[lit-ideas] Turing's Soul
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2012 09:42:33 -0500 (EST)
Aristotle's soul, Grice's soul,
or Turing's Soul for that matter
Universal Turing Machine State Functionalism
-- keywords: various
In "Turing, Grice, Wittgenstein -- Functionalism", a message dated
1/13/2012 6:33:26 A.M. UTC-02, donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes about
functionalism. This from the Stanford Encyclopedia, online, may help:
"In arguing that this question is a legitimate replacement for the original
(and speculating that its answer is “yes”),
Turing identifies
"thoughts"
with
_states_ of a system,
defined solely by their
roles in producing
further internal states *and*
verbal outputs, a view that has much in common with contemporary
functionalist theories."
"Indeed, Turing's work was explicitly invoked by many theorists during the
beginning stages of 20th century functionalism, and was the avowed
inspiration for a class of theories, the “machine state” theories most firmly
associated with Hilary Putnam (1960, 1967) that had an important role in the
early development of the doctrine."
----
McEvoy writes:
"Some sort of 'functionalism' is what I took to underpin Turing's
'Imaginary Game', though his is a tendentious rather than explicit way of
proposing
a functionalist approach."
Not according to that entry in the Stanford above, although it is indeed
Putnam who is to blame for making the connection explicit. It may do to
revise Turing's turns of phrase to doublecheck how 'functionalist' (now in
Aristotle's sense, almost) he can get.
McEvoy:
"(Perhaps we should turn to 'functionalism' as a topic, pro and con. As
Grice defends it, JLS would have a stake in the game.)"
---- the connection is usually via Ned Block, who in criticising some
varieties of functionalism, cared to quote from Grice, and so on. Grice liked
to
symbolise, so he would use the
psi
operator
as a predicate
psi-1-A-p, say
agent A thinks-1 of p.
("I'm thinking of a white Christmas, just like the ones we used to know.")
-----
To that psi, we have to add
'i' for input
and
'o' for output
We have to grant that a psi-state can be caused not by input or output, but
by other psi-states, and so on.
---- Brian Loar expanded on this ("Mind and meaning", Cambridge University
Press) -- He is the most serious Gricean functionalist, and then he went on
to explore 'social' aspects of this mental functionalism, too.
McEvoy:
"But I will indicate why I don't think Wittgenstein should be taken as a
functionalist (though elements of Wittgenstein's approach may be viewed as
'functionalist-friendly')."
Grice relies on that quote from "Philosophical Investigations" where
Witters argues that there is no need for psychological concepts ("He confronted
me"), without the manifestation in behaviour of those features that the
ascription of a psychological predicate is supposed to explain ("He raised his
arm, aggressively").
---
But I grant that Witters is a 'minor figure' here -- "The Austrian
engineer", Russell called him. Oddly, much like Turing, an engineer. The big
functionalist Grice ends up relying on is Aristotle, on his
'multiple-realisability' definition of 'soul'.
McEvoy:
"Wittgenstein's earlier and later philosophy both have an opaque character
[being open to various interpretation; given what Wittgenstein says, it
unclear often exactly what his point is] but I do not think the later (or
earlier) Wittgenstein was a 'functionalist' - simply that he may be taken this
way in much the same way that his later philosophy of mind could be read as
'behaviourist'."
Too true. Grice was concerned about behaviourism as it had been
misinterpreted by Ryle, who is usually dubbed an "analytic behaviourist". Grice
finds
behaviourism, unlike functionalism, CIRCULAR, though.
-----
McEvoy:
"The better interpretation, I suggest, is that Wittgenstein in his later
period is not to be aligned to any (metaphysical) '-ism': rather, as per the
earlier Wittgenstein, his is still an anti-metaphysician:- but where the
TLP declared metaphysics 'nonsense', albeit sometimes most important
non-sense, (the upshot being we should not try to speak 'metaphysically' as we
are
at best trying to say what cannot be said), his later approach is more
nuanced. But it is similar in that when we try to pin down a metaphysics by
way
of some -ism (like 'functionalism' or 'solipsism' or 'empiricism' or
'idealism' or 'dualism' or 'monism') for Wittgenstein we are in effect trying
to
say what cannot be said but at best only shown."
