Computer Science, because of methodological and factual problems, does not quite conform to the well-established scheme of an empirical science. Such an anomaly is contrasted with examples drawn from the development of some classical branches of knowledge such as microbiology, thermodynamics, and quan-tum mechanics. A problematic situation has recently surfaced in so-called Artifi-cial Intelligence: its enormous success in applications is not backed up by a theo-retical understanding of the attendant software. A new line of research, named Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), has come into being and a brief sketch thereof is given.
Keywords: Computer science, Artificial Intelligence, Expainable Artificial Intelli-gence.