2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

B ETWEEN ENGINEERING, SCIENCE, AND PHILOSOPHY.
since it takes its lead from necessarily simplified models of intelligence in order to proceed
to their implementation as computer programs. This procedure has prompted some scien-
tists to raise the charge of “idealism” against AI—not by chance a philosophical term—be-
cause of its disregard of the empirical data. This remark, and regardless of the truth of the
objection, is extremely telling of the difficulty faced by Artificial Intelligence in its efforts
of scientific self-justification: the constraints imposed by its engineering-like component—
the necessity of keeping models simple so that programs can actually be written—exert a
pressure on the discipline that tends to pull it away from empirical science (psychology)
and move it closer to philosophy, albeit the latter is interpreted, most often, in a derogatory
sense.
The third difficulty is related to the first two as well, and it represent just another side
of the tension between the engineering and the scientific souls of AI. Artificial Intelligence
has often been accused by psychologists of performing “wild generalizations” in order to
keep its “theories” tractable and formalizable. In other words, psychologists of different
specializations and theoretical orientations have objected that even before it reaches the de-
sign phase, an in fact in order to reach it, AI has to abstract, from the outset, from all the
interesting psychological facts. Thus, its models are based on “ideal competencies” that are
so far from the real cases to bear no relevance to them. One of the most trenchant critiques
of this kind has been offered by John Marshall in a review of Marvin Minsky’s The Society
of Mind. 36 Marshall’s strategy is simple: he examines several of the ideas proposed by Min-
sky about memory, perception, etc., and in each instance he quotes the relevant psycholog-
ical literature by pointing out that the issue tackled by Minsky has already been addressed.
With the important difference that the psychological treatment of, say, memory, did in fact
thematize specific problems, extracted specific data, and proposed specific, testable, re-
peatable explanations instead of what he takes to be just vague intuitions on ill-defined sub-
35. Daniel Dennett, “Artificial Intelligence as Philosophy and as Psychology,” Brainstorms (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1978) 109-126. See also Daniel Dennett, “When Philosophers Encounter Artificial Intelligence,”
Daedalus, 117, 1 (1988) 283-295, for a defense of the engineeristic virtues of AI vs. its alleged
philosophical (in the negative sense) and scientific (in the strong sense) shortcomings.
36. John Marshall, “Close enough for AI?” Journal of Semantics, 5 , 169-173.
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