gilbert@aimmi.UUCP (Gilbert Cockton) (03/04/87)
In article <3800004@nucsrl.UUCP> ragerj@nucsrl.UUCP (John Rager) writes: >Logic is a branch of mathematics. The last time I checked mathematics >was a science. Where did you check? We have no local index of official scientific subjects over here :-). Perhaps some US professor has mapped out the whole of knowledge and categorised it while we were all asleep :-). In English secondary education, the official policy is that Maths is NOT a science, as it does not rest on any empirical methods at all (empirical in the sense of observing the natural world, perhaps in a controlled experiment). Neither is applied maths a science, as the modelling process may involve abstracting intuitively and the return to the real problem domain also involves unobservable judgement. Whilst the only thing most people could need to know about epistemology is how to spell it, folk in AI need to get right to grips with it if their talk of 'Knowledge Representation/Elicitation' is to be anything more than one big amateur pose. Throw in some cognitive sociology and the faint-hearted will probably go back to chess games and tic-tac-toe (real everyday intelligence that) :-). -- Gilbert Cockton, Scottish HCI Centre, Ben Line Building, Edinburgh, EH1 1TN JANET: gilbert@uk.ac.hw.aimmi ARPA: gilbert%aimmi.hw.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk UUCP: ..!{backbone}!aimmi.hw.ac.uk!gilbert