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From: ladkin@kestrel.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: Technology Review article
Message-ID: <4664@kestrel.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 7-Feb-86 19:35:57 EST
Article-I.D.: kestrel.4664
Posted: Fri Feb  7 19:35:57 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 11-Feb-86 03:56:55 EST
References: <7500002@ada-uts.UUCP> <15030@rochester.UUCP>
Organization: Kestrel Institute, Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 17

In article <15030@rochester.UUCP>, lab@rochester.UUCP (Lab Manager) writes:
> "In 3000 years, Philosophy has still not lived up to its promises and
> there's no reason to think it ever will."

An interesting comment. Whenever a problem is solved in Philosophy,
it spawns a whole new field of specialists, and is no longer called
Philosophy. Witness Physics, which used to be called Natural
Philosophy. When Newton took over, it gradually became a new
subject. Witness our own subject, which arose out of the
attempts of Frege to provide a formal foundation for mathematical
reasoning, via Russell, Church, Curry, Kleene, Turing and
von Neumann. Much work in natural language understanding arises
from the work of Montague, and more recently speech act theory
is being used, from Grice, Searle and Vanderveken.
The list goes on, and so do I. Would that AI bear such glorious
fruit. I think it might.
Peter Ladkin