PhilGoetz comments on Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy - Less Wrong

106 Post author: lukeprog 20 March 2011 08:28PM

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Comment author: PhilGoetz 30 March 2011 03:53:56AM *  3 points [-]

(EDIT: Quine was not Rapaport's advisor; Hector-Neri Castaneda was.) William Rapaport, together with Stu Shapiro, applied Quine's ideas on semantics and logic to knowledge representation and reasoning for artificial intelligence. Stu Shapiro edited the Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence, which may be the best survey ever made of symbolic artificial general intelligence. Bill and Stu referenced Quine in many of their papers, which have been widely read in artificial intelligence since the early 1980s.

There are many concepts from Stu and Bill's representational principles that I find useful for dissolving philosophical problems. These include the concepts of intensional vs. extensional representation, deictic representations, belief spaces, and the unique variable binding rule. But I don't know if any of these ideas originate with Quine, because I haven't studied Quine. Bill and Stu also often cited Meinong and Carnap; I think many of Bill's representational ideas came from Meinong.

A quick google of Quine shows that a paper that I'm currently making revisions on is essentially a disproof of Quine's "indeterminacy of translation".