Machines in Minds: Expressing Digital Rationality Within the Space of Reasons

This book offers a novel and systematic inquiry into the deep connection between AI and rational agency. By linking the inferentialist approach to the mind with current discussions about semantic technologies and AI, it describes a normative shift for understanding how machines and minds stand in relation to each other. It reveals why this shift is necessary for achieving AI by tracing the key debates on the very concept of AI across cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. It further offers a solid philosophical background of the philosophy of information and its processing, investigating how information patterns generated in digital practices can provide information processing agents with possibilities for interpretation and reasoning. Particularly, by reassessing Semantic Web technologies and their role in rational digital practices and AI development, this book offers a theoretical framework to understand how information processing agents become rational agents, together with feasible measures for developers and users to deal with AI and internet technologies. Thanks to the inclusion of the extensive philosophical background and avoidance of unnecessary technicalities, it will be of great value and interest to a broader audience.