Hubert L. Dreyfus (1929–2017)

How often do you read something completely new about Homer? This is it--an outstanding book that identifies the source of contemporary spiritual ennui and argues that we need to see the world as Homer's characters do in his epics. The authors' allusions are far-ranging, from Lou Gehrig to Pulp Fiction to Wesley Autrey, the man who, in 2007, leapt onto a subway track and used his body to shield a man who had fallen from an oncoming train. Readers steeped in the intricacies of Kant might balk show more at times; others might argue that the treatment of Aquinas is too narrow--don't listen to them. Dreyfus and Kelly have an original, striking thesis and they explore it with grace, conviction and good writing. The chapter on Moby-Dick doesn't say anything that an intelligent reader of that novel has missed, but it does cary the reader along with their enthusiasm for Melville's view of the world. (They also make you want to read Moby-Dick again, even if you've already done so many times.) The authors use the phrase "whooshing up" as a way to articulate "the most real things" that "well up and take us over, hold us for a while, and then, finally, let us go," like what Achilles experiences in battle, Nureyev finds on the stage, or Pele does scoring a goal. All Things Shining provoked a few whooshing ups in me as I read it. Highly recommended. show less

Dreyfus and Taylor present a unique solution to the problems of knowledge and realism, “retrieving” both from a skepticism that seems inherent and inescapable in traditional western philosophy.

There are two big arguments in the book. The first is an epistemological argument and attacks what the authors call “mediational” theories of knowledge — ones in which our access to reality is in one way or another “mediated” rather than direct. The second is a metaphysical argument that show more takes a non-mediated, direct account of access to and knowledge of the world farther, to a “realist” claim about the status of our knowledge with respect to a world independent of our involvement in it or our making sense of it.

The anti-mediational argument is relatively familiar. Dreyfus and Taylor characterize “mediational” accounts of knowledge as adhering to four characteristics: (1) that our knowledge of reality outside us is obtained “only through” some features (ideas, representations, percepts) within us, (2) that our knowledge of external reality can be decomposed into some sort of discrete elements (e.g., ideas, beliefs, sentences), (3) that justifying those elements of knowledge cannot rely on anything outside of them — e.g., that beliefs only follow from other beliefs — that there is no transcendent Archimedean point from which to justify the system of beliefs or representations per se, and (4) a “dualist sorting” or, for short, the distinction between mind and reality (where “mind” needn’t be individual, but could refer to the theoretical knowledge or socially generated ideas of a community). The most familiar “mediational” accounts are representationalist, although Dreyfus and Taylor mean to generalize the view they oppose as “mediationalism” to encompass a broader scope of views.

They then draw on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to construct an alternative account in which our relationship to the world is pointedly unmediated. It is through our bodily orientation that we come to experience the world — our touching, gripping, and reaching, our orientation in up, down, near, far, our involvement in practical tasks . . . These are the ways in which we first or “primordially” come to terms with the world, not through observation at a distance and construction of representations or theories.

Their opponent here is a “picture,” in Wittgenstein’s sense of a picture that holds us captive. Once we escape this picture of the knower as observer and theorizer, the picture that has long dominated western philosophy, the involved, embedded knower can emerge.

So long as knowledge of the world is “mediated”, i.e., so long as we only know of the world through some intermediate (ideas, representations, etc.), the question of skepticism can arise. Do those intermediates provide us with reliable access? How could we know, since we have no independent way of checking their reliability in toto? This is the strength of Cartesian skepticism.

Eliminate the intermediary, and you disarm the skeptic. We know the world because we are already in it. There just is no separation, no mediation, to feed the skeptic’s doubt.

The response to skepticism then is not so much a solution as a dissolving, again in a Wittgensteinian sense. The skeptic cannot get his argument off the ground, because that separation, the question of how the “internal” (the idea, belief, representation, etc.) relates to the “external” (the world in itself) never arises in the first place.

Given that dissolution, the traditional philosopher may still ask, what of our theories, beliefs, ideas, representations? What is the status of the world they give us access to? Is it the world of traditional realists, or idealists, or something in-between? Kantian epistemology, for example, upheld knowledge but not realism, at least in the traditional metaphysical sense.

