ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Cybernetician Gordon Pask and His Conversation Theory & Interaction of Actor’s Theory As Critique of Artificial Intelligence

• In Event: Rewiring Humans 2: Biology, Psychotherapy, and Philosophy in the Age of Digital Computers

English Abstract

While Gordon Pask’s Conversation Theory (1975) shares with Martin Buber’s Dialogical Principle (1923) the primacy of the ‘in-between’ over predicated individuality of sender-receiver participants ‘who communicate’, the earlier I-Though / I-It distinction is quite different from Pask’s mechanical individuals (M-Ind) and psychological individuals (P-Ind), whereby "(…) any P-Ind is embodied (…) in one or more M-Inds [, which] often refer to a human body and brain. However, they may be ‘any dynamic fabric able to accommodate a P-Ind’." (De Zeeuw, 2001). Not merely a version of the hardware-software discrimination, rather two aspects (among Ln-languages, Stable-Concepts, Procedures, Memories, Topics, Entailments, Environments, […]; Boyd, 2003) of a self-referential process, through which conversation emerges. By distinguishing conversation from Claude Shannon’s communication ("signal transfer which may, or may not, be conversational", 1980), Pask redefined human-machine relations as conversational, with incidental yet significant consequences for conceptions of artificial intelligence (AI). While he and numerous collaborators understood conversation as finite upon accomplishment of ‘understanding’, as of 1980, Pask and Gerard de Zeeuw began to generalise CT into Interaction of Actors Theory (IA) for open-ended conversation akin to Wittgenstein’s ‘language games’ within ‘forms of life’ (PI, 1953). While CT was depicted as kinematic (‘relational’), IA in addition was deliberated as kinetic (cognisant of forces). De Zeeuw emphasises "(…) even when the Theory is known, it is interpreted as a theory of interaction, rather than as a theory for the study of interactions, to improve on values. And (…) a theory for research, a way to extend science rather than a theory of something." (2001) This contribution traces Pask’s et al’s development of CT and IA and their relation to contemporary conceptions of AI.

Author

• Marcus J. Carney