International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

P. DENNING writes: "The failure of artificial intelligence to produce machines with any of these capabilities (e.g. many behaviors that are very simple for human beings) after forty years of research is not a failure of intention. It is a failure of the rationalistic philosophy deeply rooted in Western thought. That philosophy has produced in many disciplines a search for models that combine context-free (meaningless) elements into systems governed by formal laws. Not only have information-processing models of cognition fallen short in computer science, but corresponding models have also fallen short in anthropology, economics, linguistics, political science, psychology and other disciplines" (1989, p.333).

Of course, no element is ever context-free, as it is its interactions with other elements which give it its value, which is modified when these interactions change.

This conceptual quagmire explains the problems which arised from some theoretical formulations when unduly applied in factual situations. A good example is the 2d law of thermodynamics and its consequences for the irreversible disorganization of isolated systems (a purely abstract concept, scantily related to concrete systems). The impossibility of the existence of life, supposedly resulting from the 2d law, created awful conceptual tangles in the minds of three generations of biologists: this riddle was resolved only after BERTALANFFY's and PRIGOGINE's work.