2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

T HE CHALLENGE OF CLOSURE
methodology that aims at modeling on computer hardware an essentially biological pro-
cess. Dreyfus’s critique, on the other hand, is very close to Ricoeur’s, insofar as it stresses
the existence of an unformalizable level of meaning-creating practices that lies behind (and
reaches beyond) the formalized structures.
The debate between Ricoeur and Lévi-Strauss’ around formalism makes clear (hope-
fully) that the interpretation of game that adopts total arbitrariness and complete separabil-
ity (the two tenets of the AI/formalistic procedure to fix the game into place) puts itself into
an unstable position that calls for an external, but impossible, grounding that can be either:
(a) “philosophical,” like Ricoeur’s search for a meaning of meaning through herme-
neutics, and its equivalent in the AI’s field: Dreyfus’s Heideggerian critique;
(b) or “biological,” like Searle’s “solution” that ties everything back to the concrete or-
ganization of the “physical.”
In either case, AI’s project fails, since it cannot, in principle, admit anything external
to its game-like search-spaces and both (a) and (b) —the first pushing upward toward philo-
sophical skies, the second pulling it downward toward a “biological physicalism”—deny
the required closure.
My analysis, however, suggests that these critiques do not really go to the root of the
issue. The problem lies with the intrinsic inability of the formalistic solution to detachment
to preserve closure. Therefore, the application to AI of an alternative solution to the prob-
lem of detachment, like Structuralism’s, would be able to salvage AI’s “grand” program un-
scathed. This does not mean that Structuralism does not face problems of its own, as we
will see in the next section.
6. The challenge of closure
In the previous section, we have seen that Ricoeur’s critique points out a set of signif-
icant problems for the formalistic understanding of abstract game-like structures that we
have seen exemplified by Artificial Intelligence. We turn now to a discussion of the positive
alternative that Lévi-Strauss proposes against hermeneutics’ interpretation of Structural-
279