Hubert Dreyfus
Encyclopedia
Hubert Lederer Dreyfus is an American philosopher
. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley
.
His main interests include phenomenology, existentialism
and the philosophy of both psychology
and literature
, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence
. Dreyfus is particularly renowned for his exegesis of Martin Heidegger
.
to Stanley S. and Irene Lederer Dreyfus, Dreyfus was educated at Harvard University
, earning three degrees there, with a BA in 1951, an MA in 1952, and a PhD in 1964, under the supervision of Dagfinn Follesdal. He is considered a leading interpreter of the work of Edmund Husserl
, Michel Foucault
, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
, but especially of Martin Heidegger
. His Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being and Time," Division 1, is thought by many who have attempted to teach Heidegger to undergraduates to be the authoritative text on Heidegger's most significant contribution to philosophy. He also co-authored Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, translated Merleau-Ponty's Sense and Non-Sense, and authored the controversial 1972 book What Computers Can't Do
, revised first in 1979, and then again in 1992 with a new introduction as What Computers Still Can't Do. While spending most of his teaching career at Berkeley, Professor Dreyfus has also taught at the Brandeis University
(1957 to 1959), Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(from 1960 to 1968), the University of Frankfurt, and Hamilton College. His philosophical work has influenced Richard Rorty
, Charles Taylor
, John Searle
, and his former student John Haugeland
, among others. His critical comments on the existential phenomenology and subsequent dialectical philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre
may well have played a significant role in the demise of Sartre's influence on recent thought.
In 1965, while teaching at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
, Dreyfus published "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence", an attack on the work of Allen Newell
and Herbert Simon
, two of the leading researchers in the field of Artificial Intelligence
. Dreyfus not only questioned the results they had so far obtained, but he also criticized their basic presupposition (that intelligence consists of the manipulation of physical symbols according to formal rules), and argued that the AI research program was doomed to failure. In 1965, he spent time at the Rand Corporation, while work on artificial intelligence was in progress there.
In addition to criticizing artificial intelligence, Dreyfus is well known for making the work of continental philosophers, especially Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Michel Foucault, intelligible to analytically trained philosophers.
His younger brother, Stuart Dreyfus
, earned a Ph.D. in applied mathematics and is a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at the University of California, Berkeley
.
(AI) concerns what he considers to be the four primary assumptions of AI research. The first two assumptions he criticizes are what he calls the "biological" and "psychological" assumptions. The biological assumption is that the brain is analogous to computer
hardware
and the mind is analogous to computer software. The psychological assumption is that the mind works by performing discrete computations (in the form of algorithmic rules) on discrete representations
or symbols.
Dreyfus claims that the plausibility of the psychological assumption rests on two others: the epistemological and ontological
assumptions. The epistemological assumption is that all activity (either by animate or inanimate objects) can be formalised (mathematically) in the form of predictive rules or laws. The ontological assumption is that reality consists entirely of a set of mutually independent, atomic (indivisible) facts. It's because of the epistemological assumption that workers in the field argue that intelligence is the same as formal rule-following, and it's because of the ontological one that they argue that human knowledge consists entirely of internal representations of reality.
On the basis of these two assumptions, workers in the field claim that cognition
is the manipulation of internal symbols by internal rules, and that, therefore, human behaviour is, to a large extent, context free (see contextualism
). Therefore a truly scientific psychology
is possible, which will detail the 'internal' rules of the human mind, in the same way the laws of physics detail the 'external' laws of the physical world.
But it is this key assumption that Dreyfus denies. In other words, he argues that we cannot now (and never will) be able to understand our own behavior in the same way as we understand objects in, for example, physics or chemistry: that is, by considering ourselves as things whose behaviour can be predicted via 'objective', context free scientific laws. According to Dreyfus, a context free psychology
is a contradiction in terms.
