cugini@ICST-ECF.ARPA.UUCP (08/25/87)
> From: mckee%corwin.ccs.northeastern.edu@RELAY.CS.NET > Subject: Should AI be scientific? If yes, how? > > ....Besides science, the other significant field with aspirations toward > understanding reality is philosophy, which has even evolved a specialized > subfield, ontology, devoted to the question. Now I haven't studied > ontology, not because the question is unimportant, but because I > think philosophical methodology is fatally flawed, and incapable of > convincing me of the substance of any conclusions that it might > obtain. ...I think philosophers' methodology has kept them from > being as productive of useful understanding as they could have been. It's worth noting that the rest of McKee's message consists of nothing but philosophizing, with particular emphasis on epistemology and the philosophy of science. Just for instance, his claim, in passing, that it is verifiability that distinguishes the scientific method, simply echoes the logical positivist school of thought. No one doubts that there is a lot of silly philosophy out there, but simply to ask the questions like: "Why should we believe the results of a scientific inquiry more than those of an inquiry using non-scientific methods?" or, more fundamentally, "What constitutes the scientific method?" is already to begin to philosophize. These are, then, not properly scientific questions (under what microscope will you find and verify their answers?), but philosophic questions about science. The distinction, then is not between a) wooly-headed philosophers and b) hard-headed scientists, but rather between a) self-conscious philosophizing, which attempts to learn about and profit from 2000+ years of related efforts, and b) "naive" philosophizing, which disdains previous experience and usually winds up inventing positions originally propounded and discussed anywhere from 20-2000 years ago. John Cugini <Cugini@icst-ecf.arpa> ------