Congratulations to Timothy Anderson, who successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on April 14th! His topic was "The Frame Problem: An Aristotelian/Thomistic Response," and his director was Professor Msgr. Robert Sokolowski, of the School of Philosophy at Catholic University.
Mr. Anderson was born in Washington, D.C. and was raised in McLean, Virginia. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Music from the Virginia Commonwealth University in 1995; a master’s degree in Music from the Ohio State University in 1998; a master’s degree in Computer Science from George Mason University in 2004; a master’s degree in Philosophy from George Mason University in 2015 and a master’s degree in Philosophy from The Catholic University of America in 2019. Mr. Anderson has been working as a software engineer for the last 20 years. He lives in McLean with his three children.
Dissertation Abstract:
The Frame Problem (TFP) is a long-standing problem in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cognitive science. It initially concerned the ability of a computer algorithm to determine both the effects and the non-effects of a proposed action. In the late 1960s, it was discovered that without a strategy to avoid the recursive search of irrelevant branches of logical inference, a planning algorithm might never terminate. As the search for such a strategy dragged on, however, AI researchers and others began wondering why humans do not face a similar impasse when planning ordinary actions.
Responding to TFP, philosopher Hubert Dreyfus contended that TFP rested on false assumptions about human action. On Dreyfus’s phenomenological view, ordinary human action does not involve logical inference but rather a prereflective “skilled coping.” Any attempt to model human action with logical inference, Dreyfus predicted, was doomed to fail.
In this study, I revise Dreyfus’s response in a way that (a) retains the strengths of his phenomenological insight into TFP while (b) according human reason a more central role in human action than Dreyfus allows. The traditions of Aristotelian and Thomistic thought figure centrally in my revision.
After laying out TFP and its history, I examine the phenomenological body of thought informing Dreyfus’s response to TFP and to AI in general. I consider Dreyfus’s intuition that embodiment is indispensable to humanlike intelligence by considering a similar argument made by Hans Jonas against cybernetics. For Jonas and contra Dreyfus, human rationality fulfills and even informs perception.
Following Jonas’s insight, I offer a novel response to TFP that restores reason to the center of human action. Drawing on recent Aristotelian essentialism, I ascribe some of the difficulty of TFP to its basis in modal essentialism. Turning to Thomistic psychology, I observe that the cogitative power allows for action that is spontaneous in the way Dreyfus describes but also pervaded by rationality. I examine the implications of the cogitative power for TFP by observing its role in the practical syllogism. I conclude by considering the implications of recent Large Language Model technologies for TFP.