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Article 1686 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Is dialectical thought an "informal logic"?
Message-ID: <5725@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 27 Nov 91 20:11:04 GMT
References: <5RPRBB5w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM> <1991Nov23.012231.3630@nuscc.nus.sg>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 15

In article <1991Nov23.012231.3630@nuscc.nus.sg> smoliar@hilbert.iss.nus.sg (stephen smoliar) writes:
>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."

I think part of the research dynamic here is that there was
enough progress on sentences that the next interesting steps
were difficult ones, so that shifting to discourse was in a
sense easier.  What we can hope is that work on discourse will
allow (or, I suppose, make unnecessary) further work on
sentences.  (There's a reciprocal process for you.)


