2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

A RTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AS A NON- PHILOSOPHICAL PROJECT
of science, in other words, is no less metaphysical than its identification with the word of
God. Thus, the obliteration of the specificity of philosophy that the hypothesis of the Φ−Ψ
continuum performs at its constative level, as it were, is contradicted by its performative
aspects, to borrow Austin’s terminology, since it is overdetermined by a reductionist meta-
physics that contradicts its stated thesis.
What happens, instead, if, following the classical Aristotelian distinction, we keep
open the difference between science and philosophy that I have been insisting upon since
the beginning of this chapter (and of this work)? Artifical Intelligence, we said, can be seen
as a discipline that shares the content with philosophy but adds a different form. The mean-
ing of this claim varies with the scope of “content.” In the classical interpretation, the basic
assumption is that content of philosophy, say of Descartes’s, can be brought over to science
by a suitable change of methods because it is epistemologically equivalent to an scientific
hypothesis on a par with those used in empirical sciences. However, if the subject matter
of philosophy, its content, is more properly understood, as truth in the broadest sense, then
the meaning of the claim that philosophy has the same content as AI changes radically be-
cause, by forbidding any Dennett-like “continuum” between philosophy and psychology,
it forces us to reverse the sense of the relationship betweeen AI and philosophy.
Far from being a scientific reduction of raw ideas provided by philosophy, AI is an
attempt, and cannot be anything but the attempt to provide a metaphysics with non-philo-
sophical means. This, in short, is what it means to have the same content but a different
form. Artificial Intelligence is then a non-philosophy in the technical sense of determinate
negation suggested above: it stands in a determinated opposition to philosophy because it
receives from the former the full scope of its inquiry, but it rejects the philosophical “tac-
tics”, in Dennett’s words, i.e. the a-priori investigations that have always characterized the
philosophical demarche. Engineering techniques, i.e. the implementation of computer pro-
grams, fill up the gap that is thus left open: they are the right tools for the job, so to speak,
since they allow AI to answer its questions synthetically, instead of proceedeing a-priori.
Thus, the crucial relevance of engineering techniques within a generally non-engineering
context that I emphasized above, is explained. The production of artifacts is only second-
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