2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

A RTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AS A NON- PHILOSOPHICAL PROJECT
but change in approach from the more general to the more specific: totally top-down for
philosophy, totally bottom-up for psychology, with AI resting somewhere in the middle:
AI can be as abstract and as “unempirical” as philosophy in the questions
uit attempts to answer, but at the same time, it should be as expplicit and as
particularistic in its models as phychology as its best. (113)
In other words, the substratum of the continuum is built on the identity of topic (and
more precisely, identity of a basic intuition), while the differentiation is provided by the dif-
ferent form (i.e the different methods/approaches). Thus, the “abstract” character of re-
search in AI is justified by postulating a higher level of similarity between philosophy and
science itself (under the guises of psychology). It is this similarity that allows AI to share
its content with philosophy without, however, being tainted with the latter’s fruitless “arm-
chair philosophizing.” To put it slightly differently: AI can have the same content of phi-
losophy with a different form because it is science itself that shares with it the same content
with a different form.
But this description is stuill inadequate to render the meaning and scope of Φ−Ψ con-
tinuum situation postulated by Dennett. Indeed, since the difference between philosophy
and psychology is provided by a gradient of “attention to empirical details,” and since such
a concern is, in itself, a (and perhaps the most typical) scientific preoccupation, it follows
that the continuum represents only a differentiation among different ways of doing science,
and not, as Dennett would have it, a bridge betwee science and philosophy. To put it differ-
ently:Dennett can build his bridge between science and philosophy because philosophy has
never been in the picture in the first place, having effectively being reduced to an “abstract”
form of scientific investigation in the traditional sense. We are not confronted, then, with a
difference between science and philosophy along the axis of same content/different form,
but rather with an identity between (abstract) science and (concrete) science where all the
content come from science and there is no philosophy left, either as content or as form.
This fact has some remarkable consequences for the status of Artificial Intelligence.
As I remarked at the end of the previous section, a solution to the question about AI identity
must preserve the distinctive characters of the three fields that we have seen it trodding up-
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