Dr Emerald Gibb
Allow me to explain. Fitter says philosophical articles can be generated by mechanical means, and set out a system for doing this in an article in a little-known journal. At the time, it was ridiculed as failing to appreciate the finer points of our philosphical discourse, but I thought then, he might have touched upon something fairly profound and important. So I resolved to develop my own 'Philosophy Generator', and try out his approach.
I first of all had to choose an area for the prospective article, settling eventually on Philosophy of Logic, which I know nothing about, but gather is rather sought after. I then used a thesaurus and a dictionary of Philosophy to make a table (Box 1.), as described by Gower & Fitter. In my case, I thought the example he used in Philosophy Now (No. 6 Summer 1993) really would not convince anyone barely literate, and might even fail to convince philosophers. So I added a few more general phrases, such as Îone or anotherâ, to just make the proposed automatic article flow a bit better (without, of course, losing unintelligibility). The numbers I generated randomly using torn up scraps of logic primers, obtaining a string of decimals: viz.
0436 1344 5677 8568 9114 0025 1757 0478 6320 4589 2951
(notice the marvellous brevity of this system - with a simple system of key words and boxes, great long articles and books can be read in a fraction of the time it would have taken before!)
which Îdecodesâ to give:
SUBSTITUTIONAL
v QUANTIFICATION
NEITHER...NOR
ELIMINABLE
SIMULATION
OBJECTURAL
etc.
However, no matter how hard I struggled with the Îbolting togetherâ, I could not make up anything other than strings of gibberish. It really would not, I thought, cut the mustard. Hereâs the sort of gibberish it came out as:
"Substitutional quantification, on the other hand, is neither an eliminable simulation nor a genuine objectural quantification. It is not a way, then of getting along with a null ontology, an empty universe; it is a non-standard idiom, rather, foreign to the language in which we talk of what there is and of values of variables. If one does still happen to wonder what would be an adequate universe for some theory that comes to him in this non-standard idiom, the thing for him to do is seek one or another reasonable-looking paraphrase of the theory into a standard form in which quantification is objecturally construed. Then he can assess the universe of this theory - though the various passable translations may well call for different universes. An unimaginative way of thus translating substitutional quantification is to translate it into a metalanguage in which we talk of strings of signs and concatenations and substitution and truth. Identifying the strings with numbers as Godel did, we end up with the positive integers as universe."
But when I showed my best attempt to some American friends, they were much impressed, commenting on its relevance to a discussion of Deviant Logic written in the sixties by no less an academic than W.V. Quine. On looking up this work*, I was astonished to find the generator had produced the entire argument almost word for word!
So the generator does work, the article it created really did make sense, after all.
* * * * * * * *
* Readers wishing to make the comparison for themselves
might like to consult: W.V. Quine, (1970) Philosophy of Logic, esp.
p94. Pub. in the Foundations of Philosophy Series by Prentice Hall, New
Jersey.
TERMS FOR GENERATOR
SUBSTITUTION, SIMULATION, GÖDEL, NEITHER...NOR, QUANTIFICATION, (EMPTY)UNIVERSE, ELIMINABLE, LANGUAGE, VARIABLES, PARAPHRASE, OBJECTURALLY, THEORY, ASSESS, OBJECTURAL, NULL ONTOLOGY, ADEQUATE UNIVERSE, NON-STANDARD IDIOM, VALUES, ONE OR ANOTHER, NUMBERS, CONSTRUED, STANDARD FORM CONCATENATION, SIGNS TRUTH, IDENTIFYING, METALANGUAGE, TRANSLATING, STRINGS, POSITIVE INTEGERS,