INTRODUCTION

This paper is written from the point of view of one who works in artificial intelligence (AI): the attempt to reproduce interesting and distinctive aspects of human behaviour with a computer, which, in my own case, means an interest in human language use.

There may seem little of immediate relevance to cognition or epistemology in that activity. And yet it hardly needs demonstration that AI, as an aspiration and in practice, has always been of interest to philosophers, even to those who may not accept the view that AI is, essentially, the pursuit of metaphysical goals by non-traditional means.

As to cognition in particular, it is also a commonplace nowadays, and at the basis of cognitive science, that the structures underlying AI programs are a guide to psychologists in their empirical investigations of cognition. That does not mean that AI researchers are in the business of cognition, nor that there is any direct inference from how a machine does a task, say translating a sentence from English to Chinese, to how a human does it. It is, however, suggestive, and may be the best intellectual model we currently have of how the task is done. So far, so well known and much discussed in the various literatures that make up cognitive science.