Aaron Sloman (born October 30, 1936 in Zimbabwe) is a philosopher and researcher on artificial intelligence and cognitive science.^[9] He held the Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, and before that held a chair with the same title at the University of Sussex.^[1] Since retiring, he is an Honorary Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at Birmingham. He has published widely on the philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence, and has collaborated widely, such as with biologist Jackie Chappell on the evolution of intelligence.

Sloman was born in 1936 in the town of Que Que (now called Kwe Kwe), in what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). His parents were Lithuanian Jews who emigrated to Southern Rhodesia around the turn of the century. Sloman describes himself as an atheist.^[2]

He went to school in Cape Town between 1948 and 1953, then earned a degree in Mathematics and Physics at the University of Cape Town in 1956, after which a Rhodes Scholarship (from South African College School) took him to the University of Oxford (first Balliol College, and then St Antony's College). In Oxford, he became interested in philosophy after a brief period studying mathematical logic supervised by Hao Wang, eventually writing a DPhil in philosophy, defending the ideas of Immanuel Kant about the nature of mathematical knowledge as non-empirical and non-analytic ('Knowing and Understanding', 1962).

His first job was teaching philosophy at the University of Hull (1962–64), after which he moved to Sussex University, where he worked on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, meta-ethics, and various topics in epistemology. In 1969, he learned about artificial intelligence (AI) from Max Clowes, then a leading UK AI researcher in vision. As a result of this, he published a paper distinguishing analogical representations from Fregean representations and criticising the logicist approach to AI as too narrow, which was presented at IJCAI in 1971 and reprinted in Artificial Intelligence. Subsequently, he was invited by Bernard Meltzer to spend a year (1972–1973) at Edinburgh University, where he met and worked with many leading AI researchers.

When he went back to Sussex, he helped to found what eventually grew into COGS, the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences. While at Sussex University, he published "The Computer Revolution in Philosophy: Philosophy science and models of mind" (which emphasised the importance of architectures) in 1978, as well as other papers on various aspects of philosophy and AI, including work on the analysis of 'ought' and 'better', on vision on emotions in robots, on forms of representation, and other topics.^[3] He managed the Poplog development team between 1980 and 1991, devoting much of his energy to developing new kinds of teaching materials based on POP-11 and Poplog for students learning AI and cognitive science.

In 1991, after 27 years at Sussex, he was offered a research chair in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, where he started a cognition and affect project (later on the Free Open Source Poplog Portal) and is still on it. He retired in 2001, but continues working full-time.

His philosophical ideas were deeply influenced by the writings of Immanuel Kant, Gottlob Frege, and Karl Popper, and to a lesser extent by John Austin, Gilbert Ryle, R. M. Hare (who, as his 'personal tutor' at Balliol College, discussed meta-ethics with him), Imre Lakatos, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. What he could learn from philosophers left large gaps, which he decided around 1970 research in artificial intelligence might fill. For example, philosophy of mind could be transformed by testing ideas in working fragments of minds, and philosophy of mathematics could be illuminated by trying to understand how a working robot could develop into a mathematician.

Much of his thinking about AI was influenced by Marvin Minsky, and despite his critique of logicism, he also learnt much from John McCarthy. His work on emotions can be seen as an elaboration of a paper on "Motivational and emotional controls of cognition", written in the 1960s by Herbert A. Simon. He disagrees with all of these thinkers on some topics, while agreeing on others.

He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour, and the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence.^[10] In 2018, he became a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute.^[4] Sussex University awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Science in July 2006.^[5] The Sloman Lounge in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham is named in his honour.^[6] In 2020, the American Philosophical Association (APA) awarded him the K.Jon Barwise Prize "for significant and sustained contributions to areas relevant to philosophy and computing".^[7]

Aaron Sloman's 1962 Oxford University DPhil thesis was titled "Knowing and Understanding: Relations between meaning and truth, meaning and necessary truth, meaning and synthetic necessary truth", which was digitised in 2007 in the Oxford Research Archive and made available online with a detailed HTML table of contents. In 1969, he published "How to derive 'Better' from 'is'" in the American Philosophical Quarterly (vol. 6, pp. 43–52). His 1971 paper, "Interactions between philosophy and AI: The role of intuition and non-logical reasoning in intelligence", was presented at the 2nd IJCAI in London, reprinted the same year in Artificial Intelligence (vol. 2, no. 3–4, pp. 209–225), and later anthologized in J.M. Nicholas's 1977 edited volume Images, Perception, and Knowledge (Dordrecht-Holland: Reidel). In 1978, Harvester Press and Humanities Press published his book The Computer Revolution in Philosophy: Philosophy, science and models of mind, which later went out of print but is available online.

During the 1980s, Sloman and M. Croucher co-authored "Why robots will have emotions" for the 7th IJCAI in Vancouver in 1981 (pp. 197–202). He contributed "The structure of the space of possible minds" to the 1984 collection The Mind and the Machine: philosophical aspects of Artificial Intelligence, edited by S. Torrance (Ellis Horwood, Chichester). He subsequently published "What enables a machine to understand?" at the 9th IJCAI in Los Angeles in 1985 (pp. 995–1001), "Did Searle attack strong strong or weak strong AI" in Artificial Intelligence and Its Applications edited by A.G. Cohn and J.R. Thomas (John Wiley and Sons, 1986), and "Reference without causal links" in Advances in Artificial Intelligence – II, edited by J.B.H. du Boulay, D. Hogg, and L. Steels (Dordrecht: North Holland, 1987, pp. 369–381). In 1989, he published "On designing a visual system: Towards a Gibsonian computational model of vision" in the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical AI (vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 289–337), alongside maintaining online presentations.

Sloman's subsequent work includes the 2003 paper "Virtual machines and consciousness", co-authored with R.L. Chrisley in the Journal of Consciousness Studies (vol. 10, no. 4–5, pp. 113–172). With J. Chappell, he co-authored "The Altricial-Precocial Spectrum for Robots" at IJCAI'05 in Edinburgh (pp. 1187–1192) and "Natural and artificial meta-configured altricial information-processing systems" in the International Journal of Unconventional Computing in 2007 (vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 211–239).

External resources include Sloman's web page and his "Turing-inspired" Meta-Morphogenesis project. Additionally, Sloman's 1962 DPhil thesis, Knowing and Understanding, Relations between meaning and truth, meaning and necessary truth, meaning and synthetic necessary truth, was transcribed in 2016 and is available in HTML, PDF, and plain text formats without diagrams.