From what I understand (someone correct me if I am wrong), the syntactical approach in AI has its roots in classical analytic philosophy, as in Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica. The idea isto replace ordinary language with a perfect language composed of clear, simple concepts that would describe all truth and reality in a completely precise manner.<p>Russell's student Wittgenstein originally supported this approach, but later demolished it in his book Philosophical Investigations. He showed that any useful language would be imperfect.<p>It seems to me that the fact the machine learning approach is succeeding where syntactical AI failed helps demonstrate Wittgenstein was right.