Kenneth M. Sayre (August 13, 1928 – October 6, 2022) was an American philosopher who spent most of his career at the
University of Notre Dame
The University of Notre Dame du Lac, known simply as Notre Dame ( ) or ND, is a private Catholic research university in Notre Dame, Indiana, outside the city of South Bend. French priest Edward Sorin founded the school in 1842. The main campu ...
(ND). His early career was devoted mainly to philosophic applications of
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...
,
cybernetics
Cybernetics is a wide-ranging field concerned with circular causality, such as feedback, in regulatory and purposive systems. Cybernetics is named after an example of circular causal feedback, that of steering a ship, where the helmsperson m ...
, and
information theory
Information theory is the scientific study of the quantification (science), quantification, computer data storage, storage, and telecommunication, communication of information. The field was originally established by the works of Harry Nyquist a ...
. Later on his main interests shifted to
Plato
Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...
,
philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addre ...
, and
environmental philosophy
Environmental philosophy is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with the natural environment and humans' place within it. It asks crucial questions about human environmental relations such as "What do we mean when we talk about nature?" "What ...
. His retirement in 2014 was marked by publication of a history of ND's Philosophy Department, ''Adventures in Philosophy at Notre Dame''.
Biographical overview
Sayre was born on August 13, 1928, in
Scottsbluff, Nebraska
Scottsbluff is a city in Scotts Bluff County, in the western part of the state of Nebraska, in the Great Plains region of the United States. The population was 14,436 at the 2020 census. Scottsbluff is the largest city in the Nebraska Panhandl ...
. After graduating from high school in 1946, he spent two years in the
US Navy
The United States Navy (USN) is the maritime service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. It is the largest and most powerful navy in the world, with the estimated tonnage of ...
as an electronics technician. He received an AB in 1952 from
Grinnell College
Grinnell College is a private liberal arts college in Grinnell, Iowa, United States. It was founded in 1846 when a group of New England Congregationalists established the Trustees of Iowa College.
Grinnell has the fifth highest endowment-to-st ...
, Iowa, with a joint major in philosophy and mathematics.
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
granted him an MA in 1954 and a PhD in 1958, both in philosophy. From 1953 to 1956 he served as Assistant Dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. While completing his thesis, he spent two years as a systems analyst in MIT's
Lincoln Laboratory
The MIT Lincoln Laboratory, located in Lexington, Massachusetts, is a United States Department of Defense federally funded research and development center chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security. Research and dev ...
. He taught at ND from 1958 to 2014, with interim appointments at
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...
(1966–67),
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green State University (BGSU) is a public research university in Bowling Green, Ohio. The main academic and residential campus is south of Toledo, Ohio. The university has nationally recognized programs and research facilities in the ...
(1981),
Oxford University
Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...
(1985), and
Cambridge University
, mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts.
Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge.
, established =
, other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...
(1996).
Areas of special interest
Artificial intelligence
Under the influence of
Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, an ...
and
Oliver Selfridge
Oliver Gordon Selfridge (10 May 1926 – 3 December 2008) was a pioneer of artificial intelligence. He has been called the "Father of Machine Perception." Biography
Selfridge, born in England, was a grandson of Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founde ...
at Lincoln Laboratory, Sayre became the first trained philosopher on record to become actively involved in the new field of artificial intelligence (AI). In ''Recognition: A Study in the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence'', his first book on the topic, he set forward the working maxim that our "understanding of a type of human behavior and our ability to simulate it go hand in hand." A corollary is that a promising way to study natural intelligence is to attempt to reproduce it artificially.
This corollary was behind his establishment of ND's Philosophical Institute for Artificial Intelligence (PIAI) in 1965. The initial goal of this institute was to build an automated system for recognizing cursive handwriting. By 1973, the PIAI had produced a handwriting recognition system more successful than any other currently available. A by-product of this effort was the discovery of a fundamental problem of automated handwriting recognition that came to be known as
Sayre's paradox. Simply stated, the paradox is that a cursively written word cannot be recognized without being
segmented and cannot be segmented without being recognized. The more promising approaches to automated handwriting recognition today have resulted from attempts to circumvent Sayre's Paradox.
Other studies in AI published by Sayre are ''Consciousness: A Philosophic study of Minds and Machines'' and ''The Modeling of Mind''. He also contributed the article "Artificial Intelligence" to the ''Encyclopedia of Religion'', edited by Mircea Eliade.
Cybernetics
The descriptive title of
Norbert Wiener
Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894 – March 18, 1964) was an American mathematician and philosopher. He was a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A child prodigy, Wiener later became an early researcher i ...
