Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site ucbvax.ARPA Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!ucbvax!LAWS@SRI-AI.ARPA From: LAWS@SRI-AI.ARPA Newsgroups: net.ai Subject: AIList Digest V2 #166 Message-ID: <3666@ucbvax.ARPA> Date: Thu, 6-Dec-84 13:21:21 EST Article-I.D.: ucbvax.3666 Posted: Thu Dec 6 13:21:21 1984 Date-Received: Fri, 7-Dec-84 02:36:11 EST Sender: daemon@ucbvax.ARPA Organization: University of California at Berkeley Lines: 397 From: AIList Moderator Kenneth LawsAIList Digest Saturday, 1 Dec 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 166 Today's Topics: Administrivia - Remailing, Philosophy - Dialectics and Piaget, Logic Programming - Book Review, PhD Oral - Nonclausal Logic Programming, Seminar - Learning Theory and Natural Language (MIT), Conference - Logics of Programs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu 6 Dec 84 09:20:51-PST From: Ken Laws Reply-to: AIList-Request@SRI-AI Subject: Lost Issue It seems likely now that very few, if any, sites received this issue on the first mailing. I am therefore sending it out to all subscribers. It has been gratifying to learn how many people just can't do without an AIList issue, but you can all stop sending me messages about #166 now. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: 30 Nov 84 14:17:42 PST (Friday) From: Rosenberg.PA@XEROX.ARPA Subject: Dialectics and Piaget Your summary of dialectics is quite nice, but your portrayal of Piaget has a major error: Piaget was not a nativist, so it's unfair to lump him together with, say, Kant. (After all, Chomsky denounces him as an empiricist!) In fact, his constructivist genetic epistemology is similar in many ways to the dialectical position you outlined (cf. his books on negation and contradiction). Jarrett Rosenberg ------------------------------ Date: 30 Nov 84 0059 EST (Friday) From: Alex.Rudnicky@CMU-CS-A.ARPA Subject: Piaget & dialectic I would take issue with Bill Frawley's contention that Piaget's theory is idealist in flavour. If anything, it is essentially dialectical in nature. Piaget's work is often popularized in terms of his ``stages'' of intellectual development and their apparently immutable order. His major contribution, however, is probably his elaboration of the mechanisms by which this development could take place. Specifically, I would point to Piaget's concept of ``equilibration'', which can (loosely) be described as the constant interaction between internal cognitive structures and external events that results in modification of internal structures. Equilibrium is never quite reached, a state that persists throughout an individual's life. On the matter of Piaget vs dialectics, I can offer the following quote: "... in the domain of the sciences themselves structuralism has always been linked with a constructivism from which the epithet "dialectical" can hardly be withheld---the emphasis upon historical development, opposition between contraries, and ``Aufhebungen'' (``de'passements'') is surely just as characteristic of constructivism as of dialectic, and that the idea of wholeness figures centrally in structuralist as in dialectical modes of thought is obvious." (Piaget, Structuralism, 1970, p.121). ------------------------------ Date: 30 Nov 84 09:46 PST From: Newman.pasa@XEROX.ARPA Subject: Re: Dialectics, V2 #163 In reference to the recent posting on Dialectics, and in spite of the fact that some of this has very little to do with AI. Question: How does dialectics interact with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and other facets of quantum theory? It seems to me that the idea of an interaction between the object and the observer which results in some knowledge on the part of the observer might be an interesting topic to discuss in terms of dialectics. Comment: More in line with the basic topic of the digest, I think it is obvious that there is some interaction between the observer and the observed since psychology has shown that (to put it very simply) we see and hear what we want to, and we don't notice what we wish to avoid. However, this evidence and your arguments do not conclusively show that Positivism is entirely wrong. Because I think that there are other reasons to dismiss Behaviorism and I am not sure how Dialectics deals with it, I will not deal with Behaviorism in this comment. The best reason that I can think of on short notice for not dismissing Positivism is that we must suppose that objects have some existence and characteristics independent of the observer. I think that we would all agree that there will be shock waves travelling through the air when the tree falls in the forest, though we might disagree on whether this constituted a sound (depending on the possible presence of an observer). I am not sure what your position is on this issue, but my inclination is that there is a position combining elements of Dialecticism and Positivism which is more aceptable than either of its parents. Note that this is just an opinion since I don't have the time or resources to do justice to the topic at the moment. >>Dave ------------------------------ Date: 30 Nov 1984 04:55-EST From: ISAACSON@USC-ISI.ARPA Subject: Dialectics: Perils, and Promises for AI Bill Frawley has written a thought-provoking introduction for a discussion on dialectics [AIList v2 # 163, 11/29/84]. As he mentioned, he applies dialectics in his work on Soviet theories of language and cognition, and studies the use of Soviet theories to explain language learning and text processing. My own work relates to a new mode of information processing which