CONCEPT
The Four-Year Gap
The fifty-month interval between Dewey's death on June 1, 1952 and the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop that coined the term artificial intelligence — a chasm that kept the philosophy of intelligence and the engineering of intelligence from encountering each other.
John Dewey died on June 1, 1952. Four years and two months later, at Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956, a group of mathematicians and engineers convened to launch the research program they called artificial intelligence. The gap between the philosopher of intelligence and the engineering of intelligence is four years. It is also a chasm. The two traditions that emerged — philosophical pragmatism with its participatory theory of knowledge, and computational cognitive science with its output-centered model of mind — have run in parallel for seven decades without fully encountering each other. The engineers built. The philosophers critiqued. Neither has reckoned with the other's central insight, and the AI transition now underway proceeds in the absence of the dialogue the gap has foreclosed.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The interval is not mere chronology. It is a conceptual separation. The Dartmouth organizers — John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, Claude