Abstract
Before Fodor and Lepore’s criticism, holism was a very widely accepted position both in philosophy and in A.I. Fodor and Lepore claim that A.I. is “almost everywhere holistic”.2 I disagree with such a sweeping contention and I will give some evidence for such disagreement. I will not consider connectionist systems, but I will confine my remarks to symbolic A.I.3 Contrary to what Fodor and Lepore claim, I will suggest that mainstream symbolic A.I. is an attempt at implementing molecularist theories of meaning (theories where the meaning of an expression is determined not by the overall system of language to which the expression belongs, but by subparts of it). I will consider three classical cases of A.I. research: (1) procedural semantics as implemented in toy worlds, (2) semantic networks and frames, (3) contextual reasoning. I will try to show that in all these cases we find evidence against an holistic view of meaning, and hints towards a molecularist view that does not degenerate into holism.
I am grateful to Paolo Bouquet, Ernest Lepore, and Diego Marconi for comments on earlier versions of this paper. Part of the work has been done at the University of Rochester, with the kind help given by the Staff of the Department of philosophy in letting me working there in 1994. An early version of the paper has been given at a Conference on Holism organized by Rosaria Egidi in Rome, 1994.
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Penco, C. (1999). Holism in Artificial Intelligence?. In: Chiara, M.L.D., Giuntini, R., Laudisa, F. (eds) Language, Quantum, Music. Synthese Library, vol 281. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2043-4_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2043-4_5
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