This is where the second argument of the book kicks in. Dreyfus and Taylor stake a “realist” claim. Roughly, their argument is that, beginning with our direct access to the world, our scientific undertaking, i.e., our investigation into what accounts for the behavior of the world we directly interact with, is a valid investigation into the world as it is in itself. In our direct interactions, we meet resistance from the world. The world has an independence against our will and understanding — objects in it are too hard, too soft, too distant, etc. And we seek an account of that resistance or independence. This is science, or at least protoscience.

The real crux of the argument comes in Chapter Seven, where Dreyfus and Taylor distinguish “deflationary realism” from “robust realism”. Deflationary realism is where we seem to end up when we admit that the world we live in is co-produced by us, providing sense and intelligibility, and “the world itself”. That “world itself” is never, according to this deflationary realism, available to us in its pristine, unalloyed state, only via our ways of making it intelligible. And in fact Dreyfus and Taylor seemed to be headed toward such a “deflationary realism” in their account of the world as we know it as a product of our interaction with it — a “co-production”.

If Dreyfus and Taylor stopped at deflationary realism, they would have still made a valuable contribution, in insisting that the ways in which we make the world intelligible are primarily bodily — via interaction-laden, orienting projects, movements and positions such as up, down, near, far, heavy to the hand, etc. This is in opposition to the, to my mind, Kantian notion of intelligibility that is intellectual and observer-driven.

But Dreyfus and Taylor want to claim “robust realism” — which in their terms reclaims a sense of truth as correspondence to an independently existing reality — the very terms of traditional realist epistemology that have been under attack.

They claim that in fact it is this “independence” of reality that scientific theories are capturing, in accounting for the resistance that we meet — the very fact that, while how we perceive and act may be up to us, but what we perceive and what we act with or against is not. Science gives us exactly an account of those very qualities of hardness, nearness, distance, etc. — the independence of reality that we meet in our direct access to it.

It’s important to see that these two big arguments — the epistemological and the metaphysical — are linked. Otherwise, a Cartesian response to “robust realism” would simply call classical doubts into play — dream or deceiver arguments. But those arguments themselves presume a lack of direct access. Skeptical arguments depend upon a problematic relationship between beliefs, theories, ideas, representations, etc. on one side (the “internal” for Drefyus and Taylor) and reality itself on the other (the “external”). But, if Dreyfus and Taylor have been successful in their first big argument, that problematic relationship never is able to get off the ground.

I have to admit reticence to accept their conclusions. As Dreyfus and Taylor conceive science, it is the result of a Heideggerian “deworlding” — an abstraction from the context of everyday life in which direct access is grounded. I haven’t yet seen the argument that this abstraction isn’t also a distortion of that direct access — a withdrawing into abstraction and an explicit construction of “theory”. Explicit beliefs, statements, even representations are the lifeblood of science — in the abstraction and withdrawal that generate them, is there room again for the skeptic’s distinction between world and account to grow? More to think about. show less

Modern academic philosophers are often criticized for not having anything to say about ordinary life. The discipline thought of as one that addresses the big problems of life seems to have little to say of interest to anyone who actually lives a life. There's some truth to that, but this book is one that does have something to say about ordinary life and how to live one well. And it says it in a very accessible, compelling way.

The authors provide a historical diagnosis of a critical cultural show more loss -- our loss of an immediate sense of what to do, of what matters, of the values to live by. Early in the book, they recite the story of a man, Wesley Autrey, who without hesitation risked his life to help a man who had fallen onto the subway tracks in New York. What's remarkable to them is how rare Autrey's act is, not so much because it was brave as because it was certain and immediate. It's not as if Autrey weighed the pros and cons and decided to act courageously -- he just did. As he says, "I just saw someone who needed help." His perception of the situation dictated his response

While there are trivial examples of such automatic responses to situations in everyday life, ones in which our mettle is tested are rare. Others were on the train platform and didn't do what Autrey did. And the authors believe that such certainty of what to do, of what matters, is something we've lost. And we've lost it because of a centuries-long process of turning ourselves deaf to the call of situations -- the evolution of the individual self, with an autonomous, internal life has produced that deafness. We no longer listen outside ourselves but only within ourselves, for meaning and direction. And that internalized self is no longer capable of finding or creating the kind of values that sustain meaningful lives for us.

