| Hubert L. Dreyfus's Critique
of Classical AI and its Rationalist Assumptions |
| Source |
Minds and
Machines archive Volume 18 ,
Issue 2 (June 2008) table of contents
Pages: 227 - 238
Year of Publication: 2008
ISSN:0924-6495 |
| Author |
| Setargew Kenaw |
Department of Philosophy,
Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
| |
| Publisher |
Kluwer Academic Publishers
Hingham, MA, USA |
| Bibliometrics |
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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.
REFERENCES
Note: OCR errors may be found in this
Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to
expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked
references.
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1 |
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