneth
Galbraith in his book THE AGE OF UNCERTAINTY:

	Once, years ago, I was greatly comforted by a story told
	me by Arthur Goodhart, the Oxford law professor and onetime
	Master of University College.  It concerned a night in 1940
	when, as a member of the Home Guard, he was deployed with a
	fellow professor, a distinguished philosopher at the university,
	to guard a small private airstrip near Oxford.  They may well
	have been the two most improbable soldiers in the annals of
	British military history.  But they marched back and forth
	in a light mist, one with a rifle of Crimean vintage more
	or less, the other with a fowling piece.  Occasionally, being
	professors, they stopped to converse.  Toward dawn, during one
	of these pauses, Goodhart's fellow soldier lit his pipe and
	said, "I say, Arthur, do you suppose those wretched fellows
	aren't coming?  I did so want a shot at them.  I've always
	detested Hegel."
>
>I suspect that one reason for ignoring the dialectic is precisely
>because it cannot be formalized.

Like Richard Reiner, I find this "a preposterously strong claim."  To assume
that the dialectic is being ignored in such areas as natural language
processing is to overlook all sorts of work in discourse analysis and
pragmatics which has emerged over the past ten years or so.  Believe
it or not, artificial intelligence HAS progressed since the days of
Eliza and SHRDLU.  I do not think ANYONE doing serious natural language
work is concerned with what you call "the movement of discrete statements."
This is not to say that all the relevant aspects of discourse have been
successfully formalized, but they are hardly being ignored.
-- 
Stephen W. Smoliar; Institute of Systems Science
National University of Singapore; Heng Mui Keng Terrace
Kent Ridge, SINGAPORE 0511
Internet:  smoliar@iss.nus.sg


