Abstract
Artificial Intelligence was born in 1956 as the off-spring of the newly-created cognitivist paradigm of cognition. As such, it inherited a strong philosophical legacy of functionalism, dualism, and positivism. This legacy found its strongest statement some 20 years later in the physical symbol systems hypothesis, a conjecture that deeply influenced the evolution of AI in subsequent years. Recent history has seen a swing away from the functionalism of classical AI toward an alternative position that re-asserts the primacy of embodiment, development, interaction, and, more recently, emotion in cognitive systems, focussing now more than ever on enactive models of cognition. Arguably, this swing represents a true paradigm shift in our thinking. However, the philosophical foundations of these approaches — phenomenology — entail some far-reaching ontological and epistemological commitments regarding the nature of a cognitive system, its reality, and the role of its interaction with its environment. The goal of this paper is to draw out the full philosophical implications of the phenomenological position that underpins the current paradigm shift towards enactive cognition.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Varela, F.J.: Whence perceptual meaning? A cartography of current ideas. In: Varela, F.J., Dupuy, J.-P. (eds.) Understanding Origins – Contemporary Views on the Origin of Life, Mind and Society. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, pp. 235–263. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (1992)
Winograd, T., Flores, F.: Understanding Computers and Cognition – A New Foundation for Design. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., Reading, Massachusetts (1986)
Shepard, R.N., Hurwitz, S.: Upward direction, mental rotation, and discrimination of left and right turns in maps. Cognition 18, 161–193 (1984)
Freeman, W.J., Núñez, R.: Restoring to cognition the forgotten primacy of action, intention and emotion. Journal of Consciousness Studies 6(11-12) ix–xix (1999)
Newell, A., Simon, H.A.: Computer science as empirical inquiry: Symbols and search. Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 19, 113–126 (1976)
Haugland, J.: Semantic engines: An introduction to mind design. In: Haugland, J. (ed.) Mind Design: Philosophy, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, pp. 1–34. Bradford Books, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1982)
Clark, A.: Mindware – An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science. Oxford University Press, New York (2001)
Maturana, H.: Biology of cognition. Research Report BCL 9.0, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois (1970)
Maturana, H.: The organization of the living: a theory of the living organization. Int. Journal of Man-Machine Studies 7(3), 313–332 (1975)
Maturana, H.R., Varela, F.J.: Autopoiesis and Cognition — The Realization of the Living. Boston Studies on the Philosophy of Science. D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland (1980)
Varela, F.: Principles of Biological Autonomy. Elsevier North Holland, New York (1979)
Maturana, H., Varela, F.: The Tree of Knowledge – The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. New Science Library, Boston & London (1987)
van Gelder, T., Port, R.F.: It’s about time: An overview of the dynamical approach to cognition. In: Port, R.F., van Gelder, T. (eds.) Mind as Motion – Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition, pp. 1–43. Bradford Books, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1995)
Granlund, G.H.: The complexity of vision. Signal Processing 74, 101–126 (1999)
Christensen, W.D., Hooker, C.A.: An interactivist-constructivist approach to intelligence: self-directed anticipative learning. Philosophical Psychology 13(1), 5–45 (2000)
Vernon, D.: The space of cognitive vision. In: Christensen, H.I., Nagel, H.-H. (eds.) Cognitive Vision Systems: Sampling the Spectrum of Approaches. LNCS, pp. 7–26. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Vernon, D.: Cognitive vision: The case for embodied perception. Image and Vision Computing, 1–14 (in press, 2007)
Anderson, J.R., Bothell, D., Byrne, M.D., Douglass, S., Lebiere, C., Qin, Y.: An integrated theory of the mind. Psychological Review 111(4), 1036–1060 (2004)
Vernon, D., Metta, G., Sandini, G.: A survey of artificial cognitive systems: Implications for the autonomous development of mental capabilities in computational agents. IEEE Transaction on Evolutionary Computation 11(1), 1–31 (2006)
Thelen, E.: Time-scale dynamics and the development of embodied cognition. In: Port, R.F., van Gelder, T. (eds.) Mind as Motion – Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition, pp. 69–100. Bradford Books, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1995)
Ziemke, T.: Are robots embodied? In: Balkenius, Z., Dautenhahn, K., Breazeal (eds.) Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics — Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems, Lund University Cognitive Studies, Lund, Sweden. vol. 85, pp. 75–83 (2001)
Ziemke, T.: What’s that thing called embodiment? In: Alterman, Kirsh (eds.) Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Lund University Cognitive Studies, pp. 1134–1139. Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Vernon, D., Furlong, D. (2007). Philosophical Foundations of AI. In: Lungarella, M., Iida, F., Bongard, J., Pfeifer, R. (eds) 50 Years of Artificial Intelligence. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4850. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77296-5_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77296-5_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-77295-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-77296-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)