Philosophical foundations of AI

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence was born in 1956 as the off-spring of the newly-created cognitivist paradigm of cognition. As such, it inherited a strong philosophical legacy of functionalism, dualism, and positivism. This legacy found its strongest statement some 20 years later in the physical symbol systems hypothesis, a conjecture that deeply influenced the evolution of AI in subsequent years. Recent history has seen a swing away from the functionalism of classical AI toward an alternative position that re-asserts the primacy of embodiment, development, interaction, and, more recently, emotion in cognitive systems, focussing now more than ever on enactive models of cognition. Arguably, this swing represents a true paradigm shift in our thinking. However, the philosophical foundations of these approaches - phenomenology - entail some far-reaching ontological and epistemological commitments regarding the nature of a cognitive system, its reality, and the role of its interaction with its environment. The goal of this paper is to draw out the full philosophical implications of the phenomenological position that underpins the current paradigm shift towards enactive cognition. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.