From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-picayune.mit.edu!bloom-beacon!micro-heart-of-gold.mit.edu!wupost!uwm.edu!ogicse!das.harvard.e Tue Nov 19 11:08:58 EST 1991
Article 1193 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Xref: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca sci.philosophy.tech:864 comp.ai.philosophy:1193
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-picayune.mit.edu!bloom-beacon!micro-heart-of-gold.mit.edu!wupost!uwm.edu!ogicse!das.harvard.e
du!husc-news.harvard.edu!zariski!zeleny
>From: zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech,comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Is there any such thing as informal logic?
Message-ID: <1991Nov4.182613.5073@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: 4 Nov 91 23:26:12 GMT
References: <1991Oct22.041210.5931@watserv1.waterloo.edu> <JMC.91Nov3225619@SAIL.Stanford.EDU>
Organization: dada
Lines: 39
Nntp-Posting-Host: zariski.harvard.edu

In article <JMC.91Nov3225619@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> 
jmc@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (John McCarthy) writes:

JMC:
>Since the remaining points of the argument are either terminological
>or concern the prospects of the logicist approach to AI, there is
>no point in continuing unless Zeleny or Yodaiken would like to offer
>some arguments against the prospects of AI in general or the logicist
>approach in particular.

You mean you haven't been convinced by the Nasruddin story?  I guess this
means that I must try harder... please let me know if I get too abstruse.

Consider Davidson's argument in ``Theories of Meaning and Learnable
Languages'', in the context of his program of extensional semantics.  Now,
various devices like Frege's paradox of the name relation, or Putnam's
model-theoretic argument, demonstrate the inadequacy of the extensional
approach to the task of characterizing the linguistic relation of denoting;
hence I conclude that an adequate semantical theory must be intensional.
Furthermore, on the assumption of intensional semantical entities, an
infinite hierarchy thereof has to be admitted (all relevant details can be
found in Church's papers on the Logic of Sense and Denotation); moreover,
for each level of intensions, our cognitive grasp of the lower-level
semantical entities can be seen as dependent on that of higher, more finely
differentiated intensional level.  Thus it can be seen that the semantics
of natural languages fails to satisfy Davidson's finite learnability
criteria, the ones required by any equivalent of a finite-state automaton
with finite memory, Q.E.D.


/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
| ``If there are no Platonic ideals, then what did we fight for?''   |
|                                (A Spanish anarchist, after 1938)   |
| Mikhail Zeleny                                           Harvard   |
| 872 Massachusetts Ave., Apt. 707                         doesn't   |
| Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139                            think    |
| (617) 661-8151                                              so     |
| email zeleny@math.harvard.edu or zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu        |
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/


