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Of Hubert Dreyfus and dead horses: some thoughts on Dreyfus' What Computers Still Can't Do: (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1992); liii + 354 pages, $13.95

โœ Scribed by Timothy Koschmann

Publisher
Elsevier Science
Year
1996
Tongue
English
Weight
1007 KB
Volume
80
Category
Article
ISSN
0004-3702

No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.

โœฆ Synopsis

The thing to do with a dead horse is to bury it as expeditiously as possible." Anonymous Seven years ago I reviewed one of Dreyfus' earlier books on computers and cognition [22]. My position at that time was that Dreyfus' critique of AI appeared ill-informed. His arguments for why AI, as a research agenda, must ultimately fail seemed, at best, weak. Recently, however, I have noticed that some of the controversies raging within the cognitive science community (e.g., symbolic processing versus situated action [30], the "symbol grounding" issue [13]) seem to have a familiar ring to them. Many of these current discussions appear to call up themes that I have encountered in Dreyfus' earlier writings. Is it possible that Dreyfus has been right all along and that my previous readings of his work have simply missed the point?

๐Ÿ“œ SIMILAR VOLUMES

Hubert Dreyfus, what computers still can
Hubert Dreyfus, what computers still can't do: (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1992); liii + 354 pages, $13.95
โœ John McCarthy ๐Ÿ“‚ Article ๐Ÿ“… 1996 ๐Ÿ› Elsevier Science ๐ŸŒ English โš– 610 KB

Hubert Dreyfus claims that "symbolic AI" is a "degenerating research program", i.e. is not making progress. It's hard to see how he would know, since he makes no claim to have read much of the recent literature. In defending "symbolic AI", I shall concentrate on just one part of symbolic AI-the log