ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that some outmoded ideas, opinions, attitudes, and metaphors have influenced cognitive science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) with often insufficient argument. It presents some assumptions that prevail in much of our society and specifically in much of AI research. The chapter focuses on Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores’ description of the rationalistic tradition. Philosophy was founded as a “stand-alone” discipline, perhaps even as the “mother of all” other disciplines. In the struggles to impose Christianity on the Roman and medieval-European worlds, philosophy was banned as a stand-alone discipline with its own claims of truth but survived as a “handmaiden of theology” – assisting theologians in affairs of logic and abstract thought. The AI community seems to think that there is “good thinking” and there is “bad thinking” as done by strange irrational people like philosophers that do not agree with the AI community and religious fanatics.
