A Critique of Artificial Reason Hubert L. Dreyfus . HUBERT L. DREYFUS What Computers Still Can't Do Thi s One XZKQ-GSY-8KDG What. WHAT COMPUTERS STILL CAN'T DO Front Cover.

For fifty years Hubert Dreyfus has done pioneering work which brings phenomenology and existentialism to bear on the philosophical and scientific study of the mind. This is a selection of his most influential essays, developing his critique of the representational model of the mind in analytical philosophy of mind and mainstream cognitive science.

Essays discuss the themes of worldliness, affectedness, understanding, and the care-structure found in Heidegger's work on the nature of existence.

Existential phenomenologists hold that the two most basic forms of intelligent behavior, learning, and skillful action, can be described and explained without recourse to mind or brain representations. This claim is expressed in two central notions in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: the intentional arc and the tendency to achieve a maximal grip. The intentional arc names the tight connection between body and world, such that, as the active body acquires skills, those skills are stored, not as representations in the mind, (...) but as dispositions to respond to the solicitations of situations in the world. A phenomenology of skill acquisition confirms that, as one acquires expertise, the acquired know-how is experienced as finer and finer discriminations of situations paired with the appropriate response to each. Maximal grip names the body's tendency to refine its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal gestalt. Thus, successful learning and action do not require propositional mental representations. They do not require semantically interpretable brain representations either.Simulated neural networks exhibit crucial structural features of the intentional arc, and Walter Freeman's account of the brain dynamics underlying perception and action is structurally isomorphic with Merleau-Ponty's account of the way a skilled agent is led by the situation to move towards obtaining a maximal grip. (shrink)

In previous work I urged that the perceptual experience we rational animals enjoy is informed by capacities that belong to our rationality, and - in passing - that something similar holds for our intentional action. In his Presidential Address, Hubert Dreyfus argued that I thereby embraced a myth, "the Myth of the Mental". According to Dreyfus, I cannot accommodate the phenomenology of unreflective bodily coping, and its importance as a background for the conceptual capacities exercised in reflective intellectual activity. (...) My paper responds to this accusation. Dreyfus misreads my invocation of Aristotle, and is thereby led to suppose, wrongly, that I conceive rationality as detached, brought to bear on practical predicaments from a standpoint other than one of immersion in them. I urge that even unreflective bodily coping, on the part of rational animals, is informed by their rationality. Dreyfus mentions Heidegger’s distinction, which is picked up by Gadamer, between being oriented towards the world and merely inhabiting an environment. But he sets it aside, whereas it is crucial for the issue between us. Engaged bodily coping involves responsiveness to affordances, and responsiveness to affordances on the part of rational animals belongs to their relation to the world. I explain how the idea that conceptual capacities are actualized in our perceptual experience is connected with the thought that our perceptual experience opens us to the world. Finally, I suggest that the real myth in this area is the conception of rationality underlying Dreyfus’s resistance to my picture. (shrink)

_Internet_ is een van de eerste boeken waarin het filosofische inzicht -van Plato tot Kierkegaard - betrokken wordt op het debat over de mogelijkheden en onmogelijkheden van het internet. Dreyfus laat zien dat de onstoffelijke, 'vrij zwevende' websurfer zijn oorsprong vindt in Descartes' scheiding van geest en lichaam, en hoe Kierkegaards inzichten in de opkomst van het moderne leespubliek vooruitlopen op de nieuwsgierige, maar elk risico vermijdende internet-junkie. Uitgaande van recente onderzoeken naar het isolement dat veel internetgebruikers ervaren, toont Dreyfus (...) aan hoe het internet, door zijn nadruk op privé-ervaringen, gebruikers berooft van wezenlijke, belichaamde vermogens zoals vertrouwen, stemmingen en betrokkenheid bij met anderen gedeelde lokale aangelegenheden. _Internet_ is verplichte kost voor iedereen die on line is en is geïnteressseerd in onze plaats in de 'e-revolutie'. (shrink)

McDowell's claim that "in mature human beings, embodied coping is permeated with mindedness",1 suggests a new version of the mentalist myth which, like the others, is untrue to the phenomenon. The phenomena show that embodied skills, when we are fully absorbed in enacting them, have a kind of non-mental content that is non-conceptual, non-propositional, non-rational and non-linguistic. This is not to deny that we can monitor our activity while performing it. For solving problems, learning a new skill, receiving coaching, and (...) so forth, such monitoring is invaluable. But monitoring what we are doing as we are doing it degrades performance to at best competence. On McDowell's view, there is no way to account for such a degradation in performance since the same sort of content would be involved whether we were fully absorbed in or paying attention to what we were doing. McDowell claims that it is an advantage of his conceptualism that it avoids any foundationalist attempt to build up the objective world on the basis of an indubitable Given or any other ground-floor experience. And, indeed, if the world is all that is the case and our minds are unproblematically open to it, all experience is on the same footing. But one must distinguish motor intentionality, and the interrelated solicitations our coping body is intertwined with, from conceptual intentionality and the world of propositional structures it opens onto. The existential phenomenologist can then agree with McDowell in rejecting traditional foundationalisms, while yet affirming and describing the ground-floor role of motor intentionality in providing the support on which all forms of conceptual intentionality are based. (shrink)

As this book makes clear, current use of data structures such as frames, scripts, and stereotypes in psychology, artificial intelligence, and all the other disciplines now grouped together as Cognitive Science develop ideas already explored by Husserl who believed that the analysis of mental representations was the proper subject of philosophy, psychology, and other disciplines that deal with the mind. This new anthology will serve as an ideal introduction to phenomenology for analytic philosophers, both as a text and as the (...) single most useful source book on Husserl for cognitive scientists. An MIT Press/Bradford Book. (shrink)

Back in 1950, while a physics major at Harvard, I wandered into C.I. Lewis’s epistemology course. There, Lewis was confidently expounding the need for an indubitable Given to ground knowledge, and he was explaining where that ground was to be found. I was so impressed that I immediately switched majors from ungrounded physics to grounded philosophy.

