Prolegomena to a study of Hector-Neri Castañeda's influence on artificial intelligence
a survey and personal reflections
pp. 345-367
in: Francesco Orilia, William J. Rapaport (eds), Thought, language, and ontology, Berlin, Springer, 1998Abstract
In 1982,1 made the transition from being a professional philosopher to being a professional computer scientist and "intelligence artificer" (to use Daniel Dennett's happy term)—"professional" in the sense that that is now how I earn my living, though not in the sense that that is how I live my professional life—for my philosophical and artificial-intelligence (AI) research have dovetailed so well that I am hard pressed to say where one leaves off and the other begins. I remember Castañeda telling me at the time that he, too, felt that philosophy and AI were intimately related—that the importance of AI lay in the fact that it filled in—indeed, had to fill in—all the gaps left in abstract philosophical theories; it was in AI that all the "I's were dotted and "t's crossed, since AI programs had to be executable and could not leave anything to be specified at a later time. Thus, for Castañeda, AI would keep philosophers honest, while philosophy could provide AI with ideas and theories to be implemented.
