His first job was teaching philosophy at the University of Hull, 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 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. It was presented at IJCAI in 1971, then reprinted in Artificial Intelligence. Subsequently, he was invited by Bernard Meltzer to spend a year in 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. He managed the Poplog development team between 1980 and 1991. While at Sussex University he published "The Computer Revolution in Philosophy: Philosophy science and models of mind" in 1978, and 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. Much of his energy was devoted 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 and is still on it. He retired in 2001, but continues working full-time.
Influences
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, 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. E.g. 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 on some topics, while agreeing on others.
A.Sloman, , Oxford University DPhil Thesis, 1962, also available with detailed table of contents in html .
A. Sloman, , American Phil. Quarterly, 6, pp. 43–52, 1969.
A.Sloman, ,Proc 2nd IJCAI, 1971, London.
A.Sloman, , Harvester press and Humanities press, 1978.
A. Sloman and M. Croucher, , Proc 7th IJCAI, 1981, pp. 197–202, Vancouver.
A. Sloman, The structure of the space of possible minds, in The Mind and the Machine: philosophical aspects of Artificial Intelligence, Ed. S. Torrance, Ellis Horwood, 1984, Chichester,
A. Sloman, , in Proc 9th IJCAI, Los Angeles, pp. 995–1001, 1985
A. Sloman, , Eds. J.B.H. du Boulay, D.Hogg and L.Steels, Advances in Artificial Intelligence – II, Dordrecht, North Holland, pp. 369–381, 1987
A. Sloman, , Eds. A.G. Cohn and J.R. Thomas, Artificial Intelligence and Its Applications, John Wiley and Sons, 1986
A. Sloman, , in Journal of Experimental and Theoretical AI, 1, 4, pp. 289–337, 1989
A. Sloman and R.L. Chrisley, , in Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10, 4–5, pp. 113–172, 2003.
A. Sloman and J. Chappell, , in Proceedings IJCAI'05, Edinburgh, pp. 1187–1192, 2005.
J.Chappell and A.Sloman, , in Int. Journal of Unconventional Computing, 3,3, pp. 211–239, 2007.
