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From: dhw@itivax.iti.org (David H. West)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,talk.philosophy.misc,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Causality (was: Re: Can Machines Think?)
Message-ID: <4678@itivax.iti.org>
Date: 20 Dec 89 16:29:19 GMT
References: <6724@cbnewsh.ATT.COM> <5767@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <5610@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu>
Reply-To: dhw@itivax.UUCP (David H. West)
Followup-To: comp.ai
Organization: The Forgotten Legions of ... um ... er ...
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In article <5610@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu> miken@rice-chex.WISC.EDU (Michael N. Nitabach) writes:
>metaphysical tradition, beginning with the British Empiricists, e.g. Locke
>and Hume.  This is the view that causation is not an aspect of the world
>which our mentality can recognize, but rather a schema which our mind imposes
                         ^^^^^^^^^
>on events with appropriate spatiotemporal relations.  A conceptually
>opposite--Realist--stance would be that causation exists as an actual
>attribute of certain pairs of physical events.  

What, in this view, is "recognition"?   Is it fallible?  If so,
how is it different from imposing (perhaps unconsciously) a schema
which may need to be revised to accommodate later sense-data?
If it is not fallible, why are we still doing science? [hint: this
is a rhetorical question :-) ]

-David West       dhw@iti.org