Customer Reviews

Android Epistemology

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.