Key Arguments

• Dreyfus argues that 'We can and do zero in on significant content in the field of experience because this field is not neutral to us but is structured in terms of our interests and our capacity for getting at what is in it.'
• He claims that 'Any object which we experience must appear in this field and therefore must appear in terms of our dominant interest at that moment, and as attainable by some variant of the activity which generated the field.'
• From this he infers: 'Since we create the field in terms of our interests, only possibly relevant facts can appear. Relevance is thus already built in.'
• He illustrates this with the horse racing example: 'racing fits into a nested context of activities, games, sports, contests. To see an activity as a horse race is to organize it in terms of the intention to win.'
• Using Taylor’s handicapper, he shows how the concern with winning and sense of 'dangers' make some newspaper items (Smith’s mother’s death) immediately salient, while a computer would treat it as just another fact about Smith, alongside such irrelevancies as 'Smith's second cousin has been elected dogcatcher in some other city'.

Source Quotes

Data, then, are far from brute; aspects of objects are not given as directly in the world but as characterizing objects in places in a local environment in space and time in the world. We can and do zero in on significant content in the field of experience because this field is not neutral to us but is structured in terms of our interests and our capacity for getting at what is in it. Any object which we experience must appear in this field and therefore must appear in terms of our dominant interest at that moment, and as attainable by some variant of the activity which generated the field.

We can and do zero in on significant content in the field of experience because this field is not neutral to us but is structured in terms of our interests and our capacity for getting at what is in it. Any object which we experience must appear in this field and therefore must appear in terms of our dominant interest at that moment, and as attainable by some variant of the activity which generated the field. Since we create the field in terms of our interests, only possibly relevant facts can appear.

Any object which we experience must appear in this field and therefore must appear in terms of our dominant interest at that moment, and as attainable by some variant of the activity which generated the field. Since we create the field in terms of our interests, only possibly relevant facts can appear. Relevance is thus already built in. In the horse race case, racing fits into a nested context of activities, games, sports, contests.

Relevance is thus already built in. In the horse race case, racing fits into a nested context of activities, games, sports, contests. To see an activity as a horse race is to organize it in terms of the intention to win. To return to Taylor's account: The handicapper is concerned to pick a winner.

Hence he notices when he reads in the obituary columns that Smith's mother died yesterday (Smith being the jockey, and one he knows to be very susceptible), and for once he bets against the form. The machine would pick out Smith's mother's death, as a fact about Smith, along with all the others, such as that Smith's second cousin has been elected dogcatcher in some other city, etc., but will then have to do a check on the probable consequences of these different facts before it decides to take them into account or not in placing the bet. 9 Thus our present concerns and past know-how always already determines what will be ignored, what will remain on the outer horizon of experience as possibly relevant, and what will be immediately taken into account as essential.

Key Concepts

• We can and do zero in on significant content in the field of experience because this field is not neutral to us but is structured in terms of our interests and our capacity for getting at what is in it.
• Any object which we experience must appear in this field and therefore must appear in terms of our dominant interest at that moment, and as attainable by some variant of the activity which generated the field.
• Since we create the field in terms of our interests, only possibly relevant facts can appear. Relevance is thus already built in.
• racing fits into a nested context of activities, games, sports, contests. To see an activity as a horse race is to organize it in terms of the intention to win.
• The machine would pick out Smith's mother's death, as a fact about Smith, along with all the others, such as that Smith's second cousin has been elected dogcatcher in some other city, etc., but will then have to do a check on the probable consequences of these different facts before it decides to take them into account or not in placing the bet.

Context

Continuing his account of field-structured experience, Dreyfus emphasizes how concern and activity preselect what can show up as a 'fact', contrasting the human handicapper’s built-in sense of danger with a machine’s need to treat all facts alike and then compute their possible consequences.