Letters

Editor: Jerome Feldman's "Essay Concerning Robotic Understanding" (AI Magazine, Fall 1990) shows a remarkable naivete about humans. Although he admits to some limitations on human understanding (understanding/h): "We actually use understanding/h loosely, normally excluding infants, idiots and so on. We acknowledge that there are strong limitations on the extent to which we can convey understanding/h across barriers of gender, race and culture." If we are using understanding/h in Locke's sense, to mean reason, with all its eighteenth century freight, including the exclusion of women and blacks from the category of reasoning beings, there are, strangely enough, no barriers to this category for machines. After all, Boole later invented his logic to help mechanize the process of jurisprudence.