Speaking Minds: Interviews with Twenty Eminent Cognitive Scientists

by Peter Baumgartner (Editor), Sabine Payr (Editor)

Few developments in the intellectual life of the past quarter-century have provoked more controversy than the attempt to engineer human-like intelligence by artificial means. Born of computer science, this effort has sparked a continuing debate among the psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers,and linguists who have pioneered--and criticized--artificial intelligence. Are there general principles, as some computer scientists had originally hoped, that would fully describe the activity of both animal and machine minds, just as aerodynamics accounts for the flight of birds and airplanes? In the twenty substantial interviews published here, leading researchers address this and other vexing questions in the field of cognitive science.

The interviewees include Patricia Smith Churchland (Take It Apart and See How It Runs), Paul M. Churchland (Neural Networks and Commonsense), Aaron V. Cicourel (Cognition and Cultural Belief), Daniel C. Dennett (In Defense of AI), Hubert L. Dreyfus (Cognitivism Abandoned), Jerry A. Fodor (The Folly of Simulation), John Haugeland (Farewell to GOFAI?), George Lakoff (Embodied Minds and Meanings), James L. McClelland (Toward a Pragmatic Connectionism), Allen Newell (The Serial Imperative), Stephen E. Palmer (Gestalt Psychology Redux), Hilary Putnam (Against the New Associationism), David E. Rumelhart (From Searching to Seeing), John R. Searle (Ontology Is the Question), Terrence J. Sejnowski (The Hardware Really Matters), Herbert A. Simon (Technology Is Not the Problem), Joseph Weizenbaum (The Myth of the Last Metaphor), Robert Wilensky (Why Play the Philosophy Game?), Terry A.Winograd (Computers and Social Values), and Lotfi A. Zadeh (The Albatross of Classical Logic). Speaking Minds can complement more traditional textbooks but can also stand alone as an introduction to the field.

Originally published in 1995.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

350 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

TWENTY PROVOCATIVE INTERVIEWS WITH TWENTY LEADERS IN THE FIELD

The editors explain in their Introduction to this 1995 book, "The idea for a collection of interviews with notable cognitive scientists originated as early as 1989... During our stay in Berkeley we had the invaluable opportunity to meet many scientists of different disciplines... We were deeply impressed by the commitment, intensity, and quality of the interdisciplinary discourse. This dynamic personal discussion seemed to us... much more concrete and powerful than the more general and often more moderate and balanced considerations in the written publications of the same scientists... The next best thing, we thought, would be a personal talk with each these scientists... With this goal in mind, we set out to organize the interviews for this book."

The book contains lengthy interviews with some of the "heavyweight" figures in the current Philosophy of Mind/Cognitive Science area: Patricia and Paul Churchland; Daniel Dennett; Jerry Fodor; George Lakoff; Hilary Putnam; John Searle; Terrence Sejnowski, etc.

After identifying the sciences that are important for cognitive science (Experimental psychology, linguistics, psychophysics, neuropsychology, neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, computational neuroscience, developmental psychology, and molecular biology), Patricia Churchland adds, "Philosophy, because we badly need to synthesize and theorize and ask the questions everyone else is either too embarrassed or too focused to ask." (Pg. 25-26)

John Searle argues, "today very few people defend strong Artificial Intelligence. Of course, they do not say that they have changed their mind, but they have. I do not hear as many extreme versions of strong Artificial Intelligence as I used to... One exciting thing about PDP [parallel distributed processing] models, I think, is not that they produce so much by way of positive results. The results are relatively modest. But much of their popularity derives from the fact that traditional Artificial Intelligence is a failure. It is the failure of traditional Artificial Intelligence rather than the positive successes of connectionism that has led to much of the popularity of the connectionist models. However... I am very sympathetic to the connectionist project, and I will be interested to see how far they can get." (Pg. 205) He adds, "if the question is whether consciousness is intrinsically computation, then the answer is that nothing is intrinsically computational; it is observer-relative. This now seems to me an obvious point. I should have seen it ten years ago, but I did not. It is devastating to any computational theory of the mind." (Pg. 210)

Joseph Weizenbaum observes, "About thirty years ago, in an article in Life magazine... Marvin Minsky made the now famous statement, which he has never taken back or modified (I heard him make it again last year; I think he is proud of it) that the brain is merely a meat machine. What is interesting... is that in English we have two words for what he calls 'meat': meat is dead, can be burned or eaten, can be thrown away; whereas flesh is living flesh, and a certain sense of dignity is associated with it... Why did he say 'meat machine' and not 'flesh machine'? It is a very deliberate choice of words that clearly testifies to a kind of disdain of the human being." (Pg. 259)

This book, though nearly thirty years old, remains of considerable value to anyone studying the philosophy of mind.

[Paul H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting snapshot of AI theory in the mid-1990s. Category mistakes from naive materialists abound, and Dreyfus is as right as ever (p. 72-73):

Artificial Intelligence is the heir to traditional, intellectualist, rationalist, idealist philosophy. That is what fascinates me; that they took up the tradition at almost exactly the moment when people in the Anglo-American world stopped believing in it. . . . what was at one time a philosophical position that needed defending got to be taken more and more for granted, and filtered down, so that in a way everybody just believed it. So that by the time Artificial Intelligence and cognitivists came along, it doesn't even seem to be an assumption anymore. . . . the early people in AI -- Newell and Simon and Minsky -- didn't even try to argue for this notion of [cognitivist] representations and rules but just assumed them. That's how philosophy works, I think; what seems to be a difficult philosophical position and needs arguing finally gets down to being accepted by every academic as just self-evident. That's the only reason I can think of why they should believe it.