Online research in philosophy

One of the fundamental methodological categories is the notion of theory. However, it is hard to determine decisively what a theory is. Does it have to be a deductive system? What is one to think about the theories in the social sciences and humanities? What are the synchronic and diachronic relations between theories? When is a theory acceptable? Does a confirmation of a theory suffice or is a falsification also needed? These and other questions have got many various answers, but (...) those answers have at least one thing in common. They take a theory to be a system of sentences. Since the sentences are related in various ways, one may apply to them the rules of inference, build up explanations, predictions and investigate the correspondence between different theories. The multitude of solutions and the problems they are facing allegedly show that the understanding of a theory as a system of symbols (sentences) is not adequate. Instead, a theory should be formulated as a non-symbolic creation. Therefore, a paradigm of artificial intelligence, which constantly grows in strength, namely connectionism arouses huge hopes. Generally speaking, connectionism is a research strategy which explains mental phenomena, in particular the phenomenon of learning, by means of the connections that originate between the stimuli and the reactions in the central nervous system. The main part of the article is devoted to the critical analysis of this paradigm. (shrink)

The Turing Test (TT) is criticised for various reasons, one being that it is limited to testing only human-like intelligence. We can read, for example, that ‘TT is testing humanity, not intelligence,’ (Fostel, 1993), that TT is ‘a test for human intelligence, not intelligence in general,’ (French, 1990), or that a perspective assumed by TT is parochial, arrogant and, generally, ‘massively anthropocentric’ (Hayes and Ford, 1996). This limitation presumably causes a basic inadequacy of TT, namely that it misses a wide (...) range of intelligence by focusing on one possibility only, namely on human intelligence. The spirit of TT enforces making explanations of possible machine intelligence in terms of what is known about intelligence in humans, thus possible specificity of the computer intelligence is ruled out from the oælset. (shrink)

There seems to exist an indirect link between computer science and theology via psychology, which is founded on dualism. First, these theories from psychology, computer science and theology are considered that acknowledge the existence of (at least) two different kinds of reality, or, possibly, two different realms of the same reality. In order to express a root of incompatibility of science and theology, a distinction is drawn between ontological and epistemological dualism. It seems that computer science combines ontological monism with (...) epistemological monism, theology combines ontological and epistemological dualism, and psychologytakes a position of epistemological monism and is quite hesitant about the ontological status of the phenomena it analyzes. A direct transition from the computer metaphor to theology is almost impossible: there is no overlap of platforms between these domains. (shrink)