Aaron Sloman
Encyclopedia
Aaron Sloman is a philosopher and researcher on artificial intelligence
and cognitive science
. He is the author of several papers on philosophy, epistemology and artificial intelligence. He held the Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham
, and before that a chair with the same title at the University of Sussex
. He is now working with biologist Jackie Chappell on the evolution of intelligence and is Honorary Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at Birmingham.
), in what was then Southern Rhodesia
(now Zimbabwe
). Although Sloman describes himself as an Atheist, his parents were Lithuania
n Jews who emigrated to Southern Rhodesia around the turn of the century. He
went to school in Cape Town
between 1948 and 1953, then earned a degree in Mathematics and Physics at the University of Cape Town
in 1956, after which a Rhodes Scholarship
(from South African College School) took him to Oxford University (first Balliol College, and then St Antony's College). In Oxford, he became interested in philosophy
after a brief period studying mathematical logic
supervised by Hao Wang, eventually ending up with a DPhil (thesis entitled 'Knowing and Understanding' never published) in philosophy defending the ideas of Immanuel Kant
about the nature of mathematical knowledge as non-empirical
and non-analytic (completed in 1962).
(1962-4), after which he moved to Sussex University where he worked on philosophy of mind
, philosophy of science
, meta-ethics
, and various topics in epistemology. In 1969, he learnt about Artificial Intelligence
("AI") from Max Clowes, then a leading UK AI researcher in vision. As a result of this, he published a paper distinguishing 'Analogical Representations' from 'Fregean representations' and criticising the Logicist approach to AI as too narrow. It was presented at IJCAI in 1971, then reprinted in the Artificial Intelligence Journal
).
Subsequently, he was invited by Bernard Meltzer
to spend a year (1972–1973) in Edinburgh University where he met and worked with many leading AI researchers. When he went back to Sussex he helped to found what eventually grew into COGS, the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences. He managed the development team between 1980 and 1991.
During that period he published The Computer Revolution in Philosophy: Philosophy science and models of mind (which emphasised the importance of architectures) in 1978, and other papers on various aspects of philosophy and AI, including work on the analysis of 'ought' and 'better', on vision
on emotions in robots, on forms of representation and other topics. Much of his energy was devoted to developing new kinds of teaching materials based on POP-11
and Poplog
for students learning AI and Cognitive Science.
In 1991, after 27 years at Sussex, he was offered a research chair in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham
, where he started the Cognition and Affect project (later on the Free Open Source Poplog Portal) and is presently still on it. He officially retired in 2001, but continues working full time.
, Gottlob Frege
and Karl Popper
, and to a lesser extent by John Austin
, Gilbert Ryle
, R. M. Hare
(who, as his 'personal tutor' at Balliol College discussed meta-ethics with him), Imre Lakatos
and Ludwig Wittgenstein
. What he could learn from philosophers left large gaps, which he decided around 1970 research in Artificial Intelligence
might fill. E.g. Philosophy of Mind
could be transformed by testing ideas in working fragments of minds, and Philosophy of Mathematics
could be illuminated by trying to understand how a working robot could develop into a mathematician.
Much of his thinking about AI was influenced by Marvin Minsky
and despite his critique of logicism he also learnt much from John McCarthy
. His work on emotions can be seen as an elaboration of a paper on 'Emotional and motivational controls of cognition', written in the 1960s by Herbert Simon
. He disagrees with all of these on some topics, while agreeing on others.
, Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour
and European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence. Sussex University
awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Science in July 2006.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
and cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
. He is the author of several papers on philosophy, epistemology and artificial intelligence. He held the Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham
University of Birmingham
The University of Birmingham is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Birmingham Medical School and Mason Science College . Birmingham was the first Redbrick university to gain a charter and thus...
, and before that a chair with the same title at the University of Sussex
University of Sussex
The University of Sussex is an English public research university situated next to the East Sussex village of Falmer, within the city of Brighton and Hove. The University received its Royal Charter in August 1961....
. He is now working with biologist Jackie Chappell on the evolution of intelligence and is Honorary Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at Birmingham.
Origins and formative education
Sloman was born in 1936, in the town of Que Que (now called Kwe KweKwekwe
Kwekwe or Kwe Kwe , formerly spelt Que Que, is a city in central Zimbabwe. It is located in the centre of the country —roughly equidistant from Harare to the northeast and Bulawayo to the southwest. Its population stood at 47,607 in 1982, 75,425 in 1992 and the preliminary result of the 2002...
), in what was then Southern Rhodesia
Southern Rhodesia
Southern Rhodesia was the name of the British colony situated north of the Limpopo River and the Union of South Africa. From its independence in 1965 until its extinction in 1980, it was known as Rhodesia...
(now Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe is a landlocked country located in the southern part of the African continent, between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers. It is bordered by South Africa to the south, Botswana to the southwest, Zambia and a tip of Namibia to the northwest and Mozambique to the east. Zimbabwe has three...
