From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!wupost!uunet!mcsun!uknet!edcastle!aiai!jeff Tue Mar 24 09:56:51 EST 1992
Article 4558 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Xref: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca comp.ai.philosophy:4558 sci.philosophy.tech:2334
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!wupost!uunet!mcsun!uknet!edcastle!aiai!jeff
>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Causes and Goals
Message-ID: <6429@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 18 Mar 92 16:59:33 GMT
References: <1992Mar16.224536.2719@neptune.inf.ethz.ch> <1992Mar17.110436.9937@husc3.harvard.edu> <1992Mar18.044516.28882@nuscc.nus.sg>
Sender: news@aiai.ed.ac.uk
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 44

In article <1992Mar18.044516.28882@nuscc.nus.sg> smoliar@iss.nus.sg (stephen smoliar) writes:
>In article <1992Mar17.110436.9937@husc3.harvard.edu> zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu
>(Mikhail Zeleny) writes:
>>
>>A cloud is not an agent.
>>
>Appealing as this assertion is to the intuition, I would like to pursue an
>angle for questioning it.  My theme is basically a variation on the approach
>to models which Minsky took in "Matter, Mind, and Models" (which I recently
>cited and Marvin subsequently developed).  Just as the question of whether
>or not an entity A* constitutes a model of another entity A can only be
>resolved in the context of some postulated observer B, so I would argue
>that whether or not any entity X is an agent cannot be resolved in terms
>of necessary and sufficient conditions on the attributes of X.  Rather,
>one can only address whether or not a given observer Y is attributing agency
>to X.

This seems a rather elaborate way of saying that there's no fact
of the matter as to whether something is an agent or not.  All we
can say is "Y is attributing agency, but Z is not".

But when someone is attributing agancy, what is it that they're
attributing?  What properties do they think an agent has?

If there's a different set of properties in every case, how can we
say they're all talking about the same thing (agency)?  And if there
are some common properties, we have a way of assessing agancy apart
from whether someone is attributing it.  (Whether the result is a
set of necesssary and sufficient conditions or, say, a "family
resemblance" is another matter.)

>The case of the cloud is a great example.  As far as anyone who seriously
>practices Hopi religion is concerned, a cloud is MOST DEFINITELY an agent;

>    Since it seems a bit ethnocentric to dismiss the matter simply by
>asserting that the Hopi mind cannot grasp the concept of agency 

How about by saying that in this case the Hopi happen to be wrong?
If, to avoid ethnocentrism, we never decide another people is wrong,
then we're not going to be able to decide much of anything.  And if
we stick to the cases where all agree, then this sort of cultural
relativism will not be among the things we retain.

-- jd


