Phenomenology 2005

Volume 1, Issue Part 1, 2007

Selected Essays from Asia Part 1

Kohji Ishihara
Pages 211-228

Reductionism in the Synthetic Approach of Cognitive Science and Phenomenology
Rethinking Dreyfus’ Critique of AI

Drawing on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Hubert Dreyfus criticized classical AI in 1970s. While classical AI was based on symbolic manipulation, AI research of recent years has been based on the neural network approach and the synthetic approach. In this essay I would like to reexamine Dreyfus’ critique of AI and his Heidegger interpretation to suggest another aspect of Heidegger’s thought and Husserl’s phenomenology of reciprocal recognition which would provide a perspective from which to resist the reductionism in the recent approaches in cognitive science.