[Wittrs] Re: Following a Rule
- From: "iro3isdx" <xznwrjnk-evca@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 18 Sep 2009 17:59:10 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Rob de Villiers <wittrs@...> wrote:
>> Exercising my particular-based nominalism, let's say that
>> if someone writes some rules down, and we can see that
>> some agency operates by checking the rules and acting
>> on them, then we have rule-following. The computer is
>> the archetype of rule-following.
> Why? "Who says? Where does this suddenly come from?
> It most certainly does not *follow* from your previous
> sentences. It is just a bald assertion... which I and
> many others, including evidently Neil, completely reject.
You are correct, that I disagree with Josh here.
The issue is complicated by the fact that we use the word "rule" in
different ways. And for some uses of "rule", what a computer does can
be said to be rule following. But surely the dominant use of "rule"
has to do with behavior of people, rather than with behavior of
computers.
When Josh takes the computer's behavior as the archetype of rule
following, then I clearly disagree. If anything, I would be inclined
to say that the idea that there are archetypes is itself a mistaken
view of language.
Josh is looking at this in terms of the Turing machine. I, like most
mathematicians, see the Turing machine as an abstract ideal machine. It
is often taken to characterize computation. In terms of rule
following, it seems to me that there are two distinct kinds of rule
following involved. One of these is in the behavior of people who do
computation, a behavior that typically involves using muscles and
making marks. And the other kind of rule following is in the
theoretical operations of the abstract Turing machine, as dictated by
the mathematics.
I see the ordinary notion of "rule following" as connected with the
first of those, with human behavior. And I see what a computer does as
more closely linked to the second, that of abstract operations dictated
by mathematics.
To put it in perspective, I'm pretty sure that Josh is a
computationalist (he believes that cognition is computation), while I
am not.
Regards,
Neil
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