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This post is a response to a minor point raised in the intial post of the thread
Socratic Inquiry in Modern Life. Since the response is tangential to the main question posed in the thread I thought it would be more appropriate to branch off to a new thread. Anyhow:
I do not question the validity or usefulness of the Socratic method as an invaluable philosophical tool. But can we infer from Socratic inquiry the specific claim that since experts cannot state explicit rules for their decision making processes, that the experts actually know nothing about the field in which they supposedly excel? Or does this simply indicate that their expertise cannot be explicitly stated in words or adequately captured by formal rules?
Hubert Dreyfus contends the latter in his article "From Socrates to Expert Systems: The Limits and Dangers of Calculative Rationality," by way of analogy to modern efforts in the field of artificial intelligence. According to the Socratic viewpoint, if experts truly had knowledge in their field of expertise, they should be able to explicitly state their knowledge and thus, the expertise that it grants them. AI researchers seeking to automate intelligent behavior have held the same belief, and thus have interviewed experts to translate their expert knowledge into explicit facts and rules, such that the knowledge can be formally programmed into a computer program. Such computers imbued with expert knowledge are called expert systems.
Theoretically speaking, if expertise is really just the logical unfolding of an explicit set of facts and rules, then an expert system should have a tremendous advantage over a human expert-- it should be doing exactly what the human expert is doing, only with a much vaster database and much faster calculations, and with less room for error to boot. But in actuality research of expert systems has floundered, since expert systems do not perform up to par with their human counterparts.
Dreyfus concludes that the disappointment of expert systems has stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding of expertise, arguing that true expertise does not stem from logical operations on a set of facts and rules, but rather is an intuitive, implicit process based on experiential familiarity with a vast array of special cases. Thus, experts can have expertise without knowing how to explicitly state the reasoning behind their knowledge and deductions for the same reasons that a normal, healthy human can be an expert at facial recognition without being able to explicitly state exactly how he discerns one face from the next.
This is just a brief recap of the article, to which a link is posted below. If you find the above interesting or provocative then you should give the entire article a read; it will be well worth your time.
http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/html/paper_socrates.html
Socratic Inquiry in Modern Life. Since the response is tangential to the main question posed in the thread I thought it would be more appropriate to branch off to a new thread. Anyhow:
Originally posted by Another God and Dark Wing
Socrates spent his whole life walking around talking to people, inquiring into their beliefs and challenging them. He would approach people who believed themselves to be an authority on an issue, and ask them to explain to him what they knew. He would approach generals and ask them what bravery was, and what it takes to be brave. He would ask poets what love was, judges what justice was, priests what piety was etc. In every case he would talk to these people, questioning them so they could show him to the true meaning of such terms, thereby imparting such knowledge to him. In every case he found that not one person actually knew what they claimed to know.
I do not question the validity or usefulness of the Socratic method as an invaluable philosophical tool. But can we infer from Socratic inquiry the specific claim that since experts cannot state explicit rules for their decision making processes, that the experts actually know nothing about the field in which they supposedly excel? Or does this simply indicate that their expertise cannot be explicitly stated in words or adequately captured by formal rules?
Hubert Dreyfus contends the latter in his article "From Socrates to Expert Systems: The Limits and Dangers of Calculative Rationality," by way of analogy to modern efforts in the field of artificial intelligence. According to the Socratic viewpoint, if experts truly had knowledge in their field of expertise, they should be able to explicitly state their knowledge and thus, the expertise that it grants them. AI researchers seeking to automate intelligent behavior have held the same belief, and thus have interviewed experts to translate their expert knowledge into explicit facts and rules, such that the knowledge can be formally programmed into a computer program. Such computers imbued with expert knowledge are called expert systems.
Theoretically speaking, if expertise is really just the logical unfolding of an explicit set of facts and rules, then an expert system should have a tremendous advantage over a human expert-- it should be doing exactly what the human expert is doing, only with a much vaster database and much faster calculations, and with less room for error to boot. But in actuality research of expert systems has floundered, since expert systems do not perform up to par with their human counterparts.
Dreyfus concludes that the disappointment of expert systems has stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding of expertise, arguing that true expertise does not stem from logical operations on a set of facts and rules, but rather is an intuitive, implicit process based on experiential familiarity with a vast array of special cases. Thus, experts can have expertise without knowing how to explicitly state the reasoning behind their knowledge and deductions for the same reasons that a normal, healthy human can be an expert at facial recognition without being able to explicitly state exactly how he discerns one face from the next.
This is just a brief recap of the article, to which a link is posted below. If you find the above interesting or provocative then you should give the entire article a read; it will be well worth your time.
http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/html/paper_socrates.html