Probabilistic Graphical Models: Cognitive Science or Cognitive Technology?

This chapter is an attempt to make explicit the philosophical and cognitive perspective that the scientific work presented in Chapters 2–6 should be viewed from. This does not mean that the scientific material collected in this work needs a philosophical foundation in order to make sense or to be really interesting. The only aim of embedding scientific results within a philosophical framework is “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term” [275], which is what Wilfrid Sellars regarded as the general aim of philosophy. In other words, while proposing a philosophical reflection on the meaning of the technical results collected in the previous chapters, we do not think that the value of those results depends in any important way on their philosophical meaning. Our standpoint is rather that,

if

we ask how those results in AI “hang together” with other results in the cognitive sciences and with particular views advocated in the philosophy of mind,

then

the philosophical remarks contained in this chapter are the answer we give to that question. But the reader should keep in mind that our ‘philosophical’ reflections are more properly meant as a scientific contribution to philosophy, rather than a philosophical contribution to science, where the guiding idea is that science can take care of itself.