MICHAEL WHEELER Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005432 pages, ISBN: 0262232405 (hbk); $35.001.When I was teaching at MIT in the 1960s, students from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory would come to...

Dieser Beitrag untersucht, was es heißt, verwundet zu leben. Was auf den ersten Blick als eine mehr als gewöhnliche und kaum spektakuläre Frage erscheinen mag, wird nach Untersuchung der dominanten Phantasmen der Unverletzlichkeit als eine Grundfrage der historischen Anthropologie erkennbar: Wie entsteht und wandelt sich der tägliche Umgang mit eigener Verletzlichkeit und Verwundung im Menschenbild? Welche Wunden des Gewöhnlichen werden in den meisten Lebens- und Arbeitsumgebungen im Allgemeinen ignoriert und ausgeblendet? Worin bestehen die Idiosynkrasien eines empfindsamen Leibes, eines sensorisches Corpus? (...) Und in welchem Zusammenhang stehen die Begehren eines bestimmten Menschen zu seinen Wunden? Eine Körperanthropologie der Wunden bezieht die Verletzungen eines Menschen im Laufe seines Lebens als integraler Teil eines Menschenbildes mit ein. (shrink)

Article CLIPS (Cognitive Linguistics in Publications) Survey of collective volumes, monographs, MA, doctoral and post-doctoral theses, articles, papers and book reviews. A selected and annotated bibliography of recent publications with a cognitive perspective was published on January 1, 1991 in the journal Cognitive Linguistics (volume 2, issue 4).

Our contemporary nihilism -- Homer's polytheism -- From Aeschylus to Augustine : monotheism on the rise -- From Dante to Kant : the attractions and dangers of autonomy -- Fanaticism, polytheism, and Melville's "evil art" -- David Foster Wallace's nihilism -- Conclusion : lives worth living in a secular age.

Can we accept John McDowell’s Kantian claim that perception is conceptual “all the way out,” thereby denying the more basic perceptual capacities we seem to share with prelinguistic infants and higher animals? More generally, can philosophers successfully describe the conceptual upper floors of the edifice of knowledge while ignoring the embodied coping going on on the ground floor? I argue that we shouldn’t leave the conceptual component of our lives hanging in midair and suggest how philosophers who want to understand (...) knowledge and action can profit from a phenomenological analysis of the nonconceptual embodied coping skills we share with animals and infants, as well as the nonconceptual immediate intuitive understanding exhibited by experts. (shrink)

What does it entail to study the climate crisis from – or consistently with – a critical realist perspective? The paper addresses this question in three steps. First, it considers the boundaries of critical realism in relation to climate crisis research. In this context it identifies climate science as a field that in important respects resonates implicitly with critical realism. Conversely, a book by human ecologist Andreas Malm is introduced as an example of a work that, while sympathetic to critical (...) realism, in key respects contradicts core features of it. Second, to illustrate what an analysis of the crisis informed by critical realism can look like, the paper brings into focus the main causes of the climate crisis – including the capitalist growth imperative, neoliberalism, and consumer culture. Finally, the status quo project, the green growth project and the degrowth project are identified as fundamentally different ways of approaching the climate crisis. (shrink)

The rapidly increasing wealth of genomic data has driven the development of tools to assist in the task of representing and processing information about genes, their products and their functions. One of the most important of these tools is the Gene Ontology (GO), which is being developed in tandem with work on a variety of bioinformatics databases. An examination of the structure of GO, however, reveals a number of problems, which we believe can be resolved by taking account of certain (...) organizing principles drawn from philosophical ontology. We shall explore the results of applying such principles to GO with a view to improving GO’s consistency and coherence and thus its future applicability in the automated processing of biological data. (shrink)

OF THE many issues surrounding the new interest in hermeneutics, current debate has converged upon two.

In this paper I would like to explain, defend, and draw out the implications of this claim. Since the intentional arc is supposed to embody the interconnection of skillful action and perception, I will first lay out an account of skill.

The contribution takes a closer look at the relations between Hannah Arendt and Paul Tillich, and focuses on the controversy surrounding Emil Ludwig's ideas on a possible ‘re-education’ of postwar Germany which was published mainly in the New York journal Aufbau of 1942. The letters and other documents used from 1942 to 1965 also shed light on the personal life and work of those embroiled in this dispute, as well as their involvement in the public discussions of their day.

The Draft Common Frame of Reference is just published. Now the creation of the final Common Frame of Reference is one of the most important issues in the field of European Private Law. The volume discusses the key question as to what extent the CFR can and should reflect existing EC Contract Law, and to what extent the DCFR has already incorporated the acquis communautaire. The contributions to this volume try to provide answers to this question by analyzing different controversial (...) areas such as the conclusion and content of the contract, non-performance, remedies, damages and the relation to International Private Law. (shrink)

An application of the entropic theory of perception to evolutionary systems indicates that environmental entropy increases will exert pressures on an organism to adapt. We speculate that the instability caused by such environmental changes will also cause an increase in the mutation rate of organisms leading to an eventual increase in their complexity. Such complexity generation allows organisms to adapt to the more entropic environment. Although we conclude that increases in environmental entropy cause an organism to evolve into a more (...) complex organism, increases in entropy may not be necessary for complexity generationper se. (shrink)