Dreyfus's arguments against this position are taken from the phenomenological and hermeneutical tradition (especially the work of Martin Heidegger
). Heidegger argued that, contrary to the cognitivist
views on which AI is based, our being is in fact highly context bound, which is why the two context-free assumptions are false. Dreyfus doesn't deny that we can choose to see human (or any) activity as being 'law governed', in the same way that we can choose to see reality as consisting of indivisible atomic facts ... if we wish. But it is a huge leap from that to state that because we want to or can see things in this way that it is therefore an objective fact that they are the case. In fact, Dreyfus argues that they are not (necessarily) the case, and that, therefore, any research program that assumes they are will quickly run into profound theoretical and practical problems. Therefore the current efforts of workers in the field are doomed to failure.
Given that Dreyfus has a reputation as a Luddite
in some quarters, it's important to emphasise that he doesn't believe that AI is fundamentally impossible; only that the current research program is fatally flawed. Instead he argues that to get a device (or devices) with human-like intelligence would require them to have a human-like being-in-the-world, which would require them to have bodies more or less like ours, and social acculturation (i.e. a society) more or less like ours. (This view is shared by psychologists in the embodied psychology (Lakoff and Johnson 1999) and distributed cognition
traditions. His opinions are similar to those of robotics
researchers such as Rodney Brooks
as well as researchers in the field of artificial life
.)
Daniel Crevier
writes: "time has proven the accuracy and perceptiveness of some of Dreyfus's comments. Had he formulated them less aggressively, constructive actions they suggested might have been taken much earlier."
in 2001. Erasmus University
awarded Dreyfus an honorary doctorate "for his brilliant and highly influential work in the field of artificial intelligence, and for his equally outstanding contributions to the analysis and interpretation of twentieth century continental philosophy".
Dreyfus is featured in Tao Ruspoli's
film Being in the World.
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
.
His main interests include phenomenology, existentialism
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
and the philosophy of both psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
and literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
. Dreyfus is particularly renowned for his exegesis of Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
.
Background
Born in Terre Haute, IndianaTerre Haute, Indiana
Terre Haute is a city and the county seat of Vigo County, Indiana, United States, near the state's western border with Illinois. As of the 2010 census, the city had a total population of 60,785 and its metropolitan area had a population of 170,943. The city is the county seat of Vigo County and...
to Stanley S. and Irene Lederer Dreyfus, Dreyfus was educated at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, earning three degrees there, with a BA in 1951, an MA in 1952, and a PhD in 1964, under the supervision of Dagfinn Follesdal. He is considered a leading interpreter of the work of Edmund Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
, Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir...
, but especially of Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
. His Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being and Time," Division 1, is thought by many who have attempted to teach Heidegger to undergraduates to be the authoritative text on Heidegger's most significant contribution to philosophy. He also co-authored Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, translated Merleau-Ponty's Sense and Non-Sense, and authored the controversial 1972 book What Computers Can't Do
What Computers Can't Do
Hubert Dreyfus has been a critic of artificial intelligence research since the 1960s. In a series of papers and books, including Alchemy and AI , What Computers Can't Do and Mind over Machine , he presented an assessment of AI's progress and a critique of the philosophical foundations of the field...
, revised first in 1979, and then again in 1992 with a new introduction as What Computers Still Can't Do. While spending most of his teaching career at Berkeley, Professor Dreyfus has also taught at the Brandeis University
Brandeis University
Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...
(1957 to 1959), Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
(from 1960 to 1968), the University of Frankfurt, and Hamilton College. His philosophical work has influenced Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University...
, Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor (philosopher)
Charles Margrave Taylor, is a Canadian philosopher from Montreal, Quebec best known for his contributions in political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, and in the history of philosophy. His contributions to these fields have earned him both the prestigious Kyoto Prize and the...
, John Searle
John Searle
John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.-Biography:...
, and his former student John Haugeland
John Haugeland
John Haugeland was a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago from 1999 until his death. He was chair of the philosophy department from 2004-2007. He spent at most of his career teaching at the University of Pittsburgh...
, among others. His critical comments on the existential phenomenology and subsequent dialectical philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
may well have played a significant role in the demise of Sartre's influence on recent thought.
In 1965, while teaching at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
, Dreyfus published "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence", an attack on the work of Allen Newell
Allen Newell
Allen Newell was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department of Psychology...
and Herbert Simon
Herbert Simon
Herbert Alexander Simon was an American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist, and professor—most notably at Carnegie Mellon University—whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, computer science, public administration, economics,...
