2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

T HE SUPPLEMENT
the three sets A, B, and C. The mandated equivalence A=B, thus, provides the completeness
and consistency required from the formal objects devised by AI and Structuralism and guar-
antees, therefore, their explanatory adequacy. The issue, here, is purely extensional: it is a
requirement on a formalism that may be not too powerful nor too poor. But the terms in A
and B belong to same domain: chess positions algebraically rewritten, for example, or
myths broken down to sentence-like mythemes. The problem is to determine whether the
empirically given configurations can be reproduced (e.g. generated) by the rules governing
structures or search-spaces. This does not mean that the issue is trivial, nor that its accom-
plishment does not require a good deal of theoretical effort, especially when, as in Lévi-
Strauss’s case, the available material, e.g mythical narratives, are given in a form very dif-
ferent from what the theory needs (e.g. mythemes) in order to construct its structures. The
reduction of chess games to ordered series of chessboard configurations is a relatively eas-
ier task, once it has been decided to focus the attention on that aspect of the game. On the
contrary, the reduction of the wealth of semi-continuous narratives into single, discrete el-
ements is far from trivial and, in itself, no small accomplishment. The same may be said for
AI’s search-spaces that deal with “fuzzy” domain where the definition of a “state” and a set
of rules governing the transition between states is not empirically given, like, for example,
vision or natural language processing. Yet, for all their importance as technical achieve-
ments, and in spite of all the ink that has been spilled on the matter, the relevance of AI and
Structuralism as successful non-philosophies does not hang on the resolution of this point. 6
Or rather, to be more precise: this is not the most difficult issue to solve, it is just a prelim-
inary to the real challenge that concerns the nature of the relationship between C and AB,
between the “world” and the object of the spaces or structures. The really thorny and philo-
sophically interesting issue is how to think the relationship between objects belonging to
5. See, for example, the debate following the publication of Hubert Dreyfus’s book, What Computers
can’t do, and the controversy around John Searle’s critique of AI’s “strong research program” program
presented in the issue of The Behavioral and Brain Sciences that contained his original paper (“Brains,
Minds and Programs”) and the peers’ commentaries.
6. In fact, one is tempted to grant AI researchers their wish and let empirical research decide the issue
instead of curtailing any prospect of a possible solution via principled philosophical arguments on the
impossibility of the relationship as such. Such an answer would at least clear the ground and redirect
the debate toward the more challenging philosophical issue.
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