Remarks on machines and rule-following. (English) Zbl 0842.00008

Haugeland, John

Casati, Roberto (ed.) et al., Philosophy and the cognitive sciences. Proceedings of the 16th international Wittgenstein symposium, 15-22 August 1993, Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria. Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky. Schriftenreihe der Wittgenstein-Gesellschaft. 21, 127-138 (1994).

The author deals with the question whether machines – “the sort of systems that is studied by artificial intelligence these days” (p. 127) – follow rules. He focusses his discussion on the notion of rule-following. He stresses (taking his concepts basically from Rawls and Searle) that even games like chess are governed not only by constitutive and regulative rules but also by a rule-following represented by “our own performance” depending on our “pertinent skills” to recognize, e.g., constitutive rules as such (p. 133). The author concludes that at least regarding this particular class of rules a machine cannot follow rules.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 0849.00032].

Reviewer: V.Peckhaus (Erlangen)

MSC:

00A30	Philosophy of mathematics
68T01	General topics in artificial intelligence

Keywords:

AI-machines; rule-following