Wittgenstein's Remarks on the Foundations of AI

297 Pages·1998·3.81 MB·English

by  Stuart G. Shanker

WITTGENSTEIN’S REMARKS ON
THE FOUNDATIONS OF AI

WITTGENSTEIN’S
REMARKS ON THE
FOUNDATIONS OF
AI

Stuart Shanker

London and New York
First published 1998
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

© 1998 Stuart Shanker

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shanker, Stuart.
Wittgenstein’s remarks on the foundations of AI/Stuart Shanker.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951 —Contributions in artificial
intelligence. 2. Artificial intelligence. I. Title.
B3376. W564S46 1998
193–dc21 97–13425

ISBN 0-415-09794-0 (Print Edition)
ISBN 0-203-04902-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-21730-6 (Glassbook Format)
IN MEMORY OF E.S.REED
I think it advisable for every critic proposing to devote his life to
literary scholarship to pick a major writer of literature as a kind of
spiritual preceptor for himself, whatever the subject of his thesis. I
am not speaking, of course, of any sort of moral model, but it seems
to me that growing up inside a mind so large that one has no sense of
claustrophobia within it is an irreplaceable experience in humane
studies. Some kind of transmission by seed goes on here too.
(Northrop Frye, Spiritus Mundi)
CONTENTS

Preface ix
Acknowledgements xiii
List of abbreviations xv
1 Wittgenstein’s response to Turing’s Thesis 1
1 Turing’s machines ‘are humans who calculate’ 1
2 ‘Does a calculating machine calculate?’ 6
3 Church’s Convention 11
4 Gödel’s response to Turing’s version of CT 14
5 The emergence of ‘machine intelligence’ 22
6 ‘Mechanical rule-following’ versus ‘Following a “mechanical
rule”’ 27
2 The behaviourist origins of AI 34
1 Turing’s two questions 34
2 Turing’s behaviourist ambitions 39
3 The continuum picture 45
4 Wittgenstein’s discussion of ‘reading’ vis-à-vis Turing’s analysis of
‘calculation’ 52
3 The resurgence of psychologism 63
1 AI and the rise of cognitive psychologism 63
2 Classical and cognitive psychologism 65
3 Psychologism as conceived by Kant 73
4 ‘Logic is a part, a branch, of psychology’ 82
5 The laws of truth are ‘boundary stones set in an eternal
foundation’ 87
6 Logic constitutes what we understand by ‘thought’ 95
7 Hilbert’s protocol 102
8 What is inferring? 110
vii
CONTENTS
4 Models of discovery 121
1 Eureka! 121
2 The ‘cognitive unconscious’ 125
3 The role of chess in the evolution of AI 131
4 GPS and the assault on ‘insight’ 138
5 Converse responses to Köhler 146
6 The relevance of Wittgenstein’s remarks on Köhler for GPS 152
7 The Cartesian shift from theory to the ethereal 162
8 The nature of ‘sudden understanding’ 167
9 The metaphor is the message 174
5 The nature of concepts 185
1 What are concepts and how are they acquired? 185
2 Piaget and AI 190
3 Wittgenstein’s ‘discovery’ 196
4 ‘What we call “concept” comes into existence only by its incorporation
in language’ 197
5 ‘Seeing what is in common’ 203
6 The cognitivist response to Wittgenstein’s view of concepts 209
7 The ‘cognitive continuum’ 215
8 The harmony between thought and language 222
9 Constraint theory 227
10 The ‘constitutional uncertainty of the mental’ 237
11 The nature of concept-acquisition 242
Notes 250
Bibliography 263
Name index 275
Subject index 278

viii
PREFACE

Immersing oneself in the work of a great philosopher is very much like
immersing oneself in a culture. One begins to look at philosophical
problems in his or her distinctive manner: to think and speak in ways that are
uniquely characteristic of that philosopher’s outlook. Moreover, as one
quickly discovers when visiting a foreign culture, genuine communication
between rival systems involves far more than can be captured in a dictionary.
How one approaches an issue, what sorts of assumptions and conventions
one tacitly adopts, what sorts of arguments one finds convincing or
problematic, are all subtly influenced in ways that can easily escape one’s
conscious awareness or control. Not surprisingly, attempts at philosophical
dialogue all too often end in mutual incomprehension, if not outright
hostility.
In a fundamental sense, then, examining an opposing theory from some
distinctive philosophical standpoint is similar to doing anthropology. For one
is not simply investigating a body of facts which are open to plain view; one is
struggling to understand the language and thinking of an entirely different
culture and, in the process, to better understand one’s own ‘languaculture’ (see
Agar 1994). That is, just as one is endeavouring to understand the implicit
assumptions and conventions of the doctrine one is studying, so, too, one
thereby hopes to expose those aspects of one’s own way of thinking that are
so entrenched that one does not even see them as cultural phenomena.
Thus, there were several reasons why I wanted to write this book. First
and foremost was simply my desire to deepen my understanding of
Wittgenstein’s later writings. For I am convinced that, in order for this to
occur, one constantly has to try to relate Wittgenstein’s thought to relevant
philosophical or scientific arguments. Moreover, the actual writing of this
book mirrors the development of Wittgenstein’s thought in the 1930s, as he
moved from the philosophy of mathematics to the philosophy of
psychology, and then sought to integrate these seemingly distant
investigations. Herein lies the principal reason why I have chosen the
particular topics covered in this book, and, indeed, the order in which they
are presented.
ix