User:Hosszuka/Computer Epistemology (book)

The book Computer Epistemology by Tibor Vámos is an essay on relevant problems of epistemology (the theory of knowledge) which are related to computer science.

Contents
The book draws a continuous line between the earliest scientific approaches of epistemology, starting with the Greek Classics, and the recent practical and theoretical problems of computer modeling, and by that is obtained the appropriate application of computers for our present problems. Uncertainty, logic and language are the key issues of this road leading to some new aspects of cognitive psychology and unification of the different results for a modeling procedure.

This book is not a textbook but a critical survey of usual and advertised methods with an evaluation of them from the point of view of their applicability, reliability and limits. Probability, Bayesian, Dempster-Shafer, fuzzy and other approaches are treated in this way in uncertainty, different worlds' concepts, non-monotonic logic and other methods and views in logic. The emphasis in linguistics is put on the meta concept, and in cognitive applications on the pattern concept. Written mostly in an entertaining style, the book provides a palatable reading of a profound subject.

Cover
The drawing on the cover represents the 'brain in a vat' metaphor, described by Hilary Putnam. In an imagined situation, a brain is kept alive, out of the body, by artificial means. It is linked to a computer, thus enabling the experimenter to cause the person whose brain it is to have illusions. This illustrates the problems of the relations of our mind to reality and self, from which arise the questions of how we should think about these ambiguous relations and on how we should rely on computers. These form the subject of this book.