Abstract

The development of Artificial Intelligence has led to many controversies of philosophical interest involving issues of logic, computer science, software engeneering. The paper goes through the main steps of this development, deals with their philosophical relevance and sketches the unsolved problems, with special emphasis on the AI models of semantic competence. Some criticisms raised to such models in AI, either in its “classical” or “neural networks” format, are examined. On the ground of the discussion of these criticisms, a view is proposed which avoids the inherited gap between the project of AI and naturalistic philosophy and suggests that filling the gap also provides a filter in order to select a definite form of naturalism