2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

S TRUCTURALISM, PHILOSOPHY, AND AI
sophical work carried out by the structures provides an explanation of how meaning came
about in the first place: as a the kind of permutation of groups of relations operated on
meaningless elements that he finds at work underneath the surface of myths. In Lévi-
Strauss’s more radical view, there is no room left for philosophy in the traditional sense, as
Ricoeur is quick to recognize and as Lévi-Strauss himself will elaborate in greater detail
his challenge to philosophy in the following years: in the introduction (Ouverture) to My-
thologiques, which I will discuss in the next section, he answers Ricoeur by responding to
the latter claim of partiality of an interpretation within an historically bound context with
the elaboration of the concept of Anaclastic unity (structural analysis of myths is a myth of
myths).
Generally speaking, though, we can notice that the two options outlined by Ricoeur
correspond quite closely, in my opinion, to successive developments followed by Artificial
Intelligence and Structuralism, although the path that these two disciplines have taken are
somewhat intricate. In the former case represented by AI, we see that the reliance upon the
formalistic distinction between form and content accompanied by the privileging of the
former term over the latter has exposed it to the kind of fallacies that Ricoeur outlined in
his critique. Although AI as such has definitely not published any grand manifesto pro-
claiming a theoretical shift from a general philosophy to a technical, “supplementary” (or
subordinate) discipline, it is not difficult to see that this is exactly what has historically hap-
pened in the scientific practice of the field. With a few exceptions (mostly coming from phi-
losophers embracing AI rather that from researchers active in AI research) 28 research in
Artificial Intelligence has quietly turned into a technical discipline that is more interested
in the development of logical tools or new algorithms than in providing an exhaustive rep-
lication of the inner workings of the human mind in general.
Lévi-Strauss, on the contrary has chosen the opposite path: by upping the ante and re-
fusing any formalistic interpretation, he aims instead toward an integrated picture that tak-
en into full account that level of human practices that, according to Ricoeur, a formalist
account will necessarily miss. To use the philosophical framework that Ricoeur sketched in
his article, such an integration should move him toward the Hegel-like pole of the philo-
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