This theme concerns philosophical issues in the study of human and artificial intelligence and consciousness.
Mark Bishop, for example, co-ordinated a project that explored the work and
influence of John Searle. This project included collaboration with Herbert Simon,
Roger Penrose, John Taylor, Kevin Warwick, Terry Winograd, Stevan Harnad, John
Searle, Ned Block, John Haugeland and George Rey. The project resulted in the
book entitled, Views
into the Chinese Room,
Preston, J., & Bishop, J.M. (Oxford University Press, 2002).
Rodger Kibble is pursuing a line of research which starts out from a position of scepticism about the attribution of consciousness and intentionality to artificial agents, preferring to model agent interactions in terms of intersubjectively observable commitments. He has authored a series of papers aimed at pulling together some parallel strands in argumentation theory, multi-agent systems (MAS), and philosophy of language in order to elucidate a notion of linguistic commitment that can find applications in a computational semantics for natural language. This research is strongly influenced both by theories of "social commitment" developed by MAS researchers such as Singh, Parsons and McBurney, and by the philosopher Robert Brandom's "normative pragmatics". The long-term goal is to develop a framework which can underpin both natural dialogue modelling and multi-agent communication, as an alternative to the well-known BDI paradigm, which is explicitly based on the mentalistic assumption that artificial agents have states that can be naturally described as believing some proposition, or intending to carry out some action.