Binary file CR_manuscript/foreword.docx has changed

--- /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
+++ b/CR_manuscript/foreword.txt	Sat Nov 23 10:18:57 2024 +0000
@@ -0,0 +1,179 @@
+*Foreword*
+
+Brian Cantwell Smith was born in Montreal, Canada, on 1 December 1949.
+Growing up first there and later in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he
+remains a Canadian citizen.  Multiple allegiances, sometimes
+conflicting but mostly complementary, have characterized both his
+personal and intellectual life ever since.
+
+He started undergraduate study at Oberlin College in Ohio in 1967,
+where his interests included both physics and religion but left after
+only two years, travelling first to visit the Quaker community
+Argenta, British Columbia, and ending up in Ottawa where he started
+work as a programmer at the Division of Physics laboratory of the
+National Research Council of Canada, working on a project jointly
+involving Fermilab in Chicago and the Lawrence Research Laboratory in
+Berkeley.  Working at all three sites on PDP 9 and PDP 15
+microcomputers, he "programmed like crazy" in machine language,
+building systems for experimental control and data gathering.
+  
+When the project ended Brian moved back to the family home in
+Cambridge, and started taking classes at the Massachusetts Institute
+of Technology (MIT), studying what was then known as Social Inquiry,
+in particular the politics of high technology.  But it quickly became
+apparent that the understanding of computing that the social
+scientists were critiquing was not the computing that he knew as a
+programmer, what he later came to refer to as "computing in the wild".
+
+"What drove me out of Social Inquiry and back to [Computer Science] was
+needing to be back in the practice.  That skill was not somthing that
+people on the outside understood."
+
+Brian had realised that in order to legitimately critique Computer
+Science, he needed to get clear on what computing really is: "I had to
+go into the heart of the beast, as it were". So he applied for the PhD
+program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and
+began taking classes there.
+
+When the MIT administration discovered Brian didn't have an
+undergraduate degree, and so couldn't be registered for graduate
+study, Patrick Winston, the newly-appointed head of the Artificial
+Intelligence Laboratory, gave Brian an informal oral exam in topics
+from the MIT undergraduate computer science curriculum and awarded him
+the credits necessary for a degree, clearing the way for his admission
+to the graduate program.
+
+In 1976 Terry Winograd, who had left MIT to join the Computer Science
+Lab at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), invited Brian to
+spend the summer in the Understander Group there, where he joined in
+the development of KRL, a Knowledge Representation Language, which
+came to embody some of the ideas that were developed in his Masters
+and PhD dissertations [refs].
+
+These biographical details bring us to the brink of Brian's
+professional life, and to the time and place where we first met. The
+point made above about multiple allegiances can be succinctly
+summarized by a list of the positions he has occupied since the
+completion of his PhD a few years later:
+
+ * Member of the Scientific Staff, Xerox PARC
+ * Director, Xerox PARC System Sciences Lab
+ * Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University
+ * Founding member of Stanford University's Center for the Study of
+   Language and Information
+ * Founding member and first president, Computer Professionals for
+   Social Responsibility
+ * President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology
+ * Professor of Cognitive Science, Computer Science, and Philosophy,
+   Indiana University
+ * Kimberly J. Jenkins University Distinguished Professor of
+   Philosophy and New Technologies, Duke University
+ * Dean of the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto
+ * Invited keynote speaker, _Défaire l'Occident_, Plainartige, France
+ * Professor of Information, Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and the
+   History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of
+   Toronto
+ * Senior Fellow, Massey College, University of Toronto
+ * Reid Hoffman Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Human,
+   University of Toronto
+
+It was during Brian's years in Palo Alto at PARC, at first just for
+the summer and then full-time, that the foundations were laid for the
+work that led to this book.
+
+  "As an exercise in using KRL representational structures, Brian
+   Smith tried to describe the KRL data structures themselves in
+   KRL-0. A brief sketch was completed, and in doing it we were made
+   much more aware of the ways in which the language was inconsistent
+   and irregular. This initial sketch was the basis for much of the
+   development in KRL-1."  [ref. Bobrow and Winograd 1978, "Experience
+   with KRL-O: One Cycle of a Knowledge Representation Language", in
+   _Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on
+   Artificial Intelligence_, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Burlington,
+   MA.  Available online at
+   https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/77-1/Papers/032.pdf].
