Michael P. Frank
Stanford University
July 16, 1991
Abstract
Terry
Winograd, famous for his contributions to, and later rejection of,
traditional approaches to Artificial Intelligence, maintains many
philosophical views that have not yet been widely accepted in what Winograd
would call the `rationalistic' community. One of the most
controversial of these is his Heideggerian rejection of `realism', the
ontological doctrine that objects of