They trace this development from a breakdown of Homeric polytheism, through Aeschylus, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Descartes, Kant, and, maybe most pointedly, Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Their analysis of Moby Dick may be the highlight of the book, finding in its characters and plot twists a kind of encyclopedia of the search for meaning in life.

In the end, they settle into something a little surprising. We don't solve the problem of the self by curing the self. We solve it by looking outside the self, to mundane practices and our ability to be receptive to public moods and the call of ordinary meaning in such rituals as family meals, sports events, and the like -- the things that "shine" forth as meaningful in everyday life. Nothing transcendent, nothing requiring great leaps of enlightenment. In fact, it is the opposite -- we've tried so hard to develop individual enlightenment and autonomy of thought in our internal lives that we've neglected those ordinary practices and the swells of meaning in big public events, such as Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Lincoln Memorial speech.

They also warn of a tendency of modern technology (or maybe better, a kind of "technologism" -- a technological world-view) that covers up those everyday practices and sources of meaning and substitutes for them a kind of marshaling of resources and reduction of the efforts of life to "ease". If anything, I'd like to have heard more about this. This is the argument of Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology, and maybe it would be better to take the topic on to a reading of that book.

Whether the problem the authors diagnose is one of "everyone" or only of a class of intellectually-aware post-moderns is debatable. I wouldn't dismiss its reach into "everyone." In fact, I question the perception I began with, that modern philosophy has little to do with ordinary life. Without speaking of the philosophers and other intellectuals behind the concepts, businessmen speak of "paradigm shifts", public policy experts line up on the side of Rawlsian liberalism, Friedmanesque free market theory, and so on. There's more going on than meets the eye. show less

This is a collection of papers written by Hubert Dreyfus (some with co-authors), gathered around his arguments against representational theories of mind, knowledge, and action. In their place, Dreyfus proposes a theory of embodied coping as our primordial interaction with the world, drawing principally on Merleau-Ponty’s “motor intentionality” and Heidegger’s “Care” structure.

The editor rightly begins with a paper on Dreyfus’s model of skill acquisition. The model, tellingly, show more may be best understood by the model that it opposes. The more traditional model plots a continuous curve from beginner to expert, as the learner acquires a richer and richer theory of the skill domain in which he is learning. He begins with the basic ontology — the things that make up the domain — and the relationships and interactions among them. A beginning driver in fact does learn by understanding the accelerator, the brake, the speedometer, etc., and how each affects the behavior of the car itself, and he learns basic rules about when to press the accelerator, when to press the brake, and so on. And Dreyfus's model doesn’t dispute that beginning stage. But, once the beginner advances, the Dreyfus model diverges — it isn’t a matter of consciously learning more rules (and more things), but instead a matter of embodying highly contextual heuristics and strategies that resist explication as rules. And the reason that they resist explication as rules is that they simply aren’t rules.

Some of the best papers in this collection are ones that respond to the objection that, if those more expert skills are not rule-driven, they become mystical — beyond explanation or account altogether. This is the objection that is born of the traditionalist saying, in one way or another, that there must be rules governing the expert’s behavior and that we just haven’t found them yet — how could it be otherwise? Here Dreyfus calls especially on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “motor intentionality” (and the new-to-me “energy landscapes” of the neuroscientist Walter Freeman).

These more positive accounts are suggestive but still a bit sketchy, as presented here. The strength of Dreyfus’s work still lies in critique, I think. Even given Deep Blue, Watson, and other AI successes, the obstacles that AI researchers have found vexing (the “commonsense problem”, the “frame problem”) seem to justify the doubts Dreyfus raised with respect to the theoretical foundations of the AI project.

Overall, this is a very good collection for understanding both Dreyfus’s critique of representationalism and the beginnings of a positive account in its place. Good, provocative stuff. show less