+
+Brian's input into the (never completed) KRL-1 meant that not only
+could some parts of a system's data be _about_ other parts, but that
+this would be more than just commentary. It would actually play a role
+in the system's operation. For KRL-1, this was initially motivated by
+a desire to formulate aspects of knowledge representation such as
+negation and disjunction as, if you will, knowledge about knowledge,
+rather than as primitives built into the vocabulary of the
+representation language itself. [elaborate this with reference to
+old-style Semantic Nets and Bobrow and Norman ?]
+
+Brian's development of this idea, which he termed 'reflection', is
+documented in the papers gathered in _Legacy_.  But its title
+notwithstanding, this book is _not_ a recapitulation of that work.
+
+There was an assumption at the heart of Brian's reflective
+architectures, which was initially expected to occupy just one section
+of one chapter of his PhD, as signalled in its preliminary outline
+Table of Contents.  But its resolution proved to be much more
+problematic than expected, to the extent that it has taken
+a lifetime of work for Brian to bring it clearly into focus.
+
+Looking back it seems that this difficulty acted rather like the grit
+in the oyster, stimulating Brian's wholesale reconsideration of the
+nature of computation, and Computer Science as currently practiced,
+which _is_ what this book is about.
+
+You'll have to read the book to find out what that assumption was, and
+the details of the critique of Computer Science that it led Brian to.
+
+It may seem rather presumptuous of me to suggest that this one person
+has accurately diagnosed a problem that a whole field of enquiry has
+missed, to the point where they've ended up altogether stuck, unable
+to see what they've missed.  The point of the list offered above of
+Brian's achievements and the manifest breadth of his background it
+testifies to will I hope give sufficient grounds for suggesting that
+it is at least possible that this indeed just might be worth checking
+out.
+
+As Brian himself said about this recently "That this is important
+needs to be said.  And it's not about _me_, that is, it's not
+important because I say it is."  That it's important to him does
+however mean that his claim deserves our attention.
+
+This is not an easy book to read, but it's a very important book, so
+it's worth the effort.  As Brian himself has said, it's written rather
+like a detective story, in which the same underlying set of facts is
+explored repeatedly, getting closer each time to a complete and
+self-consistent picture.  When I first read it, I said to Brian more
+than once "But you keeping using [some term], and it's clear you mean
+it in some important, technical, sense, but you haven't _defined_ it".
+And he said, "Look, what I've writen should be read more like novel
+than like a manual.  What things mean will gradually take shape.  Be
+patient".
+
+If you care about computer science, either as a practioner, or a
+theorist, or a concerned citizen, this book matters for you.  It's
+conclusions matter, even if parts of it are not meant for you.  So
+even if you find it hard, as a computer programmer, to see why you
+should care if the theorists have got it wrong, be patient.  If you're
+a theorist, and you find Brian's critique at best irrelevant, and at
+worst aggresive, obnoxius and founded in misunderstanding, be patient.
+If you're a citizen, and the technical details are off-putting, be
+patient.
+
+If you _are_ patient, and stay the course, when you get to the end you
+will realise that you actually do understand the terminology now, and
+that even though the work that remains is hugely challenging, and
+perhaps only imperfectly grasped by Brian himself, much less the rest
+of us, getting it done matters for all of us.  As practioners and
+theorists, we need to ask ourselves what we can do to make Brian's
+vision a reality.  As citizens, we need to cheer from the sidelines,
+and keep asking questions.  We owe him that much.
+
+Henry S. Thompson, Toronto and Edinburgh, November 2024.
+
+*Epigraph*
+
+   Therefore, I close with the following dramatic but also perfectly
+   serious claim: cognitive science and artificial intelligence cannot
+   succeed in their own essential aims unless and until they can
+   understand and/or implement genuine freedom and the capacity to
+   love.
+
+       John Haugeland, "Authentic Intentionality", 2002