I cannot imagine a better introduction to the mainstream philosophical debate about artificial intelligence than that provided by Hubert Dreyfus in this volume. 1Dreyfus, H., 2008, ‘Why Heidegerrian AI failed and why fixing it would make it more Heideggerian.’ pp. 000–000 in After Cognitivism, (ed.), Karl Leidlmair, Dordrecht: Springer. Dreyfus, as he explains, is now to be included within the mainstream, a position he has achieved after a notoriously unjustified delay of many decades, and by a process which is, to some extent, described in the paper itself (AI students attending his MIT seminar and so forth). Dreyfus by pulling things together so clearly, has actually made it easier to see what is still wrong even now that he and Heidegger have been grasped to the bosom of AI. What is missing is not, however, what Dreyfus says it is – more of his type of Heidegger. What is missing is any understanding of the distinction between humans and animals.
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Notes
- 1.
Dreyfus, H., 2008, ‘Why Heidegerrian AI failed and why fixing it would make it more Heideggerian.’ pp. 39–73 in After Cognitivism, (ed.), Karl Leidlmair, Dordrecht: Springer.
- 2.
Evan Selinger has pointed out to me that in so far as Dreyfus concentrates on the embodiment aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy he is not being faithful to Heidegger himself. Heidegger’s overall approach includes a marked discontinuity between humans and animals. Heidegger, then, is not being clasped quite so close to the bosom of AI as Bert’s paper implies. Selinger suggests that, ironically, in this respect the critique advanced here is more Heideggerian than Dreyfus’s paper. My knowledge of Heidegger is minimal, so where I refer to Heidegger in this paper I should really be talking about ‘Dreyfus’s Heidegger’ at least as he appears here and in other works by Dreyfus on AI – that is where I get my Heidegger from. Karl Leidlmair has made similar points about the relationship between Heidegger and Dreyfus’s AI-Heidegger as his introduction to this volume indicates.
- 3.
- 4.
These definitions are from Collins (2010) forthcoming.
- 5.
It is ‘mimics’ the action rather than ‘reproduces’ it because an action always goes with an intention and in the mechanical rider there is no intention.
- 6.
This argument, and the use of the term ‘somatic limit tacit knowledge’ can be found in Collins (2007) and (2010) forthcoming.
- 7.
See Collins and Evans (2007) for the latest use of these terms though they go back some years.
- 8.
For an indication of how the debate might go, or even whether the thesis stands up, see Selinger et al. (2007).
- 9.
Collins and Evans (2007).
- 10.
Sacks (1985). As with many provocative experiments, the interpretation of these has been challenged (Selinger et al., 2007).
- 11.
- 12.
Very complicated look-up tables have been invented after the style of John Searle’s ‘Chinese Room.’ However ingenious, unless continually updated by humans, such those who construct the initial entries, they still fail any Turing Test that takes place in a changing world.
- 13.
The domain of mimeomorphic actions is explored in The Shape of Actions (Collins and Kusch, 1998).
- 14.
Collins et al. (2008).
- 15.
Collins et al. (2008).
References
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Collins, H. M. (2007) Bicycling on the Moon: Collective tacit knowledge and somatic-limit tacit knowledge. Organization Studies, 28(2), 257–262.
Collins, H. M. (1998) ‘Socialness and the Undersocialised Conception of Society’, Science, Technology and Human Values, 23(4), 494–516.
Collins, H. M. (2010 forthcoming) Tacit and Explicit Knowledge, Chicago: University of Chicago press.
Collins, H., Clark, A., and Shrager, J. (2008) Keeping the Collectivity in Mind? Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 7(3), 353–374.
Collins, H. and Evans, R. (2007) Rethinking Expertise, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Collins, H. M., & Kusch, M. (1998) The Shape of Actions: What Humans and Machines Can Do, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Collins, H. and Pinch, T. (2005) Dr Golem: How to think about medicine, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sacks, O. (1985) The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. London: Duckworth.
Selinger, E., Dreyfus, H., and Collins, H. (2007) Embodiment and Interactional Expertise, in H. M. Collins (ed.) Case Studies in Expertise and Experience: Special Issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 38(4), 722–740 [December].
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Collins, H.M. (2009). The New Orthodoxy: Humans, Animals, Heidegger and Dreyfus. In: After Cognitivism. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9992-2_4
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