2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

S TRUCTURALISM, PHILOSOPHY, AND AI
der to get a better understanding of the philosophical difference between the two anti-philo-
sophical projects, both in terms of their assumptions and in terms of the choices opened up,
or closed off by them.
5. Structuralism, Philosophy, and AI
The consequences of the structural explanation of terms are not only wide and deep,
but affect particularly the viability of the game-based approaches as “non-philosophies” in
the sense described above. In fact, most if not all the philosophical debates surrounding
both Artificial Intelligence and Structuralism can be shown to stem from this point. My dis-
cussion will follow the guidelines provided by a debate between Lévi-Strauss and the phi-
losopher Paul Ricoeur that started in the early 1960s and continued, in increasingly harsher
and more radical tones, for over a decade. The first encounter took place on the pages on
the journal Esprit soon after the publication of La pensée savage, the book in which Lévi-
Strauss generalizes his researches on myths by applying the structural method to the wider
interrogation of “primitive” mentality in general. It then continued in a series of articles
published by Ricoeur in the following years and in numerous, although almost always in-
direct, discussions of Ricoeur’s critiques contained in Lévi-Strauss articles and books pub-
lished after 1963.
Although the first part of my discussion will thus be focused on Lévi-Strauss’s work,
it should be read in the wider context of both AI and Structuralism, and not just because of
the substantive analogies between the two approaches that I have described so far. In fact,
when Ricoeur criticizes Structuralism’s philosophical pretensions, he appeals to a view of
language—and a theory of reference, in particular—that he sees embodied in the work John
Searle, e.g. the work of Artificial Intelligence’s staunchest and most indefatigable critic.
This view, according to Ricoeur, is
the theory of proper names and definite descriptions, from which Strawson
and Searle derive their theory of the identifications of particulars, [and
it] turns on that fundamental characteristic of language, that the truth of a
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