is dialectical in nature. One of its applications is in Dialectical Image Processing (DIP), reported in AIList v2 #153, 11/12/84. It goes without saying that I think that things dialectical are crucial to things intelligent. But before I proceed to elaborate this point of view, I wish to caution the uninitiated, and point out some of the many perils of dialectics. The Perils of Dialectics "Dialectics" is basically an elusive, vague, and often controversial and misunderstood term. Its origin is in antiquity (Plato and Aristotle). It attained prominence and immense influence through the German idealism of the early nineteenth century (Fichte, Schelling, and, most notably Hegel) and has been transformed later into "dialectical materialism" by no other than Karl Marx. Major American philosophers (notably C. S. Peirce) have been greatly influenced by Hegelianism, and significant Hegelian influences have reached as far as Japan (Nishida). All in all, huge segments of humanity today live under political philosophies, or ideologies, that are dialectical at their roots in one way or another. Through it all, though, dialectics has remained elusive, unformalizable, and -- in the view of many, especially in the West -- unscientific and hence irrelevant to Western science. A weird mixture of a method, a (non-standard) logic, a philosophy, and sometimes a political ideology, it usually baffles the Western mind and hopelessly frustrates attempts to harness it in the interest of scientific or technological objectives. In fact, if you wish to dispose of dialectics altogether, you are urged to read a most devastating critique by Karl Popper ("What is dialectics?" - Chap. 14) in his *Conjectures and Refutations* book. Written many years ago, when Marxist ideology seemed even more menacing than it is today, Popper shows very little patience with "dialecticians" and portrays them as a bunch of misguided cynics, intellectual dwarfs, and pseudo- scientific misfits. And, I should add, his points are not without merit in many instances, and should not be ignored. In addition, beyond philosophical and scholarly controversy and confusion, there always looms the ideological/political stigma which is usually attached to dialectics. For it is the case that "dialectical materialism" has become the official dogma of Marxism- Leninism. Much of Soviet science is constrained by their political ideology, and, almost Pavolovian-style, researchers are sometimes rewarded for exhibiting "dialectical thinking" in their work. Yet, few Soviet scientific discoveries are known, or recognized, in the West that owe their existence to dialectical foundations. In other words, even a totalitarian society that promotes, and rewards, dialectical thinking among its intellectuals has failed to produce significant scientific or technological results which are genuinely dialectical. So, the questions should be asked: What's really good about that dialectical stuff? What's the hidden promise, if any? Why drag it into AI, our good old American AI? The Promises of Dialectics for AI The answers are not easy to state, and surely are incomplete here. Bill Frawley gave his own sketchy rationale for adopting dialectics for certain language learning theories. I am generally in sympathy with his reaching out for dialectics, but my reasons for using dialectics in AI are more basic and, admittedly, almost bizarre. Having an engineering background, I never dreamt of using anything as remote as dialectics for anything as technically mundane as image processing. It so happened that, for something like five years (in the mid 60's) certain simple types of operations yielded imagery that was "interesting" but unexpected and not particularly meaningful or interpretable. Only after the fact, and after outsiders had been consulted, it has become clearer (and later obvious!) that what that type of image processing was doing was Hegelian dialectics, pure and simple. All in all, that exercise took some twenty years. In other words, we've learned about dialectics from the machine, rather than have had any premeditated intention to program the machine to do dialectics! Put another way, the machine had been doing dialectics for us for some five years, well before we ever heard the term for the first time. Well, twenty years is certainly a long time, and serious study of dialectics and its ramifications has led, little-by-little, to the realization that its application in the implementation of certain intelligent tasks is potentially very powerful. The reality of an implemented "dialectical machine" then took hold and has opened up tremendous possibilities. To put it all in very simple terms. We on this project don't particularly care for Hegelian philosophy, nor do we care about Marxist ideology. Here is a machine that, of its own accord, behaves in a classical dialectical mode. While doing so, it processes images in an unusual (non-programmed) way that is useful in machine-vision. And there are clear indications that other applications in other machine-intelligence domains are feasible, and we hope to hear from others about those in this forum. Anyway, we think that the promise of dialectics for AI clearly outweighs its traditional perils, and recommend that people consider the issues and ramifications involved. -- J. D. Isaacson ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 21 Nov 84 13:03:28 EST From: Anonymous Subject: Foundations of Logic Programming [Forwarded from the Prolog Digest by Laws@SRI-AI.] Foundations of Logic Programming J.W. Lloyd Springer-Verlag,ISBN 3-540-13299-6 This is the first