Hubert L. Dreyfus

Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time.

Being-in-the-World is a guide to one of the most influential philosophical works of this century: Division I of Part One of Being and Time, where Martin Heidegger works out an original and powerful account of being-in-the-world which he then uses to ground a profound critique of traditional ontology and epistemology. Hubert Dreyfuss commentary opens the way for a new appreciation of this difficult philosopher, revealing a rigorous and illuminating vocabulary that is indispensable for talking about the phenomenon of world. The publication of Being and Time in 1927 turned the academic world on its head. Since then it has become a touchstone for philosophers as diverse as Marcuse, Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida who seek an alternative to the rationalist Cartesian tradition of western philosophy. But Heideggers text is notoriously dense, and his language seems to consist of unnecessarily barbaric neologisms; to the neophyte and even to those schooled in Heidegger thought, the result is often incomprehensible. Dreyfuss approach to this daunting book is straightforward and pragmatic. He explains the text by frequent examples drawn from everyday life, and he skillfully relates Heideggers ideas to the questions about being and mind that have preoccupied a generation of cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind.

Peripheral Vision Expertise in Real World Contexts

In this paper we describe a five-stage phenomenological model of skill acquisition, of which expertise is the highest stage. Contrary to the claims of knowledge engineers, we argue that expertise in general, and medical expertise in particular, cannot be captured in rule-based expert systems, since expertise is based on the making of immediate, unreflective situational responses; intuitive judgment is the hallmark of expertise. Deliberation is certainly used by experts, if time permits, but it is done for the purpose of improving intuition, not replacing it. The best way to avoid mistakes is to take responsibility for them when they occur, rather than try to prevent them by foolproof rules. In bureaucratic societies, however, there is the danger that expertise may be diminished through over-reliance on calculative rationality.

Intelligence without representation – Merleau-Ponty's critique of mental representation The relevance of phenomenology to scientific explanation

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-Pontys 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 bodys 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 Freemans account of the brain dynamics underlying perception and action is structurally isomorphic with Merleau-Pontys account of the way a skilled agent is led by the situation to move towards obtaining a maximal grip.

Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing it Would Require Making it More Heideggerian

When I was teaching at MIT in the 1960s, students from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory would come to my Heidegger course and say in effect: ‘‘You philosophers have been reflecting in your armchairs for over 2000 years and you still don’t understand intelligence. We in the AI Lab have taken over and are succeeding where you philosophers have failed.’’ But in 1963, when I was invited to evaluate the work of Alan Newell and Herbert Simon on physical symbol systems, I found to my surprise that, far from replacing philosophy, these pioneering researchers had learned a lot, directly and indirectly, from us philosophers: e.g., Hobbes’ claim that reasoning was calculating, Descartes’ mental representations, Leibniz’s idea of a ‘universal characteristic’ (a set of primitives in which all knowledge could be expressed), Kant’s claim that concepts were rules, Frege’s formalization of such rules, and Wittgenstein’s postulation of logical atoms in his Tractatus. In short, without realizing it, AI researchers were hard at work turning rationalist philosophy into a research program. But I began to suspect that the insights formulated in existentialist armchairs, especially Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s, were bad news for those working in AI laboratories—that, by combining representationalism, conceptualism, formalism,

Making a Mind Versus Modelling the Brain: Artificial Intelligence Back at the Branchpoint

In the early 1950s, as calculating machines were coming into their own, a few pioneer thinkers began to realise that digital computers could be more than number-crunchers. At that point two opposed visions of what computers could be, each with its correlated research programme, emerged and struggled for recognition. One faction saw computers as a system for manipulating mental symbols; the other, as a medium for modelling the brain. One sought to use computers to instantiate a formal representation of the world; the other, to simulate the interactions of neurons. One took problem solving as its paradigm of intelligence; the other, learning. One utilised logic; the other, statistics. One school was the heir to the rationalist, reductionist tradition in philosophy; the other viewed itself as idealised, holistic neuroscience.

The Return of the Myth of the Mental

McDowells 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 McDowells 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. *. As presented at the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Washington DC, December 29, 2006.

Towards a phenomenology of ethical expertise

ogy, in both its transcendental and existential versions, has made immense contributions to metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of action and mind. The same cannot be said of its contribution to ethics. With the exception of Sartre, phenomenologists have had little to say about ethics, and what Sartre has said has had little effect on the course of the subject, perhaps because Sartre takes following moral principles to be a form of inauthenticity. Our hypothesis is that if one returned to the phenomenon and tried to give a description of ethical experience one might find that phenomenology has a great deal to contribute to contemporary debate, particularly since the focus of discussion has shifted from interest in meta-ethical issues to a debate between those who demand a detached critical morality based on principles that tells us what is right and those who defend an ethics based on involvement in a tradition that defines what is good. This new confronta? tion between Kant and Hegel, between Moralit?t and Sittlichkeit, has produced two camps which can be identified with J?rgen Habermas and John Rawls on the one hand, and Bernard Williams and Charles Taylor on the other. The same polarity appears in feminism where the Kohlberg scale, which defines the highest stage of moral maturity as the ability to stand

The Ethical Implications of the Five-Stage Skill-Acquisition Model

We assume that acting ethically is a skill. We then use a phenomenological description of five stages of skill acquisition to argue that an ethics based on principles corresponds to a beginner’s reliance on rules and so is developmentally inferior to an ethics based on expert response that claims that, after long experience, the ethical expert learns to respond appropriately to each unique situation. The skills model thus supports an ethics of situated involvement such as that of Aristotle, John Dewey, and Carol Gilligan against the detached, rationalist ethics of Kant, John Rawls, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Jürgen Habermas.

Response to McDowell

Our debate got off to an embarrassing yet hopeful start with me assuming that concepts must be general and criticizing what I took to be McDowell’s conceptualist account of phronesis on the basis of Heidegger’s claim that the phronemos is responsive to the concrete, not the general, situation. In response, McDowell pointed out that on his view conceptuality is situationspecific—a view that he may have acquired indirectly from Heidegger by way of Charles Taylor and Hans-Georg Gadamer. It looked like we had a lot in common, but now I think that, while in fact we do, our differences are still significant. For example, Heidegger holds that we use concepts in a situation-specific way when dealing with malfunctioning equipment—when, for example, we notice that this hammer is too heavy for this job, i.e. we notice it as too heavy. But Heidegger points out that most of our activities don’t involve concepts at all. That is, they don’t have a situation-specific ‘‘as structure’’. Indeed, in our everyday coping, which he calls ‘‘pressing into possibilities’’, we don’t deal with objects with general properties like weight, nor with situation-specific aspects like too heavy. Rather, when everything is going well and we are absorbed in our coping, the equipment we are using

From Socrates to expert systems: The limits of calculative rationality☆

This paper examines the general epistemological assumptions of artificial intelligence technology and recent work in the development of expert systems. These systems are limited because of a failure to recognize the real character of expert understanding, which is acquired as the fifth stage of a five-step process. A review of the successes and failures of various specific expert system programs confirms this analysis.