Holism in artificial intelligence?

Carlo Penco

pp. 37-48

in: Maria L. Dalla Chiara, Roberto Giuntini, Federico Laudisa (eds), Language, quantum, music, Berlin, Springer, 1999

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.