Abstract
By following the arguments developed by Vygotsky and employing the cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) in addition to dialectical logic, this paper attempts to investigate the interaction between psychology and artificial intelligence (AI) to confront the epistemological and methodological challenges encountered in AI research. The paper proposes that AI is facing an epistemological and methodological crisis inherited from psychology based on dualist ontology. The roots of this crisis lie in the duality between rationalism and objectivism or in the mind-body rupture that has governed the production of scientific thought and the proliferation of approaches. In addition, by highlighting the sociohistorical conditions of AI, this paper investigates the historical characteristics of the shift of the crisis from psychology to AI. Additionally, we examine the epistemological and methodological roots of the main challenges encountered in AI research by noting that empiricism is the dominant tendency in the field. Empiricism gives rise to methodological and practical challenges, including challenges related to the emergence of meaning, abstraction, generalization, the emergence of symbols, concept formation, functional reflection of reality, and the emergence of higher psychological functions. Furthermore, through discussing attempts to formalize dialectical logic, the paper, based on contradiction formation, proposes a qualitative epistemological, methodological, and formal alternative by using a preliminary algorithmic model that grasps the formation of meaning as an essential ability for the qualitative reflection of reality and the emergence of other mental functions.
Highlights
Artificial intelligence has developed dramatically during the 21st century in almost all civil and military domains, resulting in a “threat” of human replacement
Numerous crucial challenges confront the development of artificial intelligence (AI), such as the challenges regarding the abilities of abstraction and generalization, the emergence of meanings/semantics and symbols, the functional reflection of reality, active learning and adaptation, and hardwarerelated problems
Artificial intelligence (AI) inherited the crisis in psychology, leading to the domination of mind-body duality reflected in empiricist epistemology and resulting in methodological and technical challenges
Summary
Artificial intelligence has developed dramatically during the 21st century in almost all civil and military domains, resulting in a “threat” of human replacement. Even for learning algorithms in the hybrid adaptive and emergent models (in training artificial neural networks), numerous problems exist, e.g., a long training period, the inability to engage in abstract learning and generalizing skills among contexts, difficulties in synthesizing (fusing) the elements, concept formation, the emergence of symbols and meanings, the grounding problem, and functional reflection (e.g., Ziemke and Sharkey’s, 2001; Guerin, 2008; Stojanov, 2009; Kober et al, 2013; Borghi and Cangelosi, 2014, Taniguchi et al, 2018; Froese and Taguchi, 2019) We maintain that these problems are the result of the empiricist understanding of knowledge, which stems from the gap produced by ontological duality. We discuss how, in contrast to formal and mechanistic approaches, dialectical logic and CHAT may provide answers to these problems
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