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Hubert Dreyfus

Hubert Dreyfus was an American philosopher who taught at MIT and for most of his career at the University of California, Berkeley, and who…

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On the Coordinates: 6.17 Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence

Also known as Hubert L. Dreyfus

1929 – 2017 · Terre Haute, Indiana; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Berkeley

Traditions: Continental

Schools: Phenomenology

Hubert Dreyfus was an American philosopher who taught at MIT and for most of his career at the University of California, Berkeley, and who interpreted Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty for anglophone readers. In What Computers Can't Do he argued, against early symbolic artificial intelligence, that human intelligence depends on embodiment, situated skill and background know-how that cannot be captured in explicit rules. His objection concerned skilled coping rather than consciousness, and his account of skill acquisition remains influential.

Key ideas

  • Human intelligence rests on embodied, situated know-how rather than on manipulating explicit rules and representations.
  • Symbolic AI faces a frame problem because relevance depends on a background that cannot be fully formalised.
  • Expertise develops from rule-following novice behaviour toward intuitive, context-sensitive response.
  • Heidegger's account of everyday coping offers a better model of mind than Cartesian representationalism.

Major works

  • What Computers Can't Do (1972; revised as What Computers Still Can't Do, 1992)
  • Mind over Machine (1986, with Stuart Dreyfus)
  • Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I (1991)
  • All Things Shining (2011, with Sean Dorrance Kelly)

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In the Coordinates

The questions of philosophy where Hubert Dreyfus takes a place, from The Coordinates of Thought.