Postcognitivism

Psychological movements are considered to be post-cognitivist if they are opposed to or move beyond the cognitivist theories posited by Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, David Marr, and others.

Researchers who have followed post-cognitive directions include Hubert Dreyfus, Gregory Bateson, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Their work carries forward some of the work of Martin Heidegger, Jean Piaget, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Lev Vygotsky and others.

Using the principles of Heidegger's philosophy, Dreyfus has been critical of cognitivism from the beginning. Despite continued resistance by old-school philosophers of cognition, he felt vindicated by the growth of new approaches. When Dreyfus' ideas were first introduced in the mid-1960s, they were met with ridicule and outright hostility. By the 1980s, however, many of his perspectives were rediscovered by researchers working in robotics and the new field of connectionism—approaches now called "sub-symbolic" because they eschew early AI research's emphasis on high level symbols. Historian and AI researcher Daniel Crevier writes: "time has proven the accuracy and perceptiveness of some of Dreyfus's comments." Dreyfus said in 2007 "I figure I won and it's over—they've given up."

In Mind Over Machine (1986), written during the heyday of expert systems, Dreyfus analyzed the difference between human expertise and the programs that claimed to capture it. This expanded on ideas from What Computers Can't Do, where he had made a similar argument criticizing the "cognitive simulation" school of AI research practiced by Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon in the 1960s.

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