2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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P HILOSOPHY, NON-PHILOSOPHY, AND SCIENCE
jects. He concludes his review by saying: “Once Bob Dylan had troubles tuning his guitar.
After many tries he concluded: ‘This is close enough for folk music.’ Perhaps The Society
of Mind is close enough for AI.”
Daniel Dennett raises the same point in “Artificial Intelligence as Philosophy and as
Psychology,” and notices that professional psychologists often put together AI and philos-
ophy in their disdain, joining the two fields in the “armchair” category. That is, both AI
practitioners and philosophers alike enjoy indulging in armchair speculations with a “blithe
indifference to the hard-won data of the experimentalist.” 37 The “broad generalizations and
bold extrapolations” of Artificial Intelligence, in other words, betray its essential proximity
to the method of philosophy. The implicit consequence of all this is quite interesting: far
from being the crucial tool that brings an unprecedented degree of rigor to psychology, the
engineering aspect of AI requires an “unscientific” disregard for the gritty details that are
the essence of the experimental method. Engineering pulls AI, as it were, out of the scien-
tific field altogether, and brings it back to philosophy, the un-empirical discipline par ex-
cellence.
Yet, the relationship between AI and philosophy has never been easy. In fact, even the
presumption of similarity between the two fields sound pure blasphemy to most researchers
in the field. In a recent paper, Philip Agre provides a vivid illustration of how deep the anti-
philosophical feelings run (and especially ran) in the AI community. He remembers how,
in his days in graduate school in AI, his fellow students “would convene impromptu two
minutes hate sessions to compare notes on the futility and arrogance of philosophy. ‘They
have had two thousand years and look what they’ve accomplished.’ Now it’s our turn.’” 38
The totally unbridgeable distance was remarked over and over again, and, as Agre remarks,
was often expressed in a difference between “doing” and “Just talking.” Philosophy just
talks about things—as one incredulous student put it to him once he had learned of Agre’s
37. DanielDennett, “Artificial Intelligence as…,” 110.
38. Philip Agre, “The Soul Gained and Lost,” Stanford Humanities Review, 4, 2, 1995, 1. Agre underlines
how the strictly scientific borders of AI have been policed with great fervor. Only “the great old men”
were allowed to talk “about” the field and take trips into other disciplines, and often, if not always, in
different institutional settings.