Heidegger’s Phenomenology in Dreyfus’s Critique of Symbolic AI

Abstract

While influential in Heidegger’s reception in the United States of America, Dreyfus’s work has been repeatedly criticized for developing a distorted and selective readingof Heidegger’s phenomenology. In this paper, we show that, regardless of Dreyfus’s later developments in cognitive science, his early critique of symbolic AI is supported by theses that can be located in Heidegger’s Being and Time, namely, that our sense of situation is both (i) pragmatic-holistic and (ii) intrinsically relevant (i.e. defined by our interests). After a general introduction, we present in the first section the project of symbolic AI and the general tone of Dreyfus’s criticism thereof; we then reconstruct Dreyfus’s criticism of R. Schank’s SAM; after that, we indicate how these theses are to be found in Heidegger’s Being and Time; we finally conclude by pointing out pending issues.