This paper continues a strain of intellectual complaint against the presumptions of certain kinds of formal semantics (the qualification is important) and their bad effects on those areas of artificial intelligence concerned with machine understanding of human language. After some discussion of the use of the term epistemology in artificial intelligence, the paper takes as a case study the various positions held by McDermott on these issues and concludes, reluctantly, that, although he has reversed himself on the issue, there was (...) no time at which he was right. (shrink)

This is a draft of the written version of comments on a paper by David Cole, presented orally at the American Philosophical Association Central Division meeting in New Orleans, 27 April 1990. Following the written comments are 2 appendices: One contains a letter to Cole updating these comments. The other is the handout from the oral presentation.

Machines are increasingly involved in decisions with ethical implications, which require ethical explanations. Current machine learning algorithms are ethically inscrutable, but not in a way very different from human behavior. This article looks at the role of rationality and reasoning in traditional ethical thought and in artificial intelligence, emphasizing the need for some explainability of actions. It then explores Neil Lawrence's embodiment factor as an insightful way of looking at the differences between human and machine intelligence, connecting it to the (...) theological understanding of embodiment, relationality, and personhood. Finally, it proposes the notion of artificial moral orthoses, which could provide ethical explanations for both artificial and human agents, as a more promising unifying approach to human and machine ethics. (shrink)