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.cb EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEMS OF COGNOLOGY


	One's opinion on how long it will take to achieve
human-level artificial intelligence depends partly on
how optimistic a personality he has but even more on what
problems he can see between the present state of our science
and this goal.  Unless one is convinced that the problems he
can see are all the important problems, he can only give
lower bounds on the time required to overcome them.
Since 1958 (see McCarthy 1959), I have seen the epistemological
problems as major obstacles to artificial intelligence, and
I have always been disappointed at the small number of people
who are working seriously on them.
Thus when Erik Sandewall and I announced a special issue of
the AI Journal devoted to these problems, we received too few
papers that were to the point to justify the special issue.

	The lack of work on the problems of epistemology
seems related to the fact that 95α% of the work in artificial
intelligence is engineering (trying to make a program with
specified performance) and only a5α% is science (studying
a natural phenomenon).  I think it should be about 50-50,
and therefore I am proposing to rename the subject %2cognology%1
- %3the science of intellectual processes and their relation
to the problems they solve%1.

	
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John McCarthy
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Computer Science Department
Stanford University
Stanford, California 94305

ARPANET: MCCARTHY@SU-AI
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