2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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P HILOSOPHY, NON-PHILOSOPHY, AND SCIENCE
The strategy at work shows quite clearly, I think, that the use of mathematics is actually
not essential to the implementation or even to the success of the critique. The goal is the
same, regardless of whether formal methods are used: the “scientific” status of a research
program is attacked with the clear intention to move the discipline at stake from the “fund-
able” sciences to the unworthy, un-scientific curiosities that only historian care about.
There is no doubt that certain attacks against Artificial Intelligence from philosophical
quarters have exploited the same strategy. The very first version of Hubert Dreyfus’s well-
known book—titled “Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence”— exhibits on its cover the op-
position hinted above. Dreyfus tries to prove that Artificial Intelligence is as scientific as
alchemy—that is, not very much— whereas it aspires to be (and sells itself as) a science as
“hard” as chemistry. 15 In such cases, both the attacker and the attacked share the value judg-
ment about “science” and struggle, by all means necessary, over whether such a coveted
label should, or should not, be awarded to the discipline. The background giving meaning
to these disputes, therefore, is constituted by the extremely charged opposition between
“science” and “not science.” The opposition is usually reinterpreted, implicitly at least, as
a very generic and ill-defined opposition between “scientific” vs. “unscientific” efforts,
with the usual understanding that whatever is “scientific” is worth pursuing and whatever
is “unscientific” is intellectual garbage in the worst cases and wishful self-deceptive think-
ing at best. “Alchemy” plays its role within this opposition: it represents the serious, but
radically misguided, efforts of generations after generations of self-deceived (and, conse-
quently, powerfully deceiving) researchers that could lead and actually led nowhere but to
an enormous waste of intellectual power and public money. “Chemistry,” on the other hand,
14. Seymour Papert, “One AI or Many?” Daedalus, 117, 1 (1988) 5, emphasis in the text. It should be emphasized
that Papert, in his reconstruction of the era, suggests the picture of two more or less equally
well established research programs (AI and Cybernetics) struggling around scarce resources, when, in
fact, the opposite is true: first, cybernetics was by far the more “solid” research program, since AI was
just at the beginning; and second, research funds were about to deluge the field under the form of military
research grants given by DARPA. It is important to keep these coordinates in mind to gain a better
appreciation of the markedly “rhetorical” character of Perceptrons.
15. Hubert Dreyfus, Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Corp, 1965). An expanded
version of this report became What Computers Can’t Do (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).