Online research in philosophy

Buchanan and Darden have provided compelling reasons why philosophers of science concerned with the nature of scientific discovery should be aware of current work in artificial intelligence. This paper contends that artificial intelligence is even more than a source of useful analogies for the philosophy of discovery: the two fields are linked by interfield connections between philosophy of science and cognitive psychology and between cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. Because the philosophy of discovery must pay attention to the psychology of practicing scientists, and because current cognitive psychology adopts a computational view of mind with AI providing the richest models of how the mind works, the philosophy of discovery must also concern itself with AI models of mental operations. The relevance of the artificial intelligence notion of a frame to the philosophy of discovery is briefly discussed.

The association of Wittgenstein’s name with the notion of artificial intelligence is bound to cause some surprise both to Wittgensteinians and to people interested in artificial intelligence. After all, Wittgenstein died in 1951 and the term artificial intelligence didn’t come into use until 1956 so that it seems unlikely that one could have anything to do with the other. However, establishing a connection between Wittgenstein and artificial intelligence is not as insuperable a problem as it might appear at first glance. While it is true that artificial intelligence as a quasi-distinct discipline is of recent vintage, some of its concerns, especially those of a philosophical nature, have been around for quite some time. At the birth of modern philosophy we find Descartes wondering whether it would be possible to create a machine that would be phenomenologically indistinguishable from..

One of the most remarkable developments of the past decade has been the attempt to marry phenomenology to cognitive science. Perhaps nothing else has so revitalized phenomenology, making it a topic of interest in the wider philosophical and scientific communities.[i] The reasoning behind this initiative is relatively straightforward. Cognitive science studies artificial and brain-based intelligence. But before we can speak of artificial intelligence, we must have some knowledge of natural intelligence, that is, understand our own cognitive functioning. Similarly, to understand how the brain functions, we need to grasp the cognitive processes that such functioning realizes. This, however, is precisely what phenomenology provides. It studies the cognitive acts through which we apprehend the world, observes the constitutive build-up of such acts, and attends to the temporal constitution at work in the genesis of every act, every intentional relation we have to the world. Its results, which have been accumulating since the beginning of the last century, thus, offer cognitive science a trove of information for its projects. As obvious as this conclusion appears, it is not immune to some fundamental objections. The chief of these is that phenomenology does not concern itself with the real, psychological subject, but rather with the “transcendental” subject. By virtue of the reduction that reveals it, this subject, as Husserl writes, “loses that which gives it the value of something real in the naively experienced, pre-given world; it loses its sense of being a soul of an animal organism which exists in a pre-given, spatial-temporal nature."[ii] As such, the transcendental subject no longer has its sense of being causally determined by this spatial-temporal nature. Given this, how can such a subject serve as a paradigm for understanding either artificial or organic, brain-based intelligence? As part of the world, the latter are causally determined structures, but the transcendental subject, as Husserl asserts, has to be “considered as absolute in itself and as existing for itself ’before’ all worldly being” (ibid., p..

This book deals with the major philosophical issues in the theoretical framework of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in particular and cognitive science in general.

Harry Collins interprets Hubert Dreyfus’s philosophy of embodiment as a criticism of all possible forms of artificial intelligence. I argue that this characterization is inaccurate and predicated upon a misunderstanding of the relevance of phenomenology for empirical scientific research.

This presentation offers a brief introduction to Heidegger in the context of artificial intelligence.

1. WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE? One of the fascinating aspects of the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is that the precise nature of its subject ..

It may seem strange to associate the name of Jan Patočka with artificial intelligence. Neither a mathematician nor a logician, the phenomenology he espoused, with its emphasis on lived experience, seems worlds apart from the formalism associated with the discipline. Yet, as I hope to show, the radicality and depth of Patočka’s thought is such that it casts a wide net. The reform of metaphysics that Patočka proposed in his asubjective phenomenology also affects artificial intelligence. It shows that what philosophers take as its most difficult, yet primary problem may well be the result of a category mistake.