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From: lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,talk.philosophy.misc,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Can Machines Think?
Message-ID: <5770@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
Date: 20 Dec 89 18:43:39 GMT
References: <5610@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu>
Organization: University of Hawaii
Lines: 32

From article <5610@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu>, by miken@wheaties.ai.mit.edu (Michael N. Nitabach):
>In article <5767@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu
>(Greg Lee) says:
>
>>`causal' and
>>`structure' have to do with theory-making -- we attribute
>>cause/effect and structure to something in our efforts to
>>understand it.
>
>This view of the fundamental nature of causation derives from a particular
>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. ...

No, that's not quite the view I expressed.  In saying that causation is
something we attribute in theory-making, I do not need to go so far as
to say "causation is not an aspect of the world".  And I don't.  It may
be, in the case of very good theories, that it is reasonable to confound
what the theory says about a thing with the thing itself, or to take the
theory to be a discovery rather than an invention.  But in the case of
not-so-good theories, where there is some doubt as to whether what the
theory says is a cause is indeed a cause, confusing the theory with what
it describes ought to be avoided.

In the present discussion, we are dealing with not-so-good theories.

Surely there's no one who is going to try to defend the view that one
should never distinguish between a theory and what that theory purports
to describe.

			Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu