How philosophy, science and technologies studies, and feminist studies of technology can be of use for soft computing

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence has been one of the fields within Computer Science that has generated more interest and debates among philosophers. Later on, the most recent fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and Feminist Studies of Technology (FST) have also shown some interest in AI. In both cases most of the authors have been quite critical about the promises, practices and, particularly, the epistemological basis of Classical AI. The first part of the paper consists on an enumeration of the most important authors and their critiques to AI from Philosophy, STS studies and FST. Since Soft Computing entails important changes with respect to traditional AI approaches, the second part of the paper will be devoted to confront Soft Computing with the previous critiques and challenges to AI and to weight up to what extent Soft Computing could (or could not) answer differently than other AI approaches to these critiques and challenges. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.