Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!mit-eddie!media-lab!minsky
From: minsky@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Marvin Minsky)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Reasoning Paradigms
Message-ID: <3586@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Date: 5 Oct 90 22:27:34 GMT
References: <9963@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU>
Reply-To: minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Organization: MIT Media Lab, Cambridge MA
Lines: 38



I am absolutely astounded at the statement by
petersja@debussy.cs.colostate.edu to that:

> Minsky's postings have (not surprisingly) suggested
> that rule-based, logico-mathematical, reasoning is the
> basis of all other types of reasoning
> (or is perhaps the only true reasoning).

I hope that no one in net-world will believe that I ever said or
maintained anything of the sort.  Most of my published work attacks
this idea.  "The Society of Mind" scarecly mentions logic and rule
based reasoning at all, save to place it as among the forms of
reasoning used occasionally by people over the age of about 10.

Instead, I have maintained from the early 1960s that most thinking
uses various forms of pattern-matching and analogy.  So I am annoyed
at such pseudo-quotes as

> Minsky, and others, have a lot bet on the idea that *all* mental
processes are ultimately (or fundamentally) calculative formal
manipulations (though we are of course not always aware that these
underlying calculations are taking place), thus formal operations
ground *all* thought processes, and therefore, all reasoning,
regardless of whether any "reasoning" *seems* non-formal (appearances
can be deceiving).

But maybe it is not so strange, come to think of it, that james lee
peterson could find such things in "Minsky's postings".  You can
verify, by running back through the files, that I have said nothing of
the sort.  However, we could explain this by assuming that Peterson
was thinking, by analogy, that because he has heard somewhere that I
am a "hard AI" teacher, therefore, I must hold such positions -- and
hence, must have said such things.

Sorry to waste your time by wordy self-defense, but I'd really like
people to read "Society of Mind" and not assume that they can guess what is
in it on the basis of hostile stereotype.