Dreyfus, Hubert - (b. 1929-, Ph.D. Philosophy, Harvard). Dreyfus has argued that the enterprise of Artificial Intelligence consists in turning the rationalist project of philosophers like Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and Husserl into an empirically rigorous research program. He contends that this project should be abandoned for many of the same reasons as rationalism.
Dreyfus taught at M.I.T. from 1960 to 1968. Currently he is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. He spent time at the Rand Corporation in 1965, while Newell, Shaw and Simon were doing their work in Artificial Intelligence (AI) there. Dreyfus has argued that the enterprise of Artificial Intelligence consists in turning the rationalist project of philosophers like Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and Husserl into an empirically rigorous research program that could actually make progress. In common with the rationalist tradition in philosophy, the AI research program holds that the mind is fundamentally rational, representational, and rule-governed. According to Dreyfus, if the AI research program succeeds, then the rationalist tradition in philosophy will be vindicated, while if it fails, this will be good evidence in support of the critiques of the rationalist tradition offered by thinkers like Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Dreyfus’ own view is that the AI research program, and cognitivism in general should be abandoned, precisely because they fall victim to the same critiques that were originally leveled at the rationalist tradition in philosophy. Dreyfus first articulated his views in What Computers Can’t Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence (1972). Other important works include What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (1992) and Mind Over Machine (1986).
Baumgartner, Peter & Payr, Sabine, ed. (1995). Speaking minds. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [bookstore]
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