Talk:Hubert Dreyfus
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Hubert Dreyfus survived vfd. See: Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Hubert Dreyfus -- Wile E. Heresiarch 03:45, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)
[edit] Dreyfus's criticism of AI
The section "Dreyfus's criticism of AI" is taken from an e-mail a friend of mine, who has read Drefyus's book and taken a few of his classes, sent me. If anybody drastically disagrees with its formulation, by all means, change it! :) --Fastfission 13:15, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)
The statements regarding Dreyfus as a prominent figure in artificial intelligence and a prominent philosopher are misguided at best. I speak from great interest in his work on Heidegger and his abilities as a professor of Heidegger which must surely be commended. But as far as the global philosophy community is concerned Dreyfus doesn’t even make gadfly status—he and several of his colleagues at Berkeley will repeatedly call his contributions noteworthy and influential. But in my experience at several prominent US universities, Oxford, and UCL in Europe, and from conversations with numbers of students of philosophy, cognitive science and neuroscience, none have even heard of the man. His books What Computers Can’t Do (and Still Can’t Do) exhibit no knowledge of cognitive science, formal logic, mathmatics or any of the actual methods used by people in the “artificial intelligence” field. Which should be noted is not explicitly a field at all, and no university I know of has an “Artificial Intelligence” department. They do have neuroscience departments, and cognitive science departments and philosophy departments but Dreyfus is largely inept to address any of these as his knowledge is in highly soft continental philosophy. If a student of Dreyfus’s wrote this wikipedia article on the professor, it is accurate and commendable in its objective facts, I agree with this much. But I would highly recommend the person who wrote this to rethink the use of “influential” “major” “prominent” “leading” and any other such misguided assessments. I also urge the reading public to research Professor Dreyfus’ achievements and discuss his influence with people in the philosophy of mind field—the cognitive science and neuroscience fields (which do work on “artificial intelligence”) will not know his name, much less any influence his students may be lead to believe he has. -Andre, November 2005
