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From: bnevin@CCH.BBN.COM ("Bruce E. Nevin")
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: epistemology of common sense
Message-ID: <8811140255.AA02084@BLOOM-BEACON.MIT.EDU>
Date: 7 Nov 88 16:21:08 GMT
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In AIList Digest for Monday, 7 Nov 1988 (Volume 8, Issue 121), in a
message dated 31 Oct 88 2154 PST on the topic "AI as CS and the
scientific epistemology of the common sense world", John McCarthy
<JMC@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> has persuasive words for colleagues who prefer
to limit their research to things that are amenable to tidy mathematical
formulation.

The audience of "neats" he was addressing should ignore this.  I want to
talk about aspects of common sense that seem even less tidy.  (But there
is hope, cf. references at the end.)

JMC> Intelligence can be studied
   | . . .
   | (3) through studying the tasks presented in the achievement of
   | goals in the common sense world.
   | . . .
   |                     I have left out sociology, because I think its
   | contribution will be peripheral.
   | . . .
   | AI is the third approach.  It proceeds mainly in computer science

There is more to common sense than the study of tasks and goals
specified in physical terms.  Much of common sense involves social
facts, not just physical facts.  A telltale of social facts is that they
are matters of convention.  Absent intelligent agents conforming to
them, they do not exist.

Restricted to physical facts, common sense concerns things like "I can't
put the blue pyramid in the box, it's already in there" or "I can't put
the lintel on yet, I need to move the second column closer to the
first."

Suppose we had an AI equipped with common sense defined solely in terms
of physical facts.  This is somewhat like the proverbial person who
knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.  

We deceive ourselves when we put labels on things like "road" or
"vehicle" or even "arch" in a knowledge base.  We have many expectations
and other associations with these terms that a knowledge base
lacks--unless we explicitly include those associations.  

If and when we do begin to include such associations (that line defines
my lane, this is the slow-speed lane, drive on the right--unless in
England or Sweden or . . . that joker's trying to pass me in the
breakdown lane . . .  this must be Boston . . . ) we are involved with
the sociology of knowledge.

Look at Erving Goffman on, say, presentation of self or interaction
rituals.  Look at W. Pearce (UMass Amherst) on communication rules and
rules for constituting the social order.  For starters.

An AI must be responsive as a member of the social order if it is to be
regarded as intelligent by humans.  It does not need the physiological
or psychological mechanisms of humans, but it does need to understand
their conventions.

Bruce Nevin
bn@bbn.com
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