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Article 1565 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: jmc@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (John McCarthy)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,sci.philosophy.tech,comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: The Philosophical Foibles of John McCarthy
Message-ID: <JMC.91Nov24203029@SAIL.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 25 Nov 91 01:30:29 GMT
References: <1991Nov15.003438.11323@grebyn.com> <1991Nov15.160741.5495@husc3.harvard.edu>
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Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
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In-Reply-To: zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu's message of 21 Nov 91 19:53:45 GMT

I have reread Zeleny's foibles posting several times.  I follow it
(and agree) up to the point where he accuses me of prestidigitation.
Then it gets a bit fuzzy.  I'm not sure what question I am supposed to
have begged.  Circumscription has been treated syntactically by
writing a certain second order formulas.  It is also treated
semantically by talking about models of the axiom that are minimal in
a certain ordering.  Given not too onerous conditions the syntactic
and semantic treatments correspond nicely.

Please avoid Latin in arguing with me; I don't know it.  No German
either.  You may use French or Russian if you must.  Also I would be
grateful for a full reference to the Church article.  Circumscription
is not an application of Occam's razor; rather it is a formalism in
which some applications of Occam's razor can be expressed.

As for salvaging my credibility, I am complacent about it.  Quine,
Dennett and several other philosophers have been quite friendly.

It occurs to me that Michael Zeleny has a future as an anti-AI
philosopher.  He has apparently read rather little in AI, especially
in the area of formalizing common sense and nonmonotonic reasoning,
but this little is enormously more than Hubert Dreyfuss, Sir James
Lighthill, John Searle, Hilary Putnam, Gian-Carlo Rota, Roger Penrose
and James Fetzer bothered to read, judging from the bibliographies
associated with their pronouncements.  Apparently they have such
strong intuitions that AI must be nonsense that they feel no need to
read papers before writing.  There is a need, however, because they
have not succeeded in transferring their bare intuitions to many of
their fellow philosophers and scientists or even many of the literati
who write reviews.

If Zeleny could bring himself to read more papers, he could easily
become the most important philosophical critic of AI.  He wouldn't
even have to say anything sensible.

Finally, Zeleny, like his fellows considers the forty years of AI
research to be completely unuccessful.  My opinion is that progress
has been made in this difficult area.  Like the problems of biology,
it may take hundreds of years.  My further opinion is that progress
is being made by many people along the logical lines proposed in my
1959 paper, "Programs with Common Sense" reprinted in my 1990
book "Formalizing Common Sense" published by Ablex.  To evaluate
that, it would be necessary to read quite a few papers.  However,
fundamental conceptual problems remain.

In a BBC debate with Professor Lighthill, I tried to make an analogy
saying, "Physicists haven't solved the problems of turbulence in 100
years and aren't giving up".  I was flabbergasted by Lighthill's
reply, "They should give up".  Unfortunately, the BBC didn't
include this exchange, which served to calibrate Sir James's
attitude, in the tape they broadcast.
--
John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
*
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.


