2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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P HILOSOPHY, NON-PHILOSOPHY, AND SCIENCE
on: engineering, philosophy, and science. Any efforts to reduce it to one of these three poles
would fall short of the desired solution, and , in particular, the effort to identify AI with a
straightforward scientific discipline, like psychology, would open the flanks to the usual
charges of “wild speculations,” “armchair philosophizing,” etc. But the postulation of a Φ−
Ψ continuum does precisely that: its reduction of philosophy to science blocks off any pos-
sibility of a reconciliation of the three poles that have to maintained in any efort toward a
correct solution to the problem of AI’s identity. Artificial Intelligence is not (partly) philos-
ophy any longer, since philosophy has disappeared from the picture. It is just a more “ab-
stract” form of science, and therefore open to all the criticisms that scientists, i.e.
psychologists, have moved against it unless it decides to relinquish its psychological and
philosophical claims and rest content with being a sub-field of engineering devoted to the
design of certain classes of software applications. And we have seen how difficult it is to
reconcile Artificial Intelligence, or at least the guidelines provided by its founding fathers,
with either branches of the alternative.
Moreover, the Φ−Ψ continuum hypothesis is extrememly implausible for philosophy it-
self. It is indeed questionable that Kant’s search, no matter how inspiring it may have
proved to psychologists, can be interpreted as an “elevated” form of psychology as Dennett
depicts it, or that, similarly, Descartes’s epistemology can be considered equivalent to a se-
ries of empirical hypothesis, as Haugeland seems to suggests. 47 Indeed, the gesture that re-
duces questions that were, for the mentioned philosophers, first and foremost metaphysical
inquiries into the “truth of being” to semi-abortive scientific investigations, is itself an in-
tegral part of a specific kind of metaphysics. The reduction of the truth of being to the truth
47. I cannot enter into a detailed discussion of Kant’s view of psychology and of the role of epistemology
within Descarte’s metaphysics. However, at least one text from the first Critique should be mentioned,
because it provides the framework of the argument that might be provided in favor of the rejection of
a reductionist interpretetation of Kant’s philosophy along Dennett’s lines. In the Architectonic of Pure
Reason, Kant asks: How are we to regard empirical psychology, which has always claimed its place in
metaphysics? […] I answer that it belongs where the proper (empirical) doctrine of nature belongs,
namely, by the side of applied philosophy, the a priori principles of which are contained in pure philosophy;
it is therefore so far connected with applied philosophy, though not to be confounded with it.
Empirical psychology is thus completely banished from the domain of metaphysics; it is indeed already
excluded by the very idea of the latter science.” See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason…,
664 (A848/B876). All emphasis except the last one are Kant’s.