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From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,talk.philosophy.misc,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence
Keywords: Reference
Message-ID: <719@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 22 Nov 88 05:22:03 GMT
References: <484@soleil.UUCP> <1654@hp-sdd.HP.COM> <1908@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <151@feedme.UUCP>
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In article <151@feedme.UUCP> doug@feedme.UUCP (Doug Salot) writes:
>Machines will exhibit the salient properties of human intelligence.
>A fun book to read is Braitenberg's "Vehicles: Experiments in
>Synthetic Psychology."  Another is Edelman's "Neural Darwinism."
>Bury Descartes already.  Connectionist modeling and neurobiological
>research will bear fruit; why fight it?

To continue this rather constructive approach of suggesting good books
to read that bear on the subject, may I recommend

	Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things
	-- what categories reveal about the mind
	George Lakoff, 1987
	U of Chicago Press, ISBN 0-226-46803-8

I don't think the data he presents are quite as much of a challenge to
the traditional view of what a category is as he thinks, provided you
think of the traditional view as an attempt to characterise ``valid''
categories rather than actual cognition, just as classical logic is
an attempt to characterise valid arguments rather than what people
actually do.  As an account of what people do, it is of very great
interest for both AI camps, and

	it provides *evidence* for the proposition that non-human
	intelligences will not "naturally" use the same categories
	as humans.
	
As for connectionist modelling, it doesn't tell us one teeny tiny little
thing about the issues that Lakoff discusses that "classical AI" didn't.
Why pretend otherwise?  Case-based reasoning, now, ...