Algorithms and stories

• Authors: W. Teed Rockwell
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

For most of human history, human knowledge was considered to be something that was stored and captured by words. This began to change when Galileo said that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Today, Dan Dennett and many others argue that all genuine scientific knowledge is in the form of mathematical algorithms. However, recently discovered neurocomputational algorithms can be used to justify the claim that there is genuine knowledge which is non-algorithmic. The fact that these algorithms use prototype deployment, rather than mathematics or logic, gives us good reason to believe that there is a kind of knowledge that we derive from stories that is different from our knowledge of algorithms. Even though we would need algorithms to build a system that can make sense out of stories, we do not need to use algorithms when we ourselves embody a system that learns from stories. The success of the Galilean perspective in the physical sciences has often resulted in an attempt to mathematize the humanities. I am arguing that the dynamic neurocomputational perspective can give us a better understanding of how we get knowledge and wisdom from the stories told by disciplines such as Literature, History, Anthropology and Theology. This new neurological data can be used to justify the traditional pedagogy of these disciplines, which originally stressed the telling of stories rather than the learning of algorithms.

Keywords

EN

Churchland; Dennett; Lakoff; Dewey; James; algorithms; stories; theology; literature; anthropology; pedagogy; science and the humanities; neuroscience; neurophilosophy; prototype; deployment; simulation semantics

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Human Affairs
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 23
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 633-644

Dates

published

2013-10-01

online

2013-09-28

Contributors

author

W. Teed Rockwell

• Sonoma State University

References

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• [8] Galilei, Galileo 1623, Il Saggiatore, The Assayer. Translated by Stillman Drake. In The Controversy of the Comets of 1618. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press 1960.
• [9] Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226471013.001.0001[Crossref]
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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/s13374-013-0154-0