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Article 1558 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Is dialectical thought an "informal logic"?
Message-ID: <Lk7wBB1w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>
Date: 24 Nov 91 14:10:44 GMT
References: <1991Nov23.012231.3630@nuscc.nus.sg>
Lines: 79

smoliar@hilbert.iss.nus.sg (stephen smoliar) writes:

RC:
> >I suspect that one reason for ignoring the dialectic is precisely
> >because it cannot be formalized.
SWS:
> 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.

The principal reason I started reading this Newsgroup was
precisely to find out what is being done at the junction of
discourse analysis and AI.  I'd found literary, philosophical and
social-political journals discussing various aspects of discourse
analysis from a structuralist and post-structuralist point of view
-- journals like _Critical Inquiry_, _Social Text, and _Telos_ --
but not relating their essentially discursive formulations to
implementable AI.  I'd also found some texts in AI and some
newsstand magazines, _AI Expert_ and one or two others, discussing
AI, but these writings were both hard to understand and unrelated
to discourse analysis.

Since I began posting in the Newsgroup a couple of weeks ago I
have been referred to several interesting publications along the
line of what I have been looking for, although I have found only
one or two investigators who are explicitly trying to tie
discourse analysis to AI.

I do have the impression that for historical reasons -- Turing's
shadow mostly -- AI in America tends to be tied to a positivist
and foundationalist notion of "logic," with "primitives" and
"theorems" and "statements" and the like.  French
post-structuralists, especially Lyotard in his 1979 (i.e.
12-year-old!) book, _The Postmodern Condition: a Report on
Knowledge_, seemed to imply that there was a lot of French work in
AI that was based on more flexible and up-to-date
conceptualizations of human thinking, but I can't find any
references to this work.

In particular I've never seen any references to formalizing
dialectical thought, even though dialectical thought is what is
usually meant by "reason" or "human reasoning."  I do get the
impression that most American workers in AI aren't even familiar
with the basic notions of the dialectic.

SWS:
> 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.

I might not have made it clear but my point was that these two
teachers were highly competent, even brilliant.  I used to marvel
at the way the English teacher could pull an interpretation of why
Eustacia did this or Wildeve did that and what it all meant to the
logic of the narrative out of even the most unimaginative high
school junior.  She was marvelous!  Yet the connotations
surrounding the very word "dialectical," stemming, I suppose, from
the presumed involvement of dialectical reasoning in "Germanic"
thought -- which your anecdote illustrated beautifully -- and in
the "dialectical materialism," of the Russian Communists, seems to
lead most Americans to think that dialectics is just a way that
foreigners have of coming up with stupid and dangerous ideas.

--
Richard Carlson        |    rc@depsych.gwinnett.COM
Midtown Medical Center |    {rutgers,ogicse,gatech}!emory!gwinnett!depsych!rc
Atlanta, Georgia       |
(404) 881-6877         |


