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Article 1709 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: <Z1u3BB1w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>
Date: 27 Nov 91 15:46:58 GMT
References: <439@trwacs.UUCP>
Lines: 61

erwin@trwacs.UUCP (Harry Erwin) writes:

> In my experience, dialectical thought is a non-mathematical approach to
> non-linear systems theory. Most of the rules can be reformulated in
> topological terms.

You are probably right.  On pp 665-666 of _Goedel, Escher, Bach_
Hofstadter describes an experience in which there was a "fusion"
[my quotes] or "symbolic recombination" [his quotes] in his mind
which put together two opposing ideas.  He describes the
subjective experience in some detail.  On p 667 he talks about
ideas mapping onto each other, which sounds topological and makes
some sense.  In fact this might be the first experiential account
of "synthesis" or "sublation" with an attempt to adumbrate some
possible ways in which it might be formalized.

Id follow this notion up in more detail, but I don't have the
background in AI lore yet, the kinds of notions which are
commonplace in this Newsgroup.  Thanks to the kind suggestions of
folks like Kurt Alonzo, John Collier, Bob Hooker, Cameron Shelley,
Burton Voorhees and Mikhail Zeleny, some via e-mail and some in
open forum, I now have a reading list of books, such as the
aforementioned _Goedel, Escher, Bach_, George Lakoff's _Women,
Fire and Dangerous Things_, Roger Penrose's _The Emperor's New
Mind_, Norman Martin's _Systems of Logic_, Stephan Koerner's _The
Philosophy of Mathematics_, and a couple more that are in the
other room buried under other stuff.

The most amazing thing I've discovered so far is the absence of
technical knowledge of the dialectic.  It's almost as if Hegel had
never lived.  Hofstadter's book is the most dialectical piece of
writing I have seen by an American -- he even has part of it in
Platonic-like dialogues -- but it is as if he is reinventing the
dialectic.  He doesn't refer to any thinkers or workers who have
said or written things about the dialectic. Why are Americans so
disinclined to discuss the dialectic and dialectical reasoning
even when they exemplify it?  (I noticed just how short and
deliberately informal your own post was.)  This is even more
amazing since it is probably the dialectical nature of human
reasoning, the question and answer, back and forth, movement --
whether between persons or inside one single person -- which most
differentiates human thinking from machine information
processing.

Oh, well, let me get back to my reading.  (I didn't even know the
Chinese room paradigm before starting to read the Newsgroup, and I
couldn't get the gist of it from the posts here, but it's in
several of my new books.)

Btw, does anybody happen to know the difference between a
_paradox_ and an _antinomy_?  The word "antinomy" seems more
dialectical somehow, since it seems to foreground the
disagreement or inconsistency or incommensurability of two
statements, but that might just be surplus connotational meaning.
Is there a difference or are these words complete synonyms?

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


