...bulldog)

Progress in AI may extinguish some philosophies, but don't stand on one foot.

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...relevant.

Compare the treatment of counterfactual conditional sentences in CostelloMcC99 with that in [Lewis 1973].

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...[McCarthy 1999]

Hilary Putnam [Putnam 1975] discusses two notions concerning meaning proposed by previous philosophers which he finds inadequate. These are

(I) That knowing the meaning of a term is just a matter of being in a certain ``psychological state'' (in the sense of ``psychological state'' in which states of memory and psychological dispositions are ``psychological states''; no one thought that knowing the meaning of a word was a continuous state of consciousness, of course.)

(II) That the meaning of a term (in the sense of ``intension'') determines its extension (in the sense that sameness of intension entails sameness of extension).

Suppose Putnam is right in his criticism of the general correctness of (I) and (II). His own ideas are more elaborate.

It may be convenient for a robot to work mostly in contexts within a larger context in which (I) and (II) (or something even simpler) hold. However, the same robot, if it is to have human level intelligence, must be able to transcend when it has to work in contexts to which Putnam's criticisms of the assumptions of apply.

It is interesting, but perhaps not necessary for AI at first, to characterize those contexts in which (I) and (II) are correct.

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...thesis.

First order logic isn't the best way of expressing all that can be expressed any more than Turing machines are the best way of expressing computations. However, with set theory, what can be expressed in stronger systems can apparently also be expressed in first order logic.

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