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C00002 00002	cogsci[w86,jmc]		Review of "The Mind's New Science" by Howard Gardner
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cogsci[w86,jmc]		Review of "The Mind's New Science" by Howard Gardner

	Howard Gardner is a psychologist at the Harvard School of Education.
The book describes ``cognitive science'', which he identifies as made
up from the subdisciplines of philosophy, psychology, AI, linguistics,
neurophysiology and anthropology and having an increasingly unified
set of problems and methods.  I want to review the book from the
standpoint of artificial intelligence.

	My main problem with the book is that it doesn't grant sufficient
autonomy to AI.  In the view of many AI scientists, including myself,
AI has a mathematical core.  It studies the relations between a
goal-seeking system and the world in which it acts.  It is particularly
concerned with the relation between the characteristics of the world and
the strategies required to achieve goals in it.  In our view, there is
much to be discovered about these relations that is entirely independent
of whether the goal seeker is a man, a dog, a Martian or a computer
program.  The nature of our actual world enters more fundamentally
in terms of the availability of information required to achieve goals.