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on studies of formal logic as an embodied, situated, social, cultural, materially-mediated activity.
This view contrasts with:
1 formal logics as Platonic mathematical objects
2 formal logic as an innate mental capacity
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inspired by @cdutilhnovaes’ _Formal Languages in Logic_, about why formality is useful. Her overall explanation of how formal rationality works is closely similar to mine in _The Eggplant_ draft, so it was exciting reading! https://amzn.to/2NQNsxa2 replies 0 retweets 16 likesShow this thread -
The traditional explanation for the power of logic is “expressive precision,” but the experience of attempting to use logic in AI is that it totally fails for that. Specifically, whenever it encounters nebulosity, which is the main point of Part I of _The Eggplant_.
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Another traditional virtue of logic is truth preservation (true premises => true conclusions); but there are nearly no absolute truths in the eggplant-sized world, and deduction does not preserve mostly-truth. So that’s not the answer outside applications in math and CS.pic.twitter.com/JZBRjPqrUH
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David Chapman Retweeted David Chapman
“Dual process theories” say we have an innate rationality module that does logic correctly, plus an irrationality module that messes it up. (This goes back to the Greeks.) In a recent
I pointed out several reasons this is wrong and has damaged cogsci.https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1079802460124766215 …David Chapman added,
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@cdutilhnovaes’s book [quote below], and the others I’ll cite in this
, treat logic as a culturally-evolved technology for particular sorts of reasoning. It’s something we do, not something we have or are. It’s also not something that lives in the Platonic Form Realm.pic.twitter.com/o4kxqx5KxN
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Mostly we do formal reasoning on paper, or a blackboard or whiteboard. Some bits are best done in the shower, but most of it critically depends on these external material technologies. Richard Feynman got this:pic.twitter.com/zAFeMumKm0
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Rationalism holds that rationality works by abstracting a concrete problem into an immaterial formal realm. This is a weird flex, inasmuch as modern rationalists are usually passionately committed to materialism. Can we do formal logic without spooks? Yes we can!pic.twitter.com/nOa4A8fFGZ
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Replying to @Meaningness
cough Vygotsky
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Yes, Novaes cites him, as do I.
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