Summary

This collection of Margaret Boden's essays written between 1982 and 1988 focuses on the relevance of artificial intelligence to psychology. With her usual clarity and eye for the key role that each discipline plays in the science of the mind, Boden ties the essays together in a thorough synoptic overview. She outlines the various approaches, from Babbage's contributions, through the work of Turing and von Neumann, to the latest theories of parallel processing, and the questions that researchers in AI and psychology must ask to ascertain if there might be a discipline termed computational psychology. Many theoretical psychologists today believe that the science of artificial intelligence can include all of the phenomena generated by the human mind. This functionalist approach views the mind as a representational system and psychology as the study of the various computational processes whereby mental representations are constructed, organized, and interpreted. Disagreements abound, however, about how various psychological phenomena can be explained in computational terms; there is disagreement, too, about which AI concepts and which of the computer-modeling methodologies will prove most useful from the psychologist's point of view. All of these issues are raised and clearly investigated here. The essays include Fashions of Mind; Is Computational Psychology Constructivist? Does Artificial Intelligence Need Artificial Brains? Intentionality and Physical Systems; Escaping from the Chinese Room; Is Equilibration Important? Artificial Intelligence and Biological Intelligence. Educational Implications of Artificial Intelligence.Artificial Intelligence in Psychology is included in the series Explorations in Cognitive Science, A Bradford Book