2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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P HILOSOPHY, NON-PHILOSOPHY, AND SCIENCE
4. Artificial Intelligence as a nonphilosophical
project
Seen from the inside, i.e. from the standpoint of its practitioners, AI is the discipline
that can finally provide a rigorous, scientific explanation of the most elusive phenomenon
ever to confront scientific progress: mind itself. A popular account of the field, for example,
calls it “the mind’s new science.” 43 Under this common interpretation, AI is the theoretical
effort striving to conquer the last topic still unexplained by Western science and philosophy.
Marvin Minsky, for example, called the “AI problem one of the hardest science has ever
undertaken.” 44 (some “ultimate frontier” rhetoric is far from absent in all popular and not
so popular discussions on the topic).
Once the scientific credentials of AI have been so established, the connection with
Western philosophy is easily built. It takes two seemingly different forms, according to the
intellectual locations of their supporters. Researchers within the field claim that their dis-
cipline is the “negation” of philosophy: AI has transformed the idle, “armchair” specula-
tions of two thousands years of philosophy into a serious, empirically-grounded scientific
effort that will finally unveil the mysteries of the mind. The opposition thus built rests on
two claims: (a) that AI is a science in the traditional sense, and mst importantly, (b) that phi-
losophy’s inquiry into the working of the mind are (or were) a hopelessly misguided (be-
cause a-priori) scientific effort. In a nutshell, this interpretation identifies the object of
traditional philosophy (or most of what goes under this name) as a narrowly construed phe-
nomenal field, e.g. the “mind.” The field could perhaps have been empirically investigated,
given the appropriate intellectual and social conditions, in a proper scientific (e.g. “empir-
ical”) way. Unfortunately, either because of its basic theoretical leanings or because the
times were not yet mature for real science, philosophy decided to use the wrong method-
43. For example by Howard Gardner in his well-known book: The Mind’s New Science: a History of the
Cognitive Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
44. from an interview contained in Gina Kolata, “How Can Computers Get Common Sense?” Science, 217
(1982).