, two of the leading researchers in the field of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
. Dreyfus not only questioned the results they had so far obtained, but he also criticized their basic presupposition (that intelligence consists of the manipulation of physical symbols according to formal rules), and argued that the AI research program was doomed to failure. In 1965, he spent time at the Rand Corporation, while work on artificial intelligence was in progress there.
In addition to criticizing artificial intelligence, Dreyfus is well known for making the work of continental philosophers, especially Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Michel Foucault, intelligible to analytically trained philosophers.
His younger brother, Stuart Dreyfus
Stuart Dreyfus
A native of Terre Haute, Indiana, Stuart E. Dreyfus is Professor Emeritus at University of California, Berkeley in the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department. While at the Rand Corporation he was a programmer of the JOHNNIAC computer. While at Rand he was coauthor, with Richard...
, earned a Ph.D. in applied mathematics and is a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
.
Dreyfus's criticism of AI
Dreyfus's critique of artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
(AI) concerns what he considers to be the four primary assumptions of AI research. The first two assumptions he criticizes are what he calls the "biological" and "psychological" assumptions. The biological assumption is that the brain is analogous to computer
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
hardware
Hardware
Hardware is a general term for equipment such as keys, locks, hinges, latches, handles, wire, chains, plumbing supplies, tools, utensils, cutlery and machine parts. Household hardware is typically sold in hardware stores....
and the mind is analogous to computer software. The psychological assumption is that the mind works by performing discrete computations (in the form of algorithmic rules) on discrete representations
Representations
Representations is an interdisciplinary journal in the humanities published quarterly by the University of California Press. The journals was established in 1983 and is the founding publication of the New Historicism movement of the 1980s. It covers topics including literary, historical, and...
or symbols.
Dreyfus claims that the plausibility of the psychological assumption rests on two others: the epistemological and ontological
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
assumptions. The epistemological assumption is that all activity (either by animate or inanimate objects) can be formalised (mathematically) in the form of predictive rules or laws. The ontological assumption is that reality consists entirely of a set of mutually independent, atomic (indivisible) facts. It's because of the epistemological assumption that workers in the field argue that intelligence is the same as formal rule-following, and it's because of the ontological one that they argue that human knowledge consists entirely of internal representations of reality.
On the basis of these two assumptions, workers in the field claim that cognition
Cognition
In science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...
is the manipulation of internal symbols by internal rules, and that, therefore, human behaviour is, to a large extent, context free (see contextualism
Contextualism
Contextualism describes a collection of views in philosophy which emphasize the context in which an action, utterance, or expression occurs, and argues that, in some important respect, the action, utterance, or expression can only be understood relative to that context...
). Therefore a truly scientific psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
is possible, which will detail the 'internal' rules of the human mind, in the same way the laws of physics detail the 'external' laws of the physical world.
But it is this key assumption that Dreyfus denies. In other words, he argues that we cannot now (and never will) be able to understand our own behavior in the same way as we understand objects in, for example, physics or chemistry: that is, by considering ourselves as things whose behaviour can be predicted via 'objective', context free scientific laws. According to Dreyfus, a context free psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
is a contradiction in terms.
Dreyfus's arguments against this position are taken from the phenomenological and hermeneutical tradition (especially the work of Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
). Heidegger argued that, contrary to the cognitivist
Cognitivism (psychology)
In psychology, cognitivism is a theoretical framework for understanding the mind that came into usage in the 1950s. The movement was a response to behaviorism, which cognitivists said neglected to explain cognition...
views on which AI is based, our being is in fact highly context bound, which is why the two context-free assumptions are false. Dreyfus doesn't deny that we can choose to see human (or any) activity as being 'law governed', in the same way that we can choose to see reality as consisting of indivisible atomic facts ... if we wish. But it is a huge leap from that to state that because we want to or can see things in this way that it is therefore an objective fact that they are the case. In fact, Dreyfus argues that they are not (necessarily) the case, and that, therefore, any research program that assumes they are will quickly run into profound theoretical and practical problems. Therefore the current efforts of workers in the field are doomed to failure.
