Why Wittgenstein and Artificial Intelligence?

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) is widely regarded as one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth century. His influence has been deep and wide-ranging, extending well beyond philosophy. Alongside a lasting impact in areas where he wrote extensively (the philosophies of language, logic, mathematics, mind and psychology, as well as metaphysics, and the theory of knowledge), Wittgenstein's philosophy has continued to influence areas beyond his focus (e.g. aesthetics, ethics and jurisprudence). Many of the themes of his work bear – either directly, or indirectly – on issues that arise in (both scientific and commercial) attempts to produce artificial intelligence (AI).

The link between Wittgenstein and AI should perhaps not be a surprising one. During his life, Wittgenstein interacted with Alan Turing (1912–1954), considered by many to be the founder of AI as an area of inquiry: Turing attended Wittgenstein's 1939 lectures in Cambridge on the foundations of mathematics (Wittgenstein 1976: LFM; see also Copeland 2012, 32–34; and see Floyd 2019 for an account of what their mutual intellectual influence may have been). And years earlier, in the Blue Book of 1933, Wittgenstein had even discussed the central animating question of AI, ‘Is it possible for a machine to think?’ (Wittgenstein 1958: BB, 47).

There is therefore ample reason to suspect both that historical investigations of Wittgenstein's work and the context in which it was situated can reveal the intellectual landscape at the dawn of AI, and that philosophical engagement with his work might shed light on important issues in the theory and application of AI. The present collection touches on the former, historical variety of inquiry (see especially Proudfoot's contribution), but it focuses primarily on the latter, more philosophical project.

Why Now?

This collection is not the first work to explore the interaction between Wittgenstein and AI. However, the last concentrated look at the topic was published over a quarter of a century ago: Shanker's (1998) single-authored monograph, Wittgenstein's Remarks on the Foundations of AI. Since then, there have been significant advances in AI – most notably, the advent of big data and the use of deep neural networks for machine learning (ML), which underpin recent generative AI systems (such as ChatGPT, Dall-E and Midjourney) – as well as changes in Wittgenstein scholarship. So the time is ripe for bringing the two together afresh.