book to give an account of the mathematical foundations of Logic Programming. Its purpose is to collect, in a unified and comprehensive manner, the basic theoretical results of Logic Programming, which have previously only been available in widely scattered research papers. The book is intended to be self-contained, the only prerequisites being some familiarity with Prolog and knowledge of some basic undergraduate mathematics. As well as presenting the technical results, the book also contains many illustrative examples and a list of problems at the end of each chapter. Many of the examples and problems are part of the folklore of Logic Programming and are not easily obtainable elsewhere. CONTENTS Chapter 1. DECLARATIVE SEMANTICS section 1. Introduction section 2. Logic programs section 3. Models of logic programs section 4. Answer substitutions section 5. Fixpoints section 6. Least Herbrand model Problems for chapter 1 Chapter 2. PROCEDURAL SEMANTICS section 7. Soundness of SLD-resolution section 8. Completeness of SLD-resolution section 9. Independence of the computation rule section 10. SLD-refutation procedures section 11. Cuts Problems for chapter 2 Chapter 3. NEGATION section 12. Negative information section 13. Finite failure section 14. Programming with the completion section 15. Soundness of the negation as failure rule section 16. Completeness of the negation as failure rule Problems for chapter 3 Chapter 4. PERPETUAL PROCESSES section 17. Complete Herbrand interpretations section 18. Properties of T' section 19. Semantics of perpetual processes Problems for chapter 4 ------------------------------ Date: 29 Nov 84 0255 PST From: Yoni Malachi Subject: PhD Oral - Nonclausal Logic Programming [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Monday 3 December, 1984, 2:15pm, 146 MJH PhD Orals Yoni Malachi Nonclausal Logic Programming The Tableau Programming Language (Tablog) is based on the Manna-Waldinger deductive-tableau proof system and combines advantages of Prolog and Lisp. A program in Tablog is a list of formulas in [quantifier-free] first-order logic with equality and is usually more natural than the corresponding program in either Lisp or Prolog. The inclusion of equivalence, negation, conditionals, functions, and equality in Tablog enables the programmer to combine functional and relational programming in the same framework. Unification is used as the binding mechanism and makes it convenient to pass unbound variables to a program and to manipulate partially computed objects. The tableau proof system is employed as an interpreter for the language in the same way that a resolution proof system serves as an interpreter for Prolog. The basic rules of inference used in the system are: nonclausal resolution, equational rewriting, and replacement of formulas by equivalent ones. This work describe Tablog and its semantics. In addition to the simple declarative (logical) semantics of the language, a procedural interpretation is presented for sequential and parallel models of computation. Various properties of the language are studied and the language is compared to Lisp and Prolog and to other combinations of functional and logic programming. ------------------------------ Date: 29 Nov 1984 14:50 EST (Thu) From: "Robert C. Berwick" Subject: Seminar - Learning Theory and Natural Language (MIT) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] Language and Learning Seminar Series Scott Weinstein University of Pennsylvania and Center for Cognitive Science, MIT ``LEARNING THEORY AND NATURAL LANGUAGE'' Tuesday, December 4, 2 PM A.I. Playroom 8th floor, 545 Technology Square Formal learning theory may be conceived as a means of relating theories of comparative grammar to studies of linguistic development. After a brief review of relevant concepts, the present talk surveys formal results within Learning Theory that suggest corresponding constraints on linguistic theory. Particular attention is devoted to the question: How many possible natural languages are there? Host: Prof. Robert C. Berwick Refreshments at 1:30 ------------------------------ Date: 25 Nov 84 1146 EST (Sunday) From: Edmund.Clarke@CMU-CS-A.ARPA Subject: Logics of Programs Call for Papers CALL FOR PAPERS Logics of Programs 1985 The Workshop on Logics of Programs 1985, sponsored by Brooklyn College and IBM Corporation, will be held Monday, June 17 through Wednesday, June 19, at Brooklyn College in Brooklyn, New York. Papers presenting original research on logic of programs, program semantics, and program verification are being sought. Typical, but not exclusive, topics of interest include: syntatic and semantic description of new formal systems relevant to computation, proof theory, comparative studies of expressive power, programming language semantics, specification languages, type theory, model theory, complexity of decision procedures, techniques for probabilistic, concurrent, or hardware verification. Demonstrations of working systems are especially invited. Authors are requested to submit 9 copies of a detailed abstract (not a full paper) to the program chairman: Professor Rohit Parikh Logics of Programs '85 Department of Computer and Information Science Brooklyn College Brooklyn, New York 11210 Abstracts should be 6 to 10 pages double-spaced, and must be received no later than January 14, 1985. Authors will be notified of acceptance or rejection by February 18, 1985. A copy of each accepted paper, typed on special forms for inclusion in the proceedings, will be due on March 24, 1985. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************