's seminal book, ''Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine'', indicates that cybernetics is concerned both with the control of functioning systems and the communication processes involved in that control. Also evident from the title is that cybernetics is concerned with functional parallels between biological and mechanical control systems. Given this overlap of interest between AI and cybernetics, it was natural that Sayre's early interest in AI led to a parallel interest in cybernetics.
Key concepts in control theory are
negative and
positive feedback
Positive feedback (exacerbating feedback, self-reinforcing feedback) is a process that occurs in a feedback loop which exacerbates the effects of a small disturbance. That is, the effects of a perturbation on a system include an increase in the ...
. The concepts of positive and negative feedback are featured in Sayre's 1976 ''Cybernetics and the Philosophy of Mind''. Other publications on cybernetics include his co-edited ''Philosophy and Cybernetics'', an encyclopedia article "Cybernetics," and a chapter by that title in the ''Routledge History of Philosophy''.
Information theory
The study of communication in cybernetics centers on
communication theory
Communication theory is a proposed description of communication phenomena, the relationships among them, a storyline describing these relationships, and an argument for these three elements. Communication theory provides a way of talking about a ...
, in the technical sense established by
Claude Shannon
Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American people, American mathematician, electrical engineering, electrical engineer, and cryptography, cryptographer known as a "father of information theory".
As a 21-year-o ...
's "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." This mathematical discipline is more commonly known today as information theory. Sayre learned information theory from ND's James Massey, winner of the 1988
Claude E. Shannon Award and an early collaborator in the PIAI handwriting recognition project.
After the handwriting project, information theory continued to figure in Sayre's research. His monograph-length "Intentionality and Information Processing: An Alternative Model for Cognitive Science" appeared in 1986. In 1998 he contributed the entry on information theory to the ''Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy''.
Philosophy of mind
Early publications by Sayre in this area include "Pattern Recognition Mechanisms and St. Thomas' Theory of Abstraction," coauthored with Joseph Bobik in 1963, and "The Cybernetic Approach to the Philosophy of Mind: A Dialogue" with James Heffernan in 1980. The most comprehensive presentation of his views in this are in the previously mentioned ''Cybernetics and the Philosophy of Mind'' (1976, reprinted 2014).
One widely discussed view in this book is Sayre's version of
neutral monism
Neutral monism is an umbrella term for a class of metaphysical theories in the philosophy of mind. These theories reject the dichotomy of mind and matter, believing the fundamental nature of reality to be neither mental nor physical; in other words ...
. As he defines it, neutral monism is the thesis that mind and matter are both reducible to an ontologically more basic "neutral" principle. The more basic principle in his account is information, in the technical sense of information theory. Sayre's version has been recognized by several recent authors as one of the more credible forms of neutral monism available to date.
Environmental philosophy
Sayre taught numerous seminar and lecture courses in environmental philosophy during the decade prior to his retirement. One of these courses was videotaped in 2007 and made available under ND's OpenCourseWare program. His 2010 book ''Unearthed: The Economic Roots of our Environmental Crisis'' develops the theme that economic production since the Industrial Revolution has degraded the biosphere to a point where it soon will be incapable of supporting human society as we know it, and that radical reductions in consumption are necessary to forestall this result.
Plato
In a period spanning almost 50 years, Sayre wrote five books and approximately two dozen shorter works on Plato. In 1987 and 1993 he presented lectures to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy. He contributed four entries to ''The Continuum Companion to Plato''.
The first book, ''Plato's Analytic Method'' (1969), shows that the method of hypothesis employed in the ''Theaetetus'' overlaps with the ''Sophists method of collection and division inasmuch as both are procedures for determining necessary and sufficient conditions for a thing's being what it is.
Standard scholarship holds that the views attributed to Plato by
Aristotle
Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of phil ...
in Book A of the ''Metaphysics'' cannot be found in the
Platonic dialogues
Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...
, and that the reason is either that Aristotle simply did not understand the views in question or that they are part of an unwritten Platonic corpus. Sayre's second book, ''Plato's Late Ontology: A Riddle Resolved'' (1983), argues that these views in fact are present in the ''Philebus'' but are expressed in terminology not frequently used by Aristotle.
The unifying theme of ''Plato's Literary Garden'' (1995) is that Plato wrote his dialogues to engage his readers in philosophic conversations similar to those he shared with Socrates. The book develops this theme with discussions of various early and middle dialogues, including the ''Meno'', the ''Phaedo'', the ''Phaedrus'', the ''Symposium'', and the ''Republic''.
