CONCEPT
The Inferential Question (Peirce 1887)
Peirce's 1887 formulation of the AI question — how much of thinking can the machine perform, and what part must remain with the living mind — posed about wooden logic machines, still unanswered a century and a half later.
In 1887, Peirce wrote in The American Journal of Psychology: "Precisely how much of the business of thinking a machine could possibly be made to perform, and what part of it must be left for the living mind, is a question not without conceivable practical importance." The sentence, occasioned by Allan Marquand's mechanical logic devices, is remarkable not merely for its prescience about computing — Peirce had already sketched designs for electrical logic circuits in an 1886 letter — but for its logical structure. Peirce does not ask whether machines can think. He asks how much of thinking they can perform, and what must remain with the living mind. The question is analytical, not metaphysical: it presupposes a division between kinds of thinking, operations that admit of mechanization and operations that do not. It is the founding question of the Peirce volume's analysis of AI.
