Speaking Minds

Few developments in the intellectual life of the past quarter-century have provoked more controversy than the attempt to engineer humanlike intelligence by artificial means. Born of computer science, this effort has sparked a continuing debate among the psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, and linguists who have pioneered - and criticized - Artificial Intelligence.

Are there general principles, as some computer scientists had originally hoped, that would fully describe the activity of both animal and machine minds, just as aerodynamics accounts for the flight of birds and airplanes? Twenty leading researchers address this and other vexing questions in the fields that make up cognitive science.