Android Epistemology [Hardcover]

Kenneth M. Ford (Editor), Clark Glymour (Editor), Patrick J. Hayes (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0262061848 | ISBN-13: 978-0262061841 | Publication Date: August 4, 1995 | Edition: 1

"Were they reborn into a modern university, Plato and Aristotle and Leibniz would most suitably take up appointments in the department of computer science."

Epistemology has traditionally been the study of human knowledge and rational change of human belief. Android epistemology is the exploration of the space of possible machines and their capacities for knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, desires, and for action in accord with their mental states. From the perspective of android epistemology, artificial intelligence and computational cognitive psychology form a unified endeavor: artificial intelligence explores any possible way of engineering machines with intelligent features, while cognitive psychology focuses on reverse engineering the most intelligent systems we know: us. The editors argue that contemporary android epistemology is the fruition of a long tradition in philosophical theories of knowledge and mind.

The sixteen essays by both computer scientists and philosophers collected in this volume include substantial contributions to android epistemology, as well as examinations, defenses, elaborations, and challenges to the very idea.

Contributors: Kalyan Shankar Basu. Margaret Boden. Selmer Bringsjord. Ronald L. Chrisley. Paul Churchland. Cary G. deBessonet. Ken Ford. James Gips. Clark Glymour. Antoni Gomila. Patrick J. Hayes. A. F. Umar Khan. Henry Kyburg. Marvin Minsky. Anatol Rapoport. Herbert Simon. Christian Stary. Lynn Andrea Stein.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Kenneth M. Ford is Founder and Director of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) in Pensacola.

Clark Glymour is Senior Research Scientist at IHMC and Alumni University Professor of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University.

Patrick J. Hayes is a Senior Research Scientist at IHMC.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 350 pages
• Publisher: AAAI Press; 1 edition (August 4, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262061848
• ISBN-13: 978-0262061841
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,784,814 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking but looking for a focus, November 11, 2000

By 

Wayne Iba (Santa Barbara, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Android Epistemology (Hardcover)

This edited volume contains articles from the Workshop on Human & Machine Cognition in 1991. I got this book while preparing an upper-division interdisciplinary course on Models of Mind. I liked the overall slant of the collection better than many of the other volumes I considered (e.g., Mind Design II, Haugeland; Philosophy of AI, Boden (one of the contributors to this volume)). Although the workshop happened in 1991, the papers are ostensibly more closely dated to the book's publication (1995). My complaint about the book (which applies to all the other books I've evaluated) is that it lacks the focus of laying out the philosophical issues related to mind and then considering computational models with repsect to those issues. That is not to say the individual papers do not address issues of Philosophy of Mind and proceed appropriately from there -- simply as an edited collection, it lacked the focus that would make it a good text for the seminar course I'm designing. There's much here to stimulate thinking and discussion.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not worth it, January 1, 2003

By 

"druid" (O'CONNOR, WA Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Android Epistemology (Hardcover)

I thought this book was awful. It offers very little original thought, and is full of wrongheaded and muddled thinking. I persisted through a fair bit of silliness, but I ultimately gave up after a chapter allegedly written by a mathematicatian got some basic combinatorics all wrong.

It probably deserves 1 star, but I've given it 2 out of respect for the fact that they've attempted to tackle such a difficult subject in the first place.