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C00002 00002	review[s88,jmc]		An other try at reviewing the question of Artificial Intelligence
C00004 00003	Why was an idea introduced when it was?
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review[s88,jmc]		An other try at reviewing the question of Artificial Intelligence

	
	Science is partly a social activity susceptible to study by the
methods of the social sciences and humanities, e.g. philosophy, history,
sociology, psychology and politics.  One can study how its development
depends on the social climate of the time, the institutions that support
research and the ideology of the researchers.  Different historians and
sociologists can frame and debate hypotheses about what caused one school
of thought to become prominent and another to decline.

	Sometimes such hypotheses don't involve the actual results of
experimental and theoretical work.  Thus the success of quantum mechanics
in overcoming classical views of physics can be explained in terms of
social trends in the first half of the twentieth century without involving
the results of (say) the Stern-Gerlach experiment.  It is easy to argue
about the sociological assumptions that one forgets the experiments and
theorems.

	Reading such discussions irritates scientists who tend to
imagine that the results of the experiments and the theorems proved
actually affect what theories come to be believed.
Why was an idea introduced when it was?

	Sometimes an idea is introduced as early as it reasonably
could be.  Some experimental result is achieved or some experimental
technique is discovered.  From my own experience, I can't see how
LISP could have been introduced ten years before it was, and even
five years would have been difficult.

	Other ideas seem to be substantially delayed.  It isn't clear why
circumscription wasn't discovered by me or someone else around 1960.  In
fact it isn't even clear why the current work in formalizing common sense
knowledge in logic couldn't have been done shortly after Frege developed
predicate calculus in 1879.  It doesn't seem that computers would really
have been required to provide motivation, and it also seems that Frege
made some attempts along those lines and would have been sympathetic to
others working in that direction.  However, most likely there is something
in scientific and philosophical ideology over the entire period between
1880 and 1960 that prevented serious work in that direction.  A historian,
philosopher or sociologist might profitably study the question.