The Marxist in the Machine

This article explores the life and work of Chinese American logician Hao Wang. Wang worked at a set of intersections: between Eastern Marxism and Western analytic philosophy; between mathematics and computing; between center and periphery. Though an analytic philosopher himself, Wang became dissatisfied with the field, proposing that it traffics in “fictions” and “abstractions” that neither adequately described nor practically served the realities of human life. In the 1950s, he argued against the imagined universality and rule-boundedness of human reasoning, a central “fiction” of both logic and early artificial intelligence research. Wang drew from Marxism and materialism to argue instead that each person in fact reasons differently, according to the “history of [their] mind and body.” He turned to modern digital computers in hopes that they might create new practical uses for philosophical ideas, and because he believed their difference from human minds was epistemically powerful.