Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!columbia!rutgers!ucla-cs!zen!ucbvax!CS.UTAH.EDU!shebs From: shebs@CS.UTAH.EDU (Stanley Shebs) Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest Subject: Re: Natural Kinds (Re: AIList Digest V5 #186) Message-ID: <8707271557.AA27403@cs.utah.edu> Date: Mon, 27-Jul-87 11:57:26 EDT Article-I.D.: cs.8707271557.AA27403 Posted: Mon Jul 27 11:57:26 1987 Date-Received: Fri, 31-Jul-87 00:44:04 EDT References: Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: cs.utah.edu!shebs@cs.utah.edu (Stanley Shebs) Distribution: world Organization: PASS Research Group Lines: 36 Approved: ailist@stripe.sri.com In article MINSKY@OZ.AI.MIT.EDU writes: >About natural kinds. In "The Society of Mind", pp123-129, I propose a >way to deal with Wittgenstein's problem of defining terms like "game"- >or "chair". The basic idea was to probe further into what >Wittgenstein was trying to do when he talked about "family >resemblances" and tried to describe a game in terms of properties, the >way one might treat members of a human family: build, features, colour >of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. >[... details of Wittgenstein vs Minsky :-) ...] >I would appreciate comments, because I think this may be an important >theory, and no one seems to have noticed it. [...] I recently finished reading "Society of Mind", and quite enjoyed it. There are a lot of interesting ideas. There are also many that are familiar to people in the field, but with new syntheses that make the ideas much more plausible than in the past. I had been getting cynical about AI, but after reading this, I wanted to go and hack out programs to test the hypotheses about action, and memory, and language. But there's a serious problem; how *can* these hypotheses be tested? The society of mind follows human thinking so closely that any implementation is going to be a model of human minds rather than minds in general, and will probably be handicapped by being too small and simple to be recognizably human-like in its behavior. Tracing a mind society's behavior will generate lots of data but little insight. So my ardor has been replaced by odd moments speculating on tricky but believable tests, and a greater appreciation for people interested in a more formal approach to minds. Getting down to specifics, the theory about recognition of objects by either structure or functions was one of the parts I really liked. A robot should be able to sit on a desk without getting neurotic, or to sit carefully on a chair that's missing one leg... stan sh New