2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

O N THE VARIOUS MEANINGS OF “X IS NOT A SCIENCE”
represents the paradigm of a well-built and methodologically sound enterprise that will
reap its efforts with well-grounded truths.
Moreover, another powerful opposition plays in the background of this querelle: the
distinction between the “blind” but fruitful proceedings of the sciences—always intent in
accumulating data but never too sure of what they are really doing—and the empty but
nonetheless ever so self-reflective demeanor of philosophy. A consequence of this opposi-
tion (deeply entrenched in our philosophical tradition) is that philosophy, endowed with an
all-encompassing gaze, is capable of licensing patents of respectability to any discipline
since its conceptual analysis can discern whether any given field can live up to its scientific
ambitions. It is no mystery that, nowadays at least, the sciences do not take too well on phi-
losophy’s self-appointed role, especially because of the practical relevance of any judgment
concerning “science” vs. “non-science” in the institutional setting. Debates like those initi-
ated by Dreyfus and Searle can be extremely useful, since they often force the contenders
to make explicit their arguments and to lay bare the deeply seated assumptions of their re-
spective fields. They come with a price, though: often, in their search for powerful argu-
ments against the perceived weaknesses of the opponent they leave less room than it would
be desired for the analytical examination of the adversary. For example, both Dreyfus’s crit-
icism of AI and AI’s criticism of Cybernetics take the form “What X can’t do, and why.”
Dreyfus’s book bears its strategy on its cover, and it would only have been fairer and more
descriptive of the book’s content (although, perhaps, less in the scientific style) if Minsky
and Papert had been similarly titled “What cybernetics can’t do.” By assuming such strat-
egies, however, both works assume as given what is not obvious at all: namely, (a) that the
discipline in question belongs to engineering since it has to do or produce something, and
(b) that its success will be measured by the functionality of its artifacts. One of the goals I
will take up in the next sections is precisely the discussion of such assumptions. In other
words, the question left unaddressed is “To which standards must AI be held up to?”. The
answer depends, in large part, upon the precise location of AI in the theoretical-practical
field. Only if Artificial Intelligence is an engineering discipline must it be judged by the
quality of its productions. Conversely, only if AI is a science must it be judged by the qual-
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