Philosophers! Help!

 

Previous philosophical discussion of certain conecpts has been helpful to AI. In this I include the Austin-Searle discussion of speech acts, Grice's discussion of conversational implicatures, various discussions of natural kinds, modal logic and the notion of philosophy as a science. Maybe some of the philosophical discussions of causality and counterfactuals will be useful for AI. In this paragraph I have chosen to be stingy with credit.

Philosophers could help artificial intelligence more than they have done if they would put some attention to some more detailed conceptual problems such as the following:

belief

What belief statements are useful?

how

What is the relation between naming an occurrence and its suboccurrences? He went to Boston. How? He drove to the airport, parked and took UA 34.

responsiveness

When is the answer to a question responsive? Thus ``Vladimir's wife's husband's telephone number'' is a true but not responsive answer to a request for Vladimir's telephone number.

useful causality

What causal statements are useful?

useful counterfactuals

What counterfactuals are useful and why? ``If another car had come over the hill when you passed, there would have been a head-on collision.''