Abstract
This paper deals with the rationalist assumptions behind researches of artificial intelligence (AI) on the basis of Hubert Dreyfus’s critique. Dreyfus is a leading American philosopher known for his rigorous critique on the underlying assumptions of the field of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence specialists, especially those whose view is commonly dubbed as “classical AI,” assume that creating a thinking machine like the human brain is not a too far away project because they believe that human intelligence works on the basis of formalized rules of logic. In contradistinction to classical AI specialists, Dreyfus contends that it is impossible to create intelligent computer programs analogous to the human brain because the workings of human intelligence is entirely different from that of computing machines. For Dreyfus, the human mind functions intuitively and not formally. Following Dreyfus, this paper aims to pinpointing the major flaws classical AI suffers from. The author of this paper believes that pinpointing these flaws would inform inquiries on and about artificial intelligence. Over and beyond this, this paper contributes something indisputably original. It strongly argues that classical AI research programs have, though inadvertently, falsified an entire epistemological enterprise of the rationalists not in theory as philosophers do but in practice. When AI workers were trying hard in order to produce a machine that can think like human minds, they have in a way been testing—and testing it up to the last point—the rationalist assumption that the workings of the human mind depend on logical rules. Result: No computers actually function like the human mind. Reason: the human mind does not depend on the formal or logical rules ascribed to computers. Thus, symbolic AI research has falsified the rationalist assumption that ‘the human mind reaches certainty by functioning formally’ by virtue of its failure to create a thinking machine.
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Notes
This does not however mean that these are the only type of AI research programmes. As Margaret Boden (1994) pointed out, there are a variety of AI research programmes developed in the 1980s and 1990s. Among these, situated robotics, evolutionary robotics, and artificial life (A-Life) could be cited as developing AI research programmes.
According to Dreyfus, the expression was first employed by the pragmatist philosopher William James. But he depended on Polanyi’s elaboration in order to substantiate his point. Describing the fringes of consciousness, Polanyi wrote: “This power resides in the area which tends to function as a background because it extends indeterminately around the central object of our attention. Seen thus from the corner of our eyes, or remembered at the back of our mind, this area compellingly affects the way we see the object on which we are focusing. We may indeed go so far as to say that we are aware of this subsidiarily noticed area mainly in the appearance of the object to which we are attending” (quoted in Dreyfus 1992b [1972], p. 103).
Margaret Boden substantiates this point very well: “That connectionism can, to some extent, defend AI against some familiar criticisms is admitted by Hubert (with Stuart) Dreyfus… But he [Hubert Dreyfus] still holds, contra Hayes and Clark, that language and common sense cannot be captured by AI (not even the connectionist variety). In defending this position, Dreyfus relates AI work to a wide range of philosophical literature, contrasting the Western rationalist tradition with Continental phenomenology and the later Wittgenstein. His skepticism about AI springs from the view that people do not use—and science cannot express—a theory about the everyday world, because there is no set of context-free primitives of understanding. Our knowledge is skilled know-how, as contrasted with procedural rules, representations, or knowledge that; even our knowledge of formal systems involves shared background intuitions about how to continue a mathematical series or apply a logical rule.” (Boden 1990, p. 17)
Plato’s theory of knowledge, in which myths and allegorical narratives are used recurrently, the body is conceived as a tomb for the soul. Borrowing the theory of the reincarnation of the soul from Eastern religions, Plato argues that true, or to be precise, “absolute” knowledge could only be attained when the soul is completely freed from the body. Sensuous perception is nothing but the source of fleeting opinions. Centuries after, Descartes also developed the rationalist tradition that denigrate or completely relegate the body from the realm of “true” knowledge.
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The author is very grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on the manuscript.
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Kenaw, S. Hubert L. Dreyfus’s Critique of Classical AI and its Rationalist Assumptions. Minds & Machines 18, 227–238 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-008-9093-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-008-9093-7