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From: stampe@uhccux.UUCP (David Stampe)
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Subject: Submission for comp-ai-digest
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Date: Fri, 3-Jul-87 14:01:33 EDT
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Posted: Fri Jul  3 14:01:33 1987
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From: stampe@uhccux.UUCP (David Stampe)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: Re: On how AI answers psychological issues
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Date: 3 Jul 87 18:01:33 GMT
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In-reply-to: norman%ics@SDCSVAX.UCSD.EDU's message of 30 Jun 87 14:18:40 GMT

norman%ics@SDCSVAX.UCSD.EDU (Donald A. Norman) writes:
> Thinking about "how the mind works" is fun, but not science, not
> the way to get to the correct answer.

In fact it's the ONLY way to get the correct answer.  Experiments
don't design themselves, and they don't interpret their own results.

We don't see with outward eyes or hear with outward ears alone.  The
outward perception or behavior does not exist without the inward one.
If you practice your remembered violin in your imagination, while your
actual violin is being repaired, you, as well as the violin, may sound
much better when the repairs are finished.

I am a linguist.  I write a tongue twister on the board that they
haven't hear before: 'Unique New York Unique New York Unique New
York....'  My students watch silently, but when I ask them what errors
this tongue twister induces, they immediately name the very errors I
discovered before class, when I tried to pronounce it aloud.  You
didn't have to say it aloud, either, did you?

It is not introspection that is AI's trouble.  It is that an expert
system, for example, isn't likely to model expertise correctly until
it is designed by someone who is himself the expert, or who knows how
to discover the nature of the expert's typically unconscious wisdom.
Linguistics has struggled for over a century to develop tools for
learning how human beings acquire and use language.  It seems likely
that a comparable struggle will be required learn how the expert
diagnostician, welder, draftsman, or reference librarian does what he
or she does.

I often feel that when a good student of language takes a job building
a natural language interface for some AI project, in her work --
though it may be viewed by others in the project as marginal, if not
menial -- she is more likely to turn up something of scientific import
than are those working on the core of the project.  This is just
because she has spent years learning to learn how experts -- in this
case language users -- do what they do.  On the other hand, she is not
likely to believe that programs can realistically model much of the
human linguistic faculty, at least in the imaginable future.  For
example, computer parsers presuppose grammars.  But it is not clear
whether children, the only devices so far known to have mastered any
natural language, come equipped with any analogous utilities.

David Stampe, Linguistics, Univ. of Hawaii