Book review: Made-Up Minds: A Constructivist Approach to Artificial Intelligence By Gary Drescher (MIT Press, 1991)

One of the key issues in cognitive development is discovering how infants come to have a representation of the external world they live in; a representation which will serve both as the framework around which to hang and organize sensory input, as well as a tool for understanding and planning external events which don't immediately involve sensations. More generally, it can be argued that any adaptive learning system must also face the task of generating a representation of its environment and establishing the constraints to guide its interaction with this environment. In psychology, two extreme positions have been historically championed: empiricism and nativism. Advocates of the later would argue that the child is initially born with no representational system and that it builds up such a system guided by practicce and experience with sensory input. Advocates of the former, however, would argue that raw sensory input is far too chaotic for any meaningful systematicity to be extracted from it. They would therefore claim that in order to interpret the world the child must have a fully developed innate representational system ready to cope with any conceivable situation. Made-up Minds is the account of Gary Drescher's attempt to implement a more moderate view first put forward by Kant and later adopted by the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget: that of constructivism.