Too true.
Grice ended up thinking that Functionalism is a 'bete noire' (circumflex on
'bete'). And so, I agree that Witters perhaps never had or wanted to have
a developed theory on anything.
---- Grice was bored by Witters, and could not think how his successor at
St. John's, P. M. S. Hacker, could dedicate almost his life to him
("Illusion and insight"), but I don't agree (why Kant Hacker not focus on
Witters if
that's where his secret heart leads him?).
McEvoy:
"So if you ask the later Wittgenstein whether a thought is a merely
material or physical entity, you will not get an answer a la Popper where a
World
2 is distinguished from a World 1 (or indeed a la traditional philosophy
insofar as it hinges on a mind-body dichotomy):- what Wittgenstein might want
to do is find out what exactly you think you are trying to say by
claiming, or denying, that thought is merely material; and then he would seek
dissolve the misleading metaphysical pictures (or conceptual confusions) that
are thrown up by this kind of thinking - dissolve them by showing how they
lead to both patent nonsense and disguised nonsense."
Too true. In the case of Grice, having a classical education, he possibly
was interested in Greek philosophy of mind (psychology in philosophical
dress, as it were): what is _soul_? How do 'mental' or psychological
predicates
operate? What is the connection between a psychological 'term' (alla
Ramsey) and its input/output. Grice relies on two Ramsey ways to define the
theoretical term now (the psychological predicate) in terms of
'observationals', like sensorial or perceptual input and behavioural output.
"That pillar box seems red to me."
Input: the pillar box. ("Causal theory of perception")
Output: the utterance: "It looks red to me."
--- But it IS red!
--- "I know; it still LOOKS and seems red to me". Etc.
-----
McEvoy:
"But at the root of Wittgenstein's method is an absence of any clear
metaphysical stance in the sense of an -ism. This is because the divide between
sense and nonsense cannot be said it can only be shown (this is a thesis
common to both the earlier and later Wittgenstein, who may be characterised as
having two distinct philosophies of sense and nonsense and of 'showing not
saying''); so any attempt to mark the divide by a clear metaphysical
stance is a futile attempt to 'say' what can only be 'shown'. And what is
'shown' by looking at the interlocking complexity of 'language games', as set
out
in 'Philosophical Investigations', seems to tell against any clear
metaphysical stance."
Too true. What is aggravating is his need to go 'sloganistic': "no
psychological ascriptions without the manifestation of behaviour that such
ascriptions are supposed to explain", and such.
Witters, while a sceptic, had a professional responsibility: he was
teaching at Cambridge, and his poor students ('poor' in sense poor-2) like
Anscombe, or Toulmin, were TAKING NOTES. Later, they brought in the news to
people like Dummett.
Dummett was fascinated by this 'behaviourism' of Witters, which he then
applied to his intuitionistic philosophy of mathematics, against
truth-conditional semantics of the type that Grice was defending (with the aid
of
implicature), etc.
McEvoy:
"Now one way to characterise 'functionalism' is that it seeks to side-step
the metaphysics of what is at stake by translating problems into
'functionalist' terms (as indeed does Turing with his 'Imaginary Game'); and,
given
that Wittgenstein's later philosophy also eschews taking any clear
metaphysical stance, we can see how 'functionalism' might easily be attributed
to
the later Wittgenstein, though this would perhaps be a mistake."
Well, by the same token, it is a mistake to attribute functionalism to
Aristotle, or Turing, or Grice. The term was perhaps made fashionable by Putnam
(who wrote an obit for Dummett in the NYT, incidentally). Personally, I
dislike the term 'function' (as McCreery notes, it applies to theatre), and I
wouldn't know if Cicero ever used it ('functio'). But what Aristotle was
onto, when he was considering the 'soul' and its operations in a living
mechanism are broader questions that a philosopher can safely focus on. And so
on.
----
And so on.
Cheers,
Speranza
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