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From: jeff@aiva.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: What is a methodology
Message-ID: <152@aiva.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 24-Aug-87 15:15:20 EDT
Article-I.D.: aiva.152
Posted: Mon Aug 24 15:15:20 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 26-Aug-87 04:40:32 EDT
References: <850@klipper.cs.vu.nl> <3692@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <866@klipper.cs.vu.nl>
Reply-To: jeff@uk.ac.ed.aiva (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: Dept. of AI, Univ. of Edinburgh, UK
Lines: 28

In article <866@klipper.cs.vu.nl> biep@cs.vu.nl (J. A. "Biep" Durieux) writes:

>1) I think I have good reasons to keep playing the devil's advocate. Not
>	that I don't believe scientific behaviour is creative, but my
>	current task is to build a system in which actors (say robots)
>	solve problems and make plans.

You agree that science is creative now, and presumably would agree that
we can solve problems and make plans.  Therefore, you should agree that
the ability to automate science (which we don't yet have) is not
necessary for solving problems and making plans, and hence that your
robot system can be built without it.

So you don't need automatic science even for human-level performance,
much less for something like Rodney Brooks' "robot insects".  But they
would also solve problems and make plans.

>2) At the moment scientific behaviour is certainly creative, as (as I
>	have said) "philosophers aren't ready yet". You may hold they
>	never will be, and I don't disagree beforehand.

But it's not beforehand as far as philosophy is concerned.  There have
been attempts to develop an inductive logic, effectively to do science
automatically, and they have failed.  We can't even do deduction (as in
automatic theorem proving) fully automatically.  Mathematics is still
"creative" and likely to remain so.

-- Jeff