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Next: Psychology. Up: COGNITIVE SCIENCE RESEARCH. Previous: Linguistics.

Philosophy.

Philosophers have long studied the nature of mind and language, and much recent work in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and epistemology has been informed by research in the other cognitive-science disciplines. In addition to the work by Putnam, Dennett, and Fodor mentioned earlier, the objections to the nature and possibility of success of artificial intelligence that have been raised by philosophers have served as research goals for artificial intelligence researchers--such criticisms must also be considered as part of cognitive science. The two major lines of criticism are those due to Hubert Dreyfus and John Searle. Dreyfus (1979) argued, on the basis of the phenomenological school of philosophy, that since computers do not have a (human) body, do not have (human) purposes or needs, and do not share the human cultural milieu, they will never be truly intelligent. Searle (1980) has argued that the Turing Test, although perhaps an indicator of the presence of intelligent behavior, fails as an indicator of the presence of intelligence. His ``Chinese Room Argument'' purports to show that a computer cannot understand natural language: Suppose that an English-speaking human who knew no Chinese was locked in a room and equipped with a program (written in English) for manipulating Chinese ideographs in such a way as to convince native Chinese speakers that they were communicating with another native speaker of Chinese. Such a person, according to Searle, would pass the Turing Test, yet (by hypothesis) would not understand Chinese.



William J. Rapaport
Fri Sep 6 15:53:47 EDT 1996