A Preliminary Note

Evandro Agazzi has dealt with artificial intelligence, both from the critical and the philosophical point of view, in a few essays, the most salient of which are: “Alcune osservazioni sul problema dell’intelligenza artificiale” (Some observation on the problem of the artificial intelligence, 1967a) and “Operazionalita e

M.L.

University of Siena, Siena, Italy e-mail: mariano.bianca@unisi.it

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

M. Alai et al. (eds.), Science Between Truth and Ethical Responsibility, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-16369-7_7

intenzionalita: 1’anello mancante dell’intelligenza artificiale” (Operationality and intentionality: the missing link of the artificial intelligence, 1991). We say “salient” because the 1967a paper contains the first extensive critical treatment of the issue of artificial intelligence proposed by Agazzi, with particular insistence on intentionality as the decisive characteristic that distinguishes human intelli­gence from machine or artificial intelligence. In such a way he was anticipating of 15 years this thesis that is often credited to John Searle. Actually Agazzi had presented his paper in English at the “Wiener Memorial Meeting on the Idea of Control” held in Genoa in 1965, whose proceedings however never appeared. Therefore in 1967 he published an Italian translation of that paper, that was also reprinted in Agazzi (1978), and in addition presented his ideas in a shorter paper at the 21th National Congress of Philosophy (1967b). Agazzi had the opportunity of taking up again and expanding his ideas in the paper “Intentionality and artificial intelligence” presented at a meeting on “The Mind-Body Problem” organized by the International Academy of Philosophy of Science in 1980 and whose proceedings appeared as a special issue of Epistemologia (see Agazzi 1981). An Italian translation of this paper was later published (Agazzi 1987).

Agazzi’s treatment of artificial intelligence reflected also, from the very beginning, his strong focus on operations in scientific epistemology. Therefore he published a paper in which both intentionality and operationality are stressed as central concepts in the debate on artificial intelligence (Agazzi 1991) closing in such a way the circle of his discussion of this topic. The 1991 paper was newly reprinted as Agazzi (2010).

This brief historical reconstruction explains why, in the present contribution, quotations are taken only from Agazzi (1967a, 1991), that is from the initial and the final points of this trajectory. Indeed the 1967a seminal paper contains the priorities and originality of the whole treatment devoted by Agazzi to artificial intelligence, while the 1991 paper stresses that strict connection between inten­tionality and operationality that is the backbone of the whole reflection on human knowledge developed by Agazzi in his work, a connection whose significance is well exemplified in the treatment of artificial intelligence. Of course in Agazzi (1981) one finds a more systematic, detailed, analytically deepened and also the­matically enriched treatment of the issue, but the real novelties are rather linked with Agazzi’s investigations in the domain of logic, semantics, foundations of mathematics to which are specifically devoted other contributions contained in the present volume, so that we did not consider essential to pay them a particular attention.

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