). Although Sloman describes himself as an Atheist, his parents were Lithuania
Lithuania
Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...
n Jews who emigrated to Southern Rhodesia around the turn of the century. He
went to school in Cape Town
Cape Town
Cape Town is the second-most populous city in South Africa, and the provincial capital and primate city of the Western Cape. As the seat of the National Parliament, it is also the legislative capital of the country. It forms part of the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality...
between 1948 and 1953, then earned a degree in Mathematics and Physics at the University of Cape Town
University of Cape Town
The University of Cape Town is a public research university located in Cape Town in the Western Cape province of South Africa. UCT was founded in 1829 as the South African College, and is the oldest university in South Africa and the second oldest extant university in Africa.-History:The roots of...
in 1956, after which a Rhodes Scholarship
Rhodes Scholarship
The Rhodes Scholarship, named after Cecil Rhodes, is an international postgraduate award for study at the University of Oxford. It was the first large-scale programme of international scholarships, and is widely considered the "world's most prestigious scholarship" by many public sources such as...
(from South African College School) took him to Oxford University (first Balliol College, and then St Antony's College). In Oxford, he became interested in philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
after a brief period studying mathematical logic
Mathematical logic
Mathematical logic is a subfield of mathematics with close connections to foundations of mathematics, theoretical computer science and philosophical logic. The field includes both the mathematical study of logic and the applications of formal logic to other areas of mathematics...
supervised by Hao Wang, eventually ending up with a DPhil (thesis entitled 'Knowing and Understanding' never published) in philosophy defending the ideas of Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
about the nature of mathematical knowledge as non-empirical
Empirical
The word empirical denotes information gained by means of observation or experimentation. Empirical data are data produced by an experiment or observation....
and non-analytic (completed in 1962).
Jobs and research activities
His first job was teaching philosophy at the University of HullUniversity of Hull
The University of Hull, known informally as Hull University, is an English university, founded in 1927, located in Hull, a city in the East Riding of Yorkshire...
(1962-4), after which he moved to Sussex University where he worked on philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...
, philosophy of science
Philosophy of science
The philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, methods and implications of science. It is also concerned with the use and merit of science and sometimes overlaps metaphysics and epistemology by exploring whether scientific results are actually a study of truth...
, meta-ethics
Meta-ethics
In philosophy, meta-ethics is the branch of ethics that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, statements, attitudes, and judgments. Meta-ethics is one of the three branches of ethics generally recognized by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics. Ethical...
, and various topics in epistemology. In 1969, he learnt about Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
("AI") from Max Clowes, then a leading UK AI researcher in vision. As a result of this, he published a paper distinguishing 'Analogical Representations' from 'Fregean representations' and criticising the Logicist approach to AI as too narrow. It was presented at IJCAI in 1971, then reprinted in the Artificial Intelligence Journal
Artificial Intelligence (journal)
Artificial Intelligence is a scientific journal on artificial intelligence research. It was established in 1970 and is published by Elsevier. The journal is abstracted and indexed in Scopus and Science Citation Index. The 2009 Impact Factor for this journal is 3.036 and the 5-Year Impact Factor is...
).
Subsequently, he was invited by Bernard Meltzer
Bernard Meltzer
Bernard C. Meltzer was a United States radio host for several decades. His advice call-in show, "What's Your Problem?," aired from 1967 until the mid-1990s on stations WCAU-AM and WPEN-AM in Philadelphia, WOR-AM and WEVD-AM in New York and in national syndication on NBC Talknet.A city planner by...
to spend a year (1972–1973) in Edinburgh University where he met and worked with many leading AI researchers. When he went back to Sussex he helped to found what eventually grew into COGS, the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences. He managed the development team between 1980 and 1991.
During that period he published The Computer Revolution in Philosophy: Philosophy science and models of mind (which emphasised the importance of architectures) in 1978, and other papers on various aspects of philosophy and AI, including work on the analysis of 'ought' and 'better', on vision
Computer vision
Computer vision is a field that includes methods for acquiring, processing, analysing, and understanding images and, in general, high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical or symbolic information, e.g., in the forms of decisions...
on emotions in robots, on forms of representation and other topics. Much of his energy was devoted to developing new kinds of teaching materials based on POP-11
POP-11
POP-11 is a reflective, incrementally compiled programming language with many of the features of an interpreted language. It is the core language of the Poplog programming environment developed originally by the University of Sussex, and recently in the at the...
and Poplog
Poplog
Poplog is a powerful multi-language, multiparadigm, reflective, incrementally compiled software development environment, originally created in the UK for teaching and research in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sussex.-History:...
for students learning AI and Cognitive Science.
In 1991, after 27 years at Sussex, he was offered a research chair in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham
University of Birmingham
The University of Birmingham is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Birmingham Medical School and Mason Science College . Birmingham was the first Redbrick university to gain a charter and thus...
, where he started the Cognition and Affect project (later on the Free Open Source Poplog Portal) and is presently still on it. He officially retired in 2001, but continues working full time.
