Remarks on Receiving the Covey Award

Abstract

My first remark on hearing that I was to receive the Covey Award (for “innovative research in the field of computing and philosophy”) was “Wow!”; the second, “That's great!”; and the third, “What a surprise!”. Perhaps those are not quite what the president of International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP) had in mind when he offered to read “some remarks” on my behalf at the presentation ceremony. And certainly something more is needed here..... But they did express my delight at hearing of IACAP's recognition of my research. When I started my interdisciplinary work in this field, Hilary Putnam's paper on functionalism had just appeared (1960). But I didn't know about it. What I did know about were Alan Turing's provocative papers inMind (1950) and (even more exciting, I thought) in the Philosophical Transactions (1952); Kenneth Craik's little book on cerebral models (1943); Margaret Masterman's work on machine translation, which resolved ambiguities by using a thesaurus (1957, 1962); and a handful of early AI programs. These included the personality-model Argus (Reitman 1963; Reitman et al. 1964), an intriguing computer model of neurosis (Colby 1963, 1964; Colby and Gilbert 1964), a model of emotionally biassed cognition (Abelson 1963), the draughts player that learnt to beat its programmer (Samuel 1959), and the General Problem Solver (Newell and Simon 1961). Last, but certainly not least, I had been spurred by George Miller's intoxicating manifesto for cognitive science, Plans and the Structure of Behavior (Miller et al. 1960). All of these related to longstanding philosophical questions that had bothered me since my high school days. They had led me to read medicine (intending a career in psychiatry) and also philosophy at Cambridge—where Masterman was an inspiring, if often infuriating, supervisor. They concerned the mind–body problem in general, and the nature of human freedom and psychopathology in particular. As an undergraduate, I had published a paper inMind that addressed such questions—but in a traditional manner (Boden 1959). For despite having found both the papers of Turing hugely exciting, and theMTwork highly ingenious, I couldn't yet see how to apply them to Philos. Technol. (2013) 26:333–339 DOI 10.1007/s13347-013-0115-x