Gerry's Home Page Preliminary Materials Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Bibliography Appendix

Sec 11.1

11.1      Contributions to a Philosophy of Interpretation

At least since Dreyfus (1966; 1972; & Dreyfus, 1986), the relevance of Heidegger’s philosophy to AI has been debated. Unfortunately, most of the discussion by computer scientists has relied on secondary sources, especially pre-publication drafts of Dreyfus’ (1991) commentary on Heidegger. So one contribution of this dissertation has been to return to the original text of Heidegger (1927) and to systematically apply that text to the context of computer support for interpretation in design. The result has been an analysis of interpretation that is frequently more detailed and rigorous than alternative presentations. This represents a contribution to Heideggerian scholarship as such, not just from a computer science perspective.

Of course, according to the philosophy there is no “correct” interpretation of a text unrelated to a background of concerns. The confrontation of the Heideggerian text with the problematic of design and computer support for design had important consequences. Examples from design methodology and from lunar habitat design provided not only a concreteness to Heidegger’s abstractions, but a more realistic context than Heidegger’s own craft-oriented glimpses of the lonely carpenter absorbed in his hammering. Design shifted the emphasis to collaborative work. It also moved (thanks largely to Schön’s insights) from use of the physical artifact to the more conceptual design of artifacts. In particular, this brought to the fore the role of discovery over that of laying out what was implicitly disclosed. This clarified and extended the analysis of interpretation, removing certain ambiguities that Heidegger glossed over.

Perhaps most importantly, the effort to apply Heidegger’s philosophy to computer system building not only forced a precision of concept, but resulted in the operationalizing of many of the ideas. This is, of course, a common benefit to philosophy of mind when it is applied in AI. In this case, the result was a computer model of human interpretation as situated, perspectival, and linguistic. However, in addition to the model, there is an extensive recognition of the limits of the model and the need to involve people in the operation of the model. These limits are shown to be consequences of the Heideggerian analysis. So philosophy benefited from its meeting with computer science.

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