Martin Heidegger, 1927.

Postulates of 'Dreideggereanism'

Dreiggereanism is Hubert Dreyfus's application of Heideggerean Phenomenoloyg to issues in Artificial Intelligence and philosophy of the mind. The postulates are:

1. Our basic way of being in the world is coping with equipment (rather than relating to the world by way of mental representations).

2. Coping skills can't be formalised.

3. Coping takes place against a background of general familiarity.

4. Familiarity is a kind of coping, but it is not directed at any particular task. Heidegger calls this background familiarity an understanding of being.

5. On the basis of familiarity, human beings are able to determine what is relevant to what, what to pay attention to, and what to do in any given situation.

6. Expertise consists of responding to a situation similar to the one that occurred in the past in a way similar to a response that has worked in the past.

7. Similarity is basic and cannot be analysed in terms of shared features.

8. Expertise is arrived at in five stages beginning with rule-like responses to specific features and ending with responses to whole situations.

9. Situations cannot be specified in terms of features.

Adapted from Dreyfus (1972, 1991) and Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986).