Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!orion.oac.uci.edu!jhess
From: jhess@orion.oac.uci.edu (James Hess)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Reasoning Paradigms
Message-ID: <27116E2C.11522@orion.oac.uci.edu>
Date: 9 Oct 90 06:29:00 GMT
References: <9963@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU>
Reply-To: jhess@orion.oac.uci.edu (James Hess)
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Lines: 29

Let me take a first stab at James Peterson's question, which I will roughly 
paraphrase as 'how can pattern recognition and similar fuzzy processes form
the basis for a formal symbolic reasoning system".

I suggest that this is a case of complexity, in a formal sense.  We do not have
one process or the other as a primitive in the mind out of which the other is
constructed and to which it is therefore reducible; both play a vital and 
necessarily vital role.

For example, it seems awkward to reduce "you and I will go to the store, but
only if it is not raining" to pattern recognition, especially if we look at the
similarity between that sentance and "you and I will go to the store, but only 
if it is not after ten o'clock".  How could pattern recognition devoid of 
symbolic manipulation model the similarity of "after ten o'clock" and 
"raining" in order to recognize that they both make sense in that context, 
although one is an external physical phenomena and the other an abstract mental
construction?  

On the other hand, how are we to recognize a new example of a chair?  If we 
were to list the properties of a chair, in almost every case we could find a
chair that lacks one of them or a non-chair that possesses several or many of 
them.  We cannot refer to a set of necessary and sufficient conditions.  We 
may get caught in the trap of infinite regress if we try to specify all the
general rules and exception rules that define an object as a member of a class
A.  Do people really go through this list when they make classifications?  Or
is it a fuzzy, statistical pattern recognition process?  Melville went to some 
length in the debate over whether a whale was a mammal or a fish.  The 
perceptual and behavioral qualties are ambiguous; only later did a whale become
a mammal by fiat.