Review of Philosophical Logic and Artificial Intelligence

The papers presented here offer great contrast to the usual philosophical discussions. They are rigorous treatments of philosophical problems that are fully informed about research in artificial intelligence, and are directly concerned with the specific logical and epistemological issues that arise in attempting to automate reasoning and represent knowledge. Each one speaks directly to the concerns of some subfield of AI, in language intelligible to both philosophy and AI. The relevance of these philosophical articles to current AI thinking has a simple reason: each of the eight authors is a prominent researcher in AI or computer science. Only two (Thomason and Israel) received formal training as philosophers. Yet, as Thomason stresses, the work described in these papers represents research in philosophical logic. Thomason’s introductory article does not attempt to summarize the six principal papers of the collection, but instead examines something of the relationships between traditional work in logic and the new work in AI. He argues that while many of the problems addressed by the new work are entirely in line with the traditional concerns of logic as studied by philosophers, linguists, and mathematicians, it is the new methods offered by AI that provide the new work with a “competitive advantage.” To quote again from the introduction: