2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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P HILOSOPHY, NON-PHILOSOPHY, AND SCIENCE
The question I would like to ask is: “how do you who have experienced an interaction
with CHESS or SHRDLU relate to your experience?” Or, in other words, “Which kind of
experience do you think you have just had?”
Many answers are possible. For example, you might consider your experience similar
to the one you might have in a car dealership, when the car salesman shows you a new mod-
el of a car, praises its virtues and eventually invites you to take it out for a test drive. That
is, is you just had the experience of interacting with an artifact, tested its functions, related
them to your needs and, finally, assessed your (typically, financial) judgment. In short, you
would consider CHESS and SHRDLU from the point of view of engineering. If this is the
case, then you might fairly ask: are there artifact equivalent to automobiles in sight in the
AI field? Is there anything as reliable, universal, robust, already available, or at least in
sight? And, more importantly, which kind of artifact would that be?
Alternatively, you might consider your experience similar to the one you might have
when observing, from behind a one-way glass, some children playing in an experimental
preschool class. The expert (typically, a psychologist) observes the children working
around a puzzle, or building a tower out of wooden blocks, and explains to you what is be-
hind their actions, why they act the way they act, why they stumble the way they do, etc.
In short, you had a learning experience: you just learned something about the way children
think, build, etc.. If this is the case, you might ask: what do we learn from CHESS and
SHRDLU? In particular, are we learning something about us (e.g. us human being)? If so:
what are we learning, exactly? Are we learning what people actually do (or how people ac-
tually function) when they speak or play chess? (but then it is a machine that play chess and
speaks English. How do we its performance relate to humans?).
Alternatively, you might consider your experience similar to the one you might have
if, for example, you were witnessing Socrates interrogating Ion on the art of playing music.
The expert, a philosopher, interrogates a practitioner about his trade and points out its de-
fining characteristics for the benefit of the observers who learn what it means to play music,
e.g. what is the essence of the musical craft. Similarly, in this occasion you are learning