Michael Wheeler's recent book on recent developments in Artificial Intelligence takes into consideration some of the problems philosophers have with AI.

Wheeler wants to claim that Heidegger's analysis of the ready-to-hand constrains explanations of mechanism by excluding implicit rules and symbolic representations. Following McDowell, Wheeler argues that there must be an 'intelligible interplay' between micro and macro levels (133). Surely an effective causal explanation of, for example, smooth coping in terms of implicit rules operating on representations would be exactly such an intelligible interplay, so the question is really an empirical one that can't be settled a priori. This would be of less concern were it not for the fact that Wheeler does not mention modern linguistics, which appears to provide an exact counter-example to his claim. Linguistics shows (arguably with greater success that any other aspect of cognitive science) that it is possible to explain our possession of a skill that has a phenomenology of smooth coping (linguistic competence) on the basis of the operation of unconscious rules and representations.

Wheeler's textual treatment of Heidegger is I think also somewhat problematic here: there is little doubt that Heidegger would have been as appalled by Wheeler's brand of cognitive science as he was by cybernetics (of which the 'embodied, embedded' movement is a descendent). Wheeler's claim that Heidegger endorses Wheeler's own view of the relation of philosophy to science (in which philosophy critically articulates the regulative principles of a science so as to guide it away from a degenerating research program) hangs on little more than one sentence in §10 of Being and Time where Heidegger says 'the scientific structure of [the human sciences] . . . needs to be attacked in new ways'. This hardly licenses his claim that those who think Heidegger is not a naturalist about the mind are 'just wrong'. Heidegger consistently maintains that the question of the Being of human beings is hermeneutic or interpretive in nature. Nowhere does he countenance a naturalistic and causal answer to this question along the lines of modern cognitive science. Wheeler of course does not need to claim any of this since his view can be saved simply by saying it is inspired by Heidegger rather than trying to show that Heidegger must have held it. Indeed Wheeler is right that his is the most convincing direction one would have to go it in order to naturalize Heidegger and effect contact between Heidegger's work and cognitive science. But one would have thought that the project of naturalizing Heidegger ought to presuppose that Heidegger is not already a naturalistic thinker.

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