More patterns
How serendipitous that Dennett chose to write about a chess-playing computer program; because of this, when Haugeland writes that
The first leaf falling today could be white's opening, P-K4; the second leaf could be black's reply, also P-K4; and so one, at tournament level. Obviously, the recognitions must be beholden somehow to what is ostensibly being recognized, yet in such a way that the criteria of correctness are induced from above.
Here lies the true import of the phrase
you know one when you see one: recognition is essentially a skill.
(Who, incidentally, still describes chess in terms of pawns moving to king's four? This essay appeared in 1994!) We are perhaps put in mind of §200 the Investigations (though it may also happen that the being put in mind of goes in the other direction, depending on when one reads what, and it may moreover be true that one who understands that section would not be put in mind of or by it: but then it may not):
But now imagine a game of chess translated according to certain rules into a series of afctions which we do not ordinarily associate with a game—say into yells and stamping of feet. And now suppose those two people to yell and stamp instead of playing the form of chess that we are used to; and this in such a way that their procedure is translatable by suitable rules into a game of chess. [W]ould we still be inclined to say they were playing a game?
What the significance of this being put in mind might be is of course quite beyond my ken, though I do suspect that the outer/inner recognition contrast is the way to answer Korsgaard's question as to the possibility of bad action, and that what, to speak maximally generally, makes it occasionally seem to this reader as if her own answers are implausible is that it seems as if she wants to get all the work done by inner recognition. Though I'm not sure what to make of this bit, which appears in the same paragraph as the above quotation from Haugeland:
The constitutive standards for a given domain—e.g. the rules of chess—set conditions jointly on a range of responsive dispositions and a range of phenomena: if they are both such that the former consistently find the latter to accord with the standards, then the former are recognition skills and the latter are objects in the domain.
It seems to derive outer recognition, what would enable us to see that a game of chess is taking place here in the first place, from the standards which apply to chessy things, and allow us to say whether something is legal or illegal. But he later insists that outer and inner recognition must at least be distinct capabilities.
None of that bears the least relation to this, a fact which should puzzle us more than it does.
Comments
on 2007-12-03 0:05:33.0, horus kemwer commented:
FYI, final link is broken (though it doesn't look like it's your fault) . . . I was disappointed.
and, further, on 2007-12-03 0:15:16.0, ben wolfson commented:
Well damn.
Not two days ago a webcomic lived there.
and, further, on 2007-12-03 20:09:58.0, ben wolfson commented:
And now it livest here again. Will wonders never etc.