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From: norm@ariel.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: Rational Psychology
Message-ID: <456@ariel.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 22-Sep-83 17:12:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: ariel.456
Posted: Thu Sep 22 17:12:11 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 23-Sep-83 23:51:51 EDT
References: <663@drufl.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T-ISL, Holmdel, NJ
Lines: 36


         Samir's view:  "To me personally, Rational Psychology
                         is a misnomer. "Rational" negates
                         what "Psychology" wants to understand."


How so?

Can you support your claim? What does psychology want to understand that
Rationality negates?  Psychology is the Logos of the Psyche or the logic
of the psyche.  How does one understand without logic?  How does one under-
stand without rationality?  What is understand?  Isn't language itself depen-
dent upon the rational faculty, or more specifically, upon the ability to form
concepts, as opposed to percepts?  Can you understand without language?  To
be totally without rationality (lacking the functional capacity for rationality
- the CONCEPTUAL faculty) would leave you without language, and therefore
without understanding.  In what TERMS is something said to be understood?  How
can terms have meaning without rationality?

Or perhaps you might claim that because men are not always rational that man
does not possess a rational faculty, or that it is defective, or inadequate?
How about telling us WHY you think Rational negates Psychology?

These issues are important to AI, psychology and philosophy students...  The
day may not be far off when AI research yields methods of feature abstraction
and integration that approximate percept-formation in humans.  The next step,
concept formation, will be much harder.  How does an epistemology come about?
What are the sequential steps necessary to form an epistemology of any kind?
By what method does the mind (what's that?) integrate percepts into concepts,
make identifications on a conceptual level ("It is an X"), justify its
identifications ("and I know it is an X because..."), and then decide (what's
that?) what to do about it ("...so therefore I should do Y")?

Do you seriously think that understanding these things won't take Rationality?

Norm Andrews, AT&T Information Systems, Holmdel, N.J. ariel!norm