WHAT EXACTLY IS PHILOSOPHICAL
ENGINEERING?
I must confess that while I routinely engage in philosophi-
cal engineering, I don't yet have a philosophically rigorous
account of what it is I am doing. What is it to do philo-
sophical engineering, rather than philosophy of engineering,
exactly? There is also the general form of the question:
What is it to do philosophical X, rather than philosophy
of X? Once one tries in earnest to carefully answer these
questions, one is engaging in the philosophy of philosophi-
cal engineering (and in the general case, the philosophy of
philosophical X). One important feature that seems to be
necessary for philosophical X is that the key formalisms and
frameworks in philosophical X must be central to philosophy
itself. In the aforementioned example (engineering ethical
robots), the key formalisms have been produced by philoso-
phers, and, at least for the most part, it continues to be
philosophers and philosophers alone who rene and extend
them. As to a second necessary condition, it seems to me
that for philosophical X one or more of the core techniques
in philosophy must be central to the process. In the case
of my attempts to engineer story generation systems (see
note 1) able to automatically produce narrative involving
betrayal, the technique of philosophical analysis (propose a
denition, search for counter-examples, adjust the denition
if one is found, and iterate; a master of this technique was
Chisholm, e.g., see (Chisholm 1976)) was crucial to the at-
tempt to devise a rigorous denition of betrayal.
4. REFERENCES
Bringsjord, S., Arkoudas, K. & Bello, P. (2006), `Toward a
general logicist methodology for engineering ethically
correct robots', IEEE Intelligent Systems 21(4), 38{44.
Bringsjord, S. & Ferrucci, D. (2000), Articial Intelligence and
Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, a
Storytelling Machine, Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ.
Chisholm, R. (1976), Person and Object: A Metaphysical Study,
George Allen and Unwin, London, UK.
Pollock, J. (1995), Cognitive Carpentry: A Blueprint for How to
Build a Person, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Pollock, J. (2001), `Defasible reasoning with variable degrees of
justication', Articial Intelligence 133, 233{282.
Pollock, J. L. (1992), `How to reason defeasibly', Articial
Intelligence 57(1), 1{42.
URL: citeseer.ist.psu.edu/pollock92how.html
http://kryten.mm.rpi.edu/sb_philosohicalengineering.pdf
