Thursday, September 20, 2007

can robots do science?

Can robots do science?

I've been recently thinking about pragmatism (see William James) and its implications for the field of robotics. In particular, I'm interested in the pragmatist treatment of truth. The down-to-earth view that reality is created from truths as opposed to the traditional (rationalistic) view that truths correspond to an external reality can be utilized to develop robust algorithms in the field of robotics. On a representational level, the philosophical doctrine that truths are deemed as 'true' only when they are 'useful' means that the type of world-state information that needs to be stored/processed/considered by a thinking machine is the information relevant to the action being considered.

I will elaborate on this in the near future...