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From: lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,comp.ai,sci.bio,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence
Message-ID: <3003@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
Date: 14 Jan 89 19:48:23 GMT
References: <43582@linus.UUCP>
Organization: University of Hawaii
Lines: 41

From article <43582@linus.UUCP>, by bwk@mbunix.mitre.org (Barry W. Kort):
" ...  But our own category boundaries are still somewhat arbitrary.
" And, by studying the "elements" we don't automatically understand how
" they assemble themselves into "molecules".

Of course not, but is this a fair analogy for reductionism?  I don't
think so.  Reductionist theories may occasionally arise by identifying
elements apart from the patterns they assemble into (perhaps molecular
biology would be a case?), but more typically the pattern is observed
first.  Later, a reduction into elements which assemble according to
certain rules is proposed to explain the patterns.  There is no step of
analysis apart from synthesis -- the rules of assembly are intrinsically
a part of the theory.

Instances are the analysis of atoms to explain the pattern of the
periodic table and the analysis of particles to explain the 8-fold way,
probably.  An instance I know more about may be drawn from Ventris'
decipherment of Linear B. The molecules were, let us say, the signs of
the writing system, and the atoms the vowels and consonants they stand
for.  A pattern in the data was that some signs appeared only at the
beginning of (what were inferentially) words.  One basis of the
decipherment was the identification of such signs as standing for single
vowels, the reasoning being that if the script was syllabic and if the
language being written did not permit vowels to occur next to one
another within a word (which is a common restriction), vowel-only
syllables and their signs could occur only word-initially.  This
would explain the pattern.  This, and other such inferences comprised
Ventris' theory.  (Other previous failed attempts to decipher
the script were, however, based on direct assignments of phonetic
values to signs.)

One cannot find here a step of synthesis that is chronologically
or logically "after" the analysis.

I suspect that the criticism proponents of holistic theories make
of reductionism is founded on a play on words -- an equivocation.
There is traditionally a use of the term 'analysis' which opposes
it to synthesis, but more commonly, 'analysis' does not refer merely
to a decomposition somehow apart from composition.

		Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu