2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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sumption that the meaningfulness of symbols is not what the theory is all about: it is a pre-
supposition that the theory will not explain but that it must assume as the ground on which
it will operate. This position is perfectly congruent with Ricoeur’s interpretation of Struc-
turalism and it does indeed leave quite a considerable room for the work of the philosopher
who will have to provide an explanation of how semantics came about in the first place.
Thus, the debate between Ricoeur and Lévi-Strauss helps us understand the critical
step that the two game-based non-philosophies we are examining have to take in order to
escape philosophy’s objections. If they are content to presuppose semantics and limit their
theoretical scope, “formalistically,” to a theory of syntactic manipulation, then it will be up
to philosophy to complete and complement their “merely” technical approach. Artificial In-
telligence does not take this critical step, nor could it take it even if it were willing to, given
its reliance on the concepts of form and content tied together by an interpretation function.
Therefore, formalist approaches like AI’s end up caught in a double bind: on the one hand
they are, theoretically speaking, forced to leave room for philosophy, as Ricoeur’s point
makes clear; on the other hand, they are programmatically incapable of doing so unless they
renounce the “non-philosophical” ambitions and accept to be reduced to a pure “technical”
(e.g. “engineeristic”) discipline that the philosopher may found useful but that can never
solve, nor indeed even approach, any true philosophical problem.The interpretation of Ar-
tificial Intelligence’s impasse I have just offered may perhaps show that the classical cri-
tiques advanced, from diverging sides, by John Searle, Hubert Dreyfus and the
Connectionists movement are in some sense necessitated by the inadequate rendering of
detachment within the AI filed. All critiques, in fact, try to ground meaning outside AI’s
formalistic structres, e.g. they relinquish the requirement of closure. Searle’s celebrated
‘Chinese room’ argument wanted to show, inter alia, that no formal structure can ever have
a signifying intention, that no original intentionality can be originated by a computer pro-
gram. Intentionality, for Searle, is a bio-physical process analogous to digestion and lacta-
tion—e.g. it belongs to that ‘level of content’ that lies programmatically (but
‘supplementarily’) outside of AI’s search-spaces. Connectionism can be similarly interpret-
ed as the effort to abandon the non-philosophical ambitions of AI in favor of a classical