Aaron Sloman

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  Aaron Sloman commented on Sloman cas-teachshare

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  • 11 months ago

  

  Modified 12th June:- Inserted on slide 13 a critique of the claim of Fred Brooks in his 1994 ACM Award lecture: ’...Nevertheless, the scientist builds in order to study; the engineer studies in order to build. What is our Discipline? I submit that by any reasonable criterion the discipline we call ’computer science’ is in fact not a science but a synthetic, an engineering, discipline. We are concerned with making things, be they computers, algorithms, or software systems.’ This denial of computer science as science ignores a significant subset of what goes on in computer science research labs. A great deal of it is building in order to study -- e.g. cognition, learning, perception, motivation, development, in humans and other animals. The work cannot be done by people in other disciplines who don’t understand computation (information processing) of the kind presented in these slides. That’s why I, a philosopher, choose to work in a computer science department.
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  Aaron Sloman commented on What is science? (Can There Be a Science of Mind?) (Updated August 2010)

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  • 1 year ago

  

  Thanks for your comment. I apologise if my wording made it sound like a claim that extending ontologies is unique to science. I have never thought that and did not mean to write it. The main reason for emphasising ontology extension here is that many accounts of science ignore ontology extension and the problems of adding new concepts that cannot be defined in terms of old ones. Slide 8 implies that even young children who are not thought of as doing science extend their ontologies. Perhaps it would be useful to produce a more systematic presentation of ways in which science overlaps with and differs from other activities. In a different presentation ("Ontologies for baby animals and robots") I talk about ontology extension in young children, other animals, and future 'baby' robots: http://www.slideshare.net/asloman/ontologies-for-baby-animals-and-robots-from-baby-stuff-to-the-world-of-adult-science-developmental-ai-from-a-kantian-viewpoint However you are right to mention the particular importance of ontology extension in art forms, not referred to in my presentation.
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