Introduction
The invention of computers--based on the work of Alan Turing in the 1930s and John von Neumann in the 1950s--quickly gave rise to the notion of artificial intelligence, or AI, the claim that such nonhuman machines can exhibit intelligence because they mimic (or so its proponents claim) what humans do when they do things we regard as being evidence of intelligence.
From about the late 1960s to the middle of the 1980s there was a great deal of excitement and debate among philosophers, psychologists, learning theorists, and others concerning the possibility and status of AI. Mostly there were AI champions and AI detractors, with little middle ground. That controversy seems to have cooled of late, but new developments in the computer-engineering field may now take us past those earlier debates. (Agre & Chapman 1987)
Research in the provocatively named field of artificial intelligence (AI) evokes both spirited and divisive arguments from friends and foes alike. The......
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