Presupposing no familiarity with the technical concepts of either
philosophy or computing, this clear introduction reviews the
progress made in AI since the inception of the field in 1956.
Copeland goes on to analyze what those working in AI must achieve
before they can claim to have built a thinking machine and
appraises their prospects of succeeding.
There are clear introductions to connectionism and to the
language of thought hypothesis which weave together material from
philosophy, artificial intelligence and neuroscience. John Searle’s
attacks on AI and cognitive science are countered and close
attention is given to foundational issues, including the nature of
computation, Turing Machines, the Church-Turing Thesis and the
difference between classical symbol processing and parallel
distributed processing. The book also explores the possibility of
machines having free will and consciousness and concludes with a
discussion of in what sense the human brain may be a computer.
Table of Content
List of figures x
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
In outline 2
1 The beginnings of Artificial Intelligence: a historical sketch 4
2 Some dazzling exhibits 11
3 Can a machine think? 33
4 The symbol system hypothesis 58
5 A hard look at the facts 83
6 The curious case of the Chinese room 121
7 Freedom 140
8 Consciousness 163
9 Are we computers? 180
10 AI’s fresh start: parallel distributed processing 207
Epilogue 249
Notes 250
Blibliography 283
Index 299
About the author
Jack Copeland is Senior Lecturer in philosophy and logic at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He has published widely on logic, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, and is editor of Logic and Reality (1993).
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