LIBRI DI MARCO BUZZONI

The book contains different essays in honor of Vincenzo Fano, for his 60th birthday. They address several foundational issues in the philosophy and metaphysics of science, epistemology, history of science and philosophy, and the relation between philosophy, science, and art. The crucial aspect of the book is the constant dialogue between different forms of knowledge: from science to art, from philosophy to philology, from the classics to contemporary research. This also reflects the breadth of Fano’s philosophical research.

This paper replies to objections that have been raised against my operational-Kantian account of thought experiments by Fehige 2012 and 2013. Fehige also sketches an alternative Neo-Kantian account that utilizes Michael Friedman’s concept of a contingent and changeable a priori. To this I shall reply, first, that Fehige’s objections not only neglect some fundamental points I had made as regards the realizability of TEs, but also underestimate the principle of empiricism, which was rightly defended by Kant. Secondly, in opposition to what he states, my account does not differ in a very essential way from the empiricist solutions either as regards the power of TEs to predict something new about empirical reality, or as regards the criteria for telling apart good from bad TEs. Thirdly, in the light of the Kantian definition of the a priori, Friedman’s corresponding notion is contrary both to the spirit and to the letter of Kant’s philosophy; moreover, from a theoretical point of view, a material a priori is theoretically untenable since, counter to Friedman’s own intentions, it leads to relativism.

To bring to the fore some elements of truth both in the Turing Test and in Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment, we need to distinguish between two different senses of intentionality: a reflexive-transcendental sense and a positive-empirical one. In the first sense, intentionality is intimately connected with thought experimentation and denotes the capacity of the mind to assume as merely possible any actually given reality. Pace Searle, we have no idea as to how intentionality, in this transcendental sense, may be implemented not only in a Turing machine, but also in any robot, brain or living being produced by our scientific and technical intelligence. This is why, in case a machine passed the Turing Test, neither science nor philosophy can find an answer to the question whether the artificial life so produced, or the creature in Frankenstein’s novel, is a human being or a dangerous machine. However, such a choice could and should be made by assuming the supreme value of the human person and by applying the principle of precaution.