In the fall of 1985 Carnegie Mellon University established a Department
of Philosophy. The focus of the department is logic broadly conceived,
philos- ophy of science, in particular of the social sciences, and
linguistics. To mark the inauguration of the department, a daylong
celebration was held on April 5, 1986. This celebration consisted of two
keynote addresses by Patrick Sup- pes and Thomas Schwartz, seminars
directed by members of the department, and a panel discussion on the
computational model of mind moderated by Dana S. Scott. The various
contributions, in modified and expanded form, are the core of this
collection of essays, and they are, I believe, of more than parochial
interest: they turn attention to substantive and reflective interdis-
ciplinary work. The collection is divided into three parts. The first
part gives perspec- tives (i) on general features of the
interdisciplinary enterprise in philosophy (by Patrick Suppes, Thomas
Schwartz, Herbert A. Simon, and Clark Gly- mour), and (ii) on a
particular topic that invites such interaction, namely computational
models of the mind (with contributions by Gilbert Harman, John
Haugeland, Jay McClelland, and Allen Newell). The second part con- tains
(mostly informal) reports on concrete research done within that enter-
prise; the research topics range from decision theory and the philosophy
of economics through foundational problems in mathematics to issues in
aes- thetics and computational linguistics. The third part is a
postscriptum by Isaac Levi, analyzing directions of (computational) work
from his perspective.
