Key Arguments

• Dreyfus reports that Weizenbaum 'asserts that cognitive science, because it merely seeks to give a mechanical account of how the mind works rather than some sort of general theory on the model of physics or Chomskian linguistics, cannot be taken seriously as a contribution to our understanding of the mind.'
• Dreyfus grants a conditional: 'If the mind is even in part an information-processing mechanism, which Weizenbaum assumes and I doubt, then an explanation of its capacities in terms of its functional components and their interactions would, indeed, be just the kind of understanding one would hope to obtain.'
• He cites John Haugeland's 'The Plausibility of Cognitive Psychology' as providing a detailed account of this kind of mechanistic-functional understanding, suggesting that cognitive science is not trivially or obviously inadequate if its basic information‑processing assumption were true.

Source Quotes

160. In this connection Weizenbaum asserts that cognitive science, because it merely seeks to give a mechanical account of how the mind works rather than some sort of general theory on the model of physics or Chomskian linguistics, cannot be taken seriously as a contribution to our understanding of the mind. If the mind is even in part an information-processing mechanism, which Weizenbaum assumes and I doubt, then an explanation of its capacities in terms of its functional components and their interactions would, indeed, be just the kind of understanding one would hope to obtain.

In this connection Weizenbaum asserts that cognitive science, because it merely seeks to give a mechanical account of how the mind works rather than some sort of general theory on the model of physics or Chomskian linguistics, cannot be taken seriously as a contribution to our understanding of the mind. If the mind is even in part an information-processing mechanism, which Weizenbaum assumes and I doubt, then an explanation of its capacities in terms of its functional components and their interactions would, indeed, be just the kind of understanding one would hope to obtain. For a detailed account of this sort of understanding, see John Haugeland's "The Plausibility of Cognitive Psychology," cited in note 45 above.

If the mind is even in part an information-processing mechanism, which Weizenbaum assumes and I doubt, then an explanation of its capacities in terms of its functional components and their interactions would, indeed, be just the kind of understanding one would hope to obtain. For a detailed account of this sort of understanding, see John Haugeland's "The Plausibility of Cognitive Psychology," cited in note 45 above. 148.

Key Concepts

• In this connection Weizenbaum asserts that cognitive science, because it merely seeks to give a mechanical account of how the mind works rather than some sort of general theory on the model of physics or Chomskian linguistics, cannot be taken seriously as a contribution to our understanding of the mind.
• If the mind is even in part an information-processing mechanism, which Weizenbaum assumes and I doubt, then an explanation of its capacities in terms of its functional components and their interactions would, indeed, be just the kind of understanding one would hope to obtain.
• For a detailed account of this sort of understanding, see John Haugeland's "The Plausibility of Cognitive Psychology," cited in note 45 above.

Context

Still in his extended commentary on Weizenbaum in the Introduction to the Revised Edition, Dreyfus distinguishes his own phenomenological doubts about the information-processing model from a conditional defense of cognitive science’s explanatory aims against Weizenbaum’s blanket rejection.