Note: the speakers below
are completely fictitious are not meant to resemble
any person, living or dead. Fortunately all of this is changing,
and cognitive science has a hope of actually becoming a field
in its own right.
AI
Philosopher: "You people are playing with notions like
concept and meaning as though you invented them.
We've been dealing with this stuff for more than 2000 years; you might
benefit by reading something so you don't re-invent the wheel.
And frankly you seem a bit too cocky to me.
Programs that 'understand' natural language? Give me a break."
Psychologist: "I'll be blunt; I don't understand what you people
are 'modeling'. Where's your data? You'd benefit by doing some
experiments on real people so you'd have some way of knowing
whether your 'models' are on the right track. As for as I can
tell, all this talk of
'cognitive modeling' is just a way to dress up engineering, which
is fine, but please don't pretend it's cognitive science."
Philosophy of mind
AI worker: "To be honest, I don't know how to make sense out of
what you people are saying. I mean, half the time I don't have a clue
how I'd take your ideas and turn them into an algorithm. What good
is all this if we can't use it to write programs so we can test whether
it makes any sense? There's a place for the humanities, but not in
cognitive science, please."
Psychologist: "All this sounds very nice (when I can
understand it), but isn't it all just
a bunch of armchair speculation? You'd be a lot better off basing it on
some real empirical research, that is, if what you're claiming
is testable at all, which I doubt. And another thing; can't you
bring some transparencies when you give a talk? I'm used to looking
at text and graphics."
Psychology
AI worker: "It's all well and good to spend your time in the lab
gathering data. I have lots of respect for real hard numbers. But
most of the time your results are things I already pretty much knew were
true. We really don't need your help to build our models.
There's plenty about intelligence we already know that's crying out
to be modeled. And the quantitative models can wait till we solve the more
interesting qualitative stuff. And where are your theories anyway?
You spend 95% of your time gathering data and doing statistics on it, but
what about an explanation for all this?"
Philosopher: "I know you people would like the study of cognition
to be a real empirical science like physics, but you seem to spend all
your time focusing on trivia, like how many milliseconds it takes
people to push a button in response to some kind of image on a computer
screen. What about the big questions? And how can you do your experiments
in an intellectual vacuum? Do you really begin to understand all the
hidden assumptions behind what you're doing?"
