As workers in the field fully understand, the phrase “artificial intelligence” is a terrible way to pick out the topic. Artificial intelligence is to be real intelligence, created by artifice. But artificial diamonds are not real diamonds created by artifice. They are fake diamonds. Real diamonds created in a laboratory are synthetic diamonds. And what is at issue is not intelligence—a phenomenon that admits of degrees and has its primary application to comparative assessments within the discursive community. It is really sapience that is at issue—something we language-users have and cats do not. So the issue would be better identified as “synthetic sapience” than “artificial intelligence.” But it is too late to get the label right.
Brandom, John Locke lecture 3 “Artificial Intelligence and Analytic Pragmatism”
What is “sapience,” and why is it restricted to language users? That seems to suggest a relationship with the ability to semantically represent states of affairs, which we have good reason to suspect digital computers can’t do.
Brandom doesn’t think computers can be sapient in the right sort of way either. Sapience, from what I gather, is a kind of facility with concepts: it is understanding in the sense of forming the right kinds of judgments or drawing the right inferences. Drawing inferences and making judgments is, on Brandom’s view, something special to language use; it is language all the way down. Brandom (and the entire Pittsburgh school) is willing to say things like: the cat can see a ball, but it can’t judge that its a ball.
Hmmm. That just seems like the conceptual/non-conceptual divide, then (at least if it’s going to make any sense). I think it’s right to say that the cat can see the ball (of course), and that it’s right to say that the cat can’t judge ‘there is a ball;’ cats don’t represent the world propositionally. Still, that certainly doesn’t seem to imply that the cat can’t make ANY inferences or judgments–apes (and crows) clearly seem to be able to reason causally (at least in a rudimentary fashion), and there’s good reason to suspect that that kind of reasoning involves at least some kind of inferential thinking. Interesting.