AI, Chess, and Language 3.3: Chess and language as models, a philosophical interlude

I now want to take a look at AI, chess, and language from a Piagetian point of view. While he is best known for his work in developmental psychology, Piaget was also interested in the development of concepts over historical time, which he called genetic epistemology, and more generally, in the construction of mental mechanisms. He was particularly interested in abstraction and in something he called reflective abstraction. The concept is a slippery one. Ernst von Glasersfeld has a useful account (Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach) from which ...