Given that Dreyfus has a reputation as a Luddite
Luddite
The Luddites were a social movement of 19th-century English textile artisans who protested – often by destroying mechanised looms – against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, which they felt were leaving them without work and changing their way of life...
in some quarters, it's important to emphasise that he doesn't believe that AI is fundamentally impossible; only that the current research program is fatally flawed. Instead he argues that to get a device (or devices) with human-like intelligence would require them to have a human-like being-in-the-world, which would require them to have bodies more or less like ours, and social acculturation (i.e. a society) more or less like ours. (This view is shared by psychologists in the embodied psychology (Lakoff and Johnson 1999) and distributed cognition
Distributed cognition
Distributed cognition is a psychological theory developed in the mid 1980s by Edwin Hutchins. Using insights from sociology, cognitive science, and the psychology of Vygotsky it emphasizes the social aspects of cognition. It is a framework that involves the coordination between individuals,...
traditions. His opinions are similar to those of robotics
Robotics
Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, structural disposition, manufacture and application of robots...
researchers such as Rodney Brooks
Rodney Brooks
Rodney Allen Brooks is the former Panasonic professor of robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1986 he has authored a series of highly influential papers which have inaugurated a fundamental shift in artificial intelligence research...
as well as researchers in the field of artificial life
Artificial life
Artificial life is a field of study and an associated art form which examine systems related to life, its processes, and its evolution through simulations using computer models, robotics, and biochemistry. The discipline was named by Christopher Langton, an American computer scientist, in 1986...
.)
Daniel Crevier
Daniel Crevier
Daniel Crevier is a Canadian entrepreneur and artificial intelligence and image processing researcher. He is also the author of AI: the Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence. In 1974 Crevier received a Ph.D. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
writes: "time has proven the accuracy and perceptiveness of some of Dreyfus's comments. Had he formulated them less aggressively, constructive actions they suggested might have been taken much earlier."
Webcasting Philosophy
When UC Berkeley and Apple began making a selected number of lecture classes freely available to the public as podcasts beginning around 2006, a recording of Dreyfus teaching a course called "Man, God, and Society in Western Literature - From Gods to God and Back" rose to 58th most popular webcast on iTunes.http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/pdf/Los%20Angeles%20Times_%20The%20iPod%20lecture%20circuit.pdf These webcasts have attracted the attention of many, including non-academics, to Dreyfus and his subject area.Achievements
Dreyfus was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and SciencesAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
in 2001. Erasmus University
Erasmus University
Erasmus University Rotterdam is a university in the Netherlands, located in Rotterdam. The university is named after Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, a 15th century humanist and theologian...
awarded Dreyfus an honorary doctorate "for his brilliant and highly influential work in the field of artificial intelligence, and for his equally outstanding contributions to the analysis and interpretation of twentieth century continental philosophy".
Dreyfus is featured in Tao Ruspoli's
Tao Ruspoli
Tao Ruspoli is an Italian American filmmaker and musician.-Background:Ruspoli is the second son of occasional actor and aristocrat Prince Alessandro Ruspoli, 9th Prince of Cerveteri and Austrian-American actress Debra Berger. He is the older brother of Bartolomeo dei Principi Ruspoli , second...
film Being in the World.
External links
- Professor Bert Dreyfus at the Berkeley Philosophy Department Web page
- Professor Bert Dreyfus's UC Berkeley Home Page
- Professor Bert Dreyfus' online papers at UC Berkeley in archive.org, with links to old Berkeley web page
- Webcast: Man, God, and Society in Western Literature
- Webcast: Existentialism in Literature and Film
- Webcast: Heidegger
- Copy of Article "The iPod Lecture Circuit" by Michelle Quinn in LA Times, November 2007
- Conversations with History, an interview, November 2005
- Comprehensive interview
- AfterTV: Conversations about media,culture and technology, Interview between Andrew Keen and Hubert Dreyfus February 16, 2006
- Radio interview on Philosophy TalkPhilosophy TalkPhilosophy Talk is a talk radio program co-hosted by John Perry and Ken Taylor, who are professors at Stanford University. The show is also available as a podcast, available for purchase. The program deals both with fundamental problems of philosophy and with the works of famous philosophers,...