Over this evolution, distinctions between analytical truths (logical or conventional necessity) and empirical truths (contingent upon observation) were abolished ...

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        Contrasted with the cybernetic approaches were logic-based approaches to reasoning that 
        were part of a larger wave of Platonism that gained momentum in the 1930’s. Over this 
        evolution, distinctions between analytical truths (logical or conventional necessity) and 
        empirical truths (contingent upon observation) were abolished, such that "observation 
        terms" and notions of semantics external to notational systems were replaced by internal, 
        logical semantics. (One sees this in Rudolf Carnap’s trajectory). In this way, "semantic" 
        relations between the symbols in the notational systems and the material world became 
        syntacticized. One of the consequences of this turn was to isolate the mind and questions 
        of intelligence from the outside world, relegating the processes of perceiving and acting 
        to secondary, tertiary, and even inconsequential status. In symbolic AI it was held that 
        the really important problems were those of symbolic reasoning, that the sensors and 
        effectors of devices were peripheral to the central questions of mind. The distinction 
        between analog and digital processes was argued to be inessential, on the grounds that, in 
        principle, any analog process could be simulated in a digital computer. Even in arenas 
        like machine vision, the distal stimulus was quickly pixelized and reduced to a set of 
        features that could be logically manipulated. In theories of science, the earlier 
        conceptions of the scientific model that made clear distinctions between operations of 
        measurement and those of formal computation (e.g. von Helmholtz, Hertz’s commutation 
        diagram, Mach, Bridgman, Bohr) eventually gave way to accounts of science that claimed 
        that no observables are even needed (e.g. (Churchland, 1985)). 
      
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