2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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P HILOSOPHY, NON-PHILOSOPHY, AND SCIENCE
root of the conflict between AI and philosophy that is often couched in the terms of a false
opposition between the unreliable, “messy,” and vague descriptions provided by the latter
against the “precise,” “testable,” and “precise” theories of the former. In other words, the
gap between what philosophy feels as its most proper (be it the notion of consciousness as
Bewußtsein as historically transmitted by the Western “Continental” tradition or the qualia
at the center of the “semantic” discussions in the analytic philosophy of mind) and the ex-
planations provided by AI marks the distance between AI and philosophy, and the former
inadequacy to explain the latter’s phenomena.
In short, AI is a science that seems to be dragged constantly back to philosophy in the
opinion of a good numbers of its adepts and critics. On the other hand, since the “big head
start” enjoyed by philosophy did not help it much toward the resolution of problems con-
cerning the mind. it is clear that some radical difference between the two fields has to be
found. The need for “scientificity” pulls AI away from philosophy—the non-scientific dis-
cipline par excellence— but the efforts to provide a solid foundation of its content brings
it back toward it. As a result, AI finds itself exposed on both fronts: psychologists do not
recognize in its wild generalizations “tested” on biologically and psychologically implau-
sible artifacts anything similar to the hard data won on the field; philosophers, on the other
hand, tend to see in the models proposed by AI a naive reformulation of ideas that pretend
to ignore the centuries-long scrutiny philosophy has submitted them to.
Therefore, Artificial Intelligence cannot be just philosophy because of the use of an en-
gineering-like, empirical methodology that lacks necessity, and requires a necessary sim-
plification of the “subtle” insights provided by the philosophical method. But its content is
42. To put it differently: if it were a mathematical form of psychology, AI would have a very different relationship
with mathematics itself, because then the “gnawing doubts about whether the conceptions
of human life being formalized along the way are sufficiently subtle, accurate or socially responsible,”
in Agre’s words, would not only be allowed, and in fact encouraged and rewarded, at least as reflections
on the best mathematical ways to preserve some extra-mathematical intuition. Mathematization,
in other words, is not, or at least not always, synonymous with formalization, as Jean Petitot has underlined,
for example, in “Unità delle matematiche,” Enciclopedia Einaudi (Torino: Einaudi, 1982)
v15,1034-1085. For a further discussion of the necessary impoverishment caused by formalization and
the necessity to distinguish between formalization and precision, see Brian Cantwell Smith, The Rise
of Objects (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1996).