Influences
His philosophical ideas were deeply influenced by the writings of Immanuel KantImmanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
, Gottlob Frege
Gottlob Frege
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German mathematician, logician and philosopher. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern logic, and made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics. He is generally considered to be the father of analytic philosophy, for his writings on...
and Karl Popper
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...
, and to a lesser extent by John Austin
J. L. Austin
John Langshaw Austin was a British philosopher of language, born in Lancaster and educated at Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford University. Austin is widely associated with the concept of the speech act and the idea that speech is itself a form of action...
, Gilbert Ryle
Gilbert Ryle
Gilbert Ryle , was a British philosopher, a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers that shared Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical problems, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the...
, R. M. Hare
R. M. Hare
Richard Mervyn Hare was an English moral philosopher who held the post of White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1966 until 1983. He subsequently taught for a number of years at the University of Florida...
(who, as his 'personal tutor' at Balliol College discussed meta-ethics with him), Imre Lakatos
Imre Lakatos
Imre Lakatos was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its 'methodology of proofs and refutations' in its pre-axiomatic stages of development, and also for introducing the concept of the 'research programme' in his...
and Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
. What he could learn from philosophers left large gaps, which he decided around 1970 research in Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
might fill. E.g. Philosophy of Mind
Philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...
could be transformed by testing ideas in working fragments of minds, and Philosophy of Mathematics
Philosophy of mathematics
The philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the philosophical assumptions, foundations, and implications of mathematics. The aim of the philosophy of mathematics is to provide an account of the nature and methodology of mathematics and to understand the place of...
could be illuminated by trying to understand how a working robot could develop into a mathematician.
Much of his thinking about AI was influenced by Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky is an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence , co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy.-Biography:...
and despite his critique of logicism he also learnt much from John McCarthy
John McCarthy (computer scientist)
John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. He coined the term "artificial intelligence" , invented the Lisp programming language and was highly influential in the early development of AI.McCarthy also influenced other areas of computing such as time sharing systems...
. His work on emotions can be seen as an elaboration of a paper on 'Emotional and motivational controls of cognition', written in the 1960s by Herbert Simon
Herbert Simon
Herbert Alexander Simon was an American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist, and professor—most notably at Carnegie Mellon University—whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, computer science, public administration, economics,...
. He disagrees with all of these on some topics, while agreeing on others.
Recognition
He is a Fellow of Association for the Advancement of Artificial IntelligenceAssociation for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence or AAAI is an international, nonprofit, scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines...
, Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour
Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour
The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour or SSAISB or AISB is a nonprofit, scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behaviour and their simulation and embodiment in machines...
and European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence. Sussex University
awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Science in July 2006.
Selected publications
- A.Sloman, Knowing and Understanding: Relations between meaning and truth, meaning and necessary truth, meaning and synthetic necessary truth, Oxford University DPhil Thesis, 1962 (digitised 2007, Oxford Research Archive), also available with detailed table of contents in html here.
- A. Sloman, How to derive "Better" from "is", American Phil. Quarterly, 6, pp. 43–52, 1969.
- A.Sloman, Interactions between philosophy and AI: The role of intuition and non-logical reasoning in intelligence,Proc 2nd IJCAI, 1971, London. (Reprinted in 'Artificial Intelligence', vol 2, 3-4, pp 209–225, 1971, and in J.M. Nicholas, ed. Images, Perception, and knowledge, Dordrecht-Holland: Reidel. 1977.)
- A.Sloman, The Computer Revolution in Philosophy: Philosophy, science and models of mind, Harvester press and Humanities press, 1978. (Out of print but now online)
- A. Sloman and M. Croucher, 'Why robots will have emotions', Proc 7th IJCAI, 1981, pp. 197—202, Vancouver.
- A. Sloman, The structure of the space of possible minds, in The Mind and the Machine: philosophical aspects of Artificial Intelligence, Ed. S. Torrance, Ellis Horwood, 1984, Chichester
- A. Sloman, What enables a machine to understand?, in Proc 9th IJCAI, Los Angeles, pp. 995—1001, 1985
- Online presentations
- A. Sloman, Reference without causal links, Eds. J.B.H. du Boulay, D.Hogg and L.Steels, Advances in Artificial Intelligence - II, Dordrecht, North Holland, pp. 369—381, 1987
- A. Sloman, Did Searle attack strong strong or weak strong AI, Eds. A.G. Cohn and J.R. Thomas, Artificial Intelligence and Its Applications, John Wiley and Sons, 1986
- A. Sloman, On designing a visual system: Towards a Gibsonian computational model of vision, in Journal of Experimental and Theoretical AI, 1, 4, pp. 289—337, 1989
- A. Sloman and R.L. Chrisley, Virtual machines and consciousness, in Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10, 4-5, pp. 113—172, 2003.
- A. Sloman and J. Chappell, The Altricial-Precocial Spectrum for Robots, in Proceedings IJCAI'05, Edinburgh, pp. 1187—1192, 2005.