Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!haven!udel!princeton!phoenix!harnad
From: harnad@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Stevan Harnad)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Cog Sci Fi  (was: STRONG AND WEAK AI)
Summary: On theory and practice
Message-ID: <12143@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 12 Dec 89 05:05:20 GMT
References: <7302@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 27



mnr@daisy.learning.cs.cmu.edu (Marc Ringuette)
of Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI wrote:

> As a practicing roboticist, it's clear that when I consider an AI
> system I should not be asking the question "Is it grounded?" but rather
> the question "How interesting is it?", where _interest_ is positively
> correlated with _realism_...  I think it's up to you to give reasons
> why the AI community should care about the philosophical issue of
> _grounding_ rather than the practical issues of _interest_ and
> _realism_.

As a practicing roboticist, you can be interested in whatever you like.
But if you're doing real robotics, rather than virtual robotics, your
robots better be able to do whatever they do in the real world. To the
extent that symbol-crunching in a virtual world can actually be
translated into robotic performance in the real world, none of my
objections should worry you. To the extent it cannot, they
should. For my part, my interest is in a robot that can pass the
Total Turing Test; the symbol grounding problem for this enterprise
is empirical and methodological. It isn't and never has been
philosophical.
-- 
Stevan Harnad  Department of Psychology  Princeton University
harnad@confidence.princeton.edu       srh@flash.bellcore.com
harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu    harnad@pucc.bitnet    (609)-921-7771