''Parmenides Lesson: Translation and Explication of Plato's Parmenides'' (1996) contains a line-by-line commentary on Plato's most difficult dialogue. The latter three-quarters of the dialogue consists of consequences drawn from eight hypotheses about Unity, which commentators traditionally have paired in ways that make them appear contradictory. This book shows that when the hypotheses are paired in a different but no less plausible way, the consequences not only are compatible but moreover add up to a defense of Plato's later
Pythagorean
Pythagorean, meaning of or pertaining to the ancient Ionian mathematician, philosopher, and music theorist Pythagoras, may refer to:
Philosophy
* Pythagoreanism, the esoteric and metaphysical beliefs purported to have been held by Pythagoras
* Ne ...
ontology against the
Eleatic
The Eleatics were a group of pre-Socratic philosophers in the 5th century BC centered around the ancient Italian Greek colony of Elea ( grc, Ἐλέα), located in present-day Campania in southern Italy.
The primary philosophers who are associa ...
Ontology of the middle dialogues.
In ''Metaphysics and Method in Plato's Statesman'' (2006), the part on metaphysics brings passages from Aristotle's
Neoplatonic
Neoplatonism is a strand of Platonic philosophy that emerged in the 3rd century AD against the background of Hellenistic philosophy and religion. The term does not encapsulate a set of ideas as much as a chain of thinkers. But there are some ide ...
commentators to bear in showing that the ontology of the ''Philebus'' is present in the ''Statesman'' as well. The part dealing with method argues that the procedure of collection in the Sophist is superseded by the use of paradigms in the ''Statesman'', and that bipartite division in the ''Sophist'' is replaced by multipartite division in service of a method similar to the method of negation employed in the ''Parmenides''.
Personal life and death
Sayre died in October 2022, at the age of 94.
Books published
* ''The Modeling of Mind''. Edited with F.J. Crosson, University of Notre Dame Press, 1963. Paper Cover: Simon and Schuster, 1967.
* ''Recognition: A Study in the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence''. University of Notre Dame Press, 1965, 312 pages.
* ''Philosophy and Cybernetics''. Edited with F.J. Crosson. University of Notre Dame Press, 1967. Translated into Spanish (1969) and Japanese (1970). Paper Cover: Simon and Schuster, 1969.
* ''Consciousness: A Philosophic Study of Minds and Machines''. Random House, 1969, 273 pages. Hard cover: Peter Smith, 1972.
* ''Plato's Analytic Method''. University of Chicago Press, 1969, 250 pages. Reprinted 1994 by Gregg Revivals.
* ''Cybernetics and the Philosophy of Mind''. Routledge and Kegan Paul, Humanities Press, 1976, 265 pages. Reprinted 2014.
* ''Moonflight''. University of Notre Dame Press, 1977, 97 pages.
* ''Starburst''. University of Notre Dame Press, 1977, 116 pages.
* ''Values in the Electric Power Industry'' (ed.). University of Notre Dame Press, 1977.
* ''Ethics and Problems of the 21st Century'', with K. Goodpaster (eds.). University of Notre Dame Press, 1979.
* ''Regulation, Values, and the Public Interest'', with E. Maher, P. Arnold, K. Goodpaster, R. Rodes and J. Stewart, University of Notre Dame Press, 1980, 207 pages.
* ''Reason and Decision'', edited with M. Bradie. Bowling Green University Applied Philosophy Program, Bowling Green, Ohio, 1982.
* ''Plato's Late Ontology: A Riddle Resolved''. Princeton University Press, 1983, 328 pages. Reprinted with "Excess and Deficiency at Statesman 283C-285C" and new Introduction by Parmenides Press, 2005.
* (Monograph) "Intentionality and Information Processing: An Alternative Model for Cognitive Science," ''The Behavioral and Brain Sciences'', 9:1 (1986). 44 pages (extra length, double column); 10:4 (1987), 5 pages.
* ''Plato's Literary Garden: How to Read a Platonic dialogue''. University of Notre Dame Press, 1995, 220 pages.
* ''Parmenides' Lesson: Translation and Explication of Plato's Parmenides''. University of Notre Dame Press, 1996, 383 pages.
* ''Belief and Knowledge: Mapping the Cognitive Landscape''. Rowman & Littlefield, 1997, 310 pages.
* ''Metaphysics and Method in Plato's Statesman'', Cambridge University Press, 2006, 265 pages.
* ''Unearthed: The Economic Roots of our Environmental Crisis'', University of Notre Dame Press, 2010, 438 pages.
* ''Adventures in Philosophy at Notre Dame'', University of Notre Dame Press, 2014, 382 pages.
References
External links
Kenneth M. Sayre's ND Philosophy Faculty Page
*.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sayre, Kenneth M.
1928 births
2022 deaths
20th-century American philosophers
21st-century American philosophers
Environmental philosophers
Epistemologists
University of Notre Dame faculty
Harvard University alumni
Grinnell College alumni
MIT Lincoln Laboratory people
Academics from Nebraska
People from Scottsbluff, Nebraska
Military personnel from Nebraska