Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!wuarchive!psuvax1!rutgers!njin!princeton!phoenix!eliot
From: eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: "Emotion" vs. "Understanding" (was: Re: emergent properties)
Message-ID: <3350@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 15 Oct 90 05:25:41 GMT
References: <3679@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <3344@idunno.Princeton.EDU> <3708@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Sender: news@idunno.Princeton.EDU
Organization: Shitson University, New Crapsey
Lines: 28

In article <3708@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:
;In article <3344@idunno.Princeton.EDU> eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU
;(Eliot Handelman) also  writes:
;> One can, in other words, easily verify Minsky's "theories" (if these
;>  are what they are) by becoming Minsky's theories.

;They are theories, indeed, so Eliot is guilty of foolish flaming, too.

Now hold on, Marvin: just who's flaming whom? It's not in the least
obvious to me what a theory of mind ought to look like. If you
want to pass over the behavioristic critique of introspectionism 
so lightly you may as well admit that the status of "theory" itself 
is bound to be affected -- you can't simply proclaim statements about 
minds or consciousness to be "theories" without slipping beyond the 
domain adequate to that discourse.  That's why I came down of your 
"pre-scientific" criticism in the other part of the posting quoted 
above. We are no longer dealing with "science." "Training one's mind" 
doesn't help either, unless one wants to make a full retreat back 
to Wundt (which may turn out to be progress, as Verdi put it). This,
in a nutshell, is why I regard the matter of intersubjectivity to
be weightier that the matter of "systems descriptions" (whose 
theortical status John Anderson seems recently to have called into 
question -- "The Adaptive Nature of Thought") and, to return to the 
previous discussion, why therfore "awe" ought not to be denounced 
in the interests of the analysis of mind. "Awe" (or some finer-grained 
esthetic) is crucial to the transmission of whatever would once have 
been called a "theory of mind." I doubt that there are, or ever can 
be, such theories in any currently held sense of the term.