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From: rhh@research.att.com (Ron Hardin <9289-11216> 0112110)
Subject: Re: NEW: Does AI make philosophy obsolete?
Message-ID: <DEJA50.4rK@research.att.com>
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ
References: <42k782$atm@Venus.mcs.com> <42ko7k$h6q@mp.cs.niu.edu> <JMC.95Sep6125357@Steam.stanford.edu>
Date: Thu, 7 Sep 1995 11:48:36 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.ai:33193 sci.cognitive:9453 sci.psychology.theory:580

John McCarthy writes:
>I do not think AI is yet ready to make much other philosophy obsolete.
>However, philosophers concerned with epistemology neglect the AI
>problem at the peril of being irrelevant to the problems they are
>studying.
>
>Specifically, they need to study how knowledge is obtained in detail
>and not with their customary extremely broad brush.

You are thinking of philosophy as positivism, which has been
pretty dead in America since the late 50s.  (Became AI?)

Look at the talents of Austin or Cavell, their ear for thinking up telling
contexts to straighten something out - and say how thinking of
building a robot would have helped.

AI is stuck with picturing a process and cannot think its way
out of it.

(If everything is a process, what do we have the word for?)

Cavell writes somewhere about replacing the village idiot with
the village explainer.   That's a move within philosophy, and not within AI.

Maybe AI can explain the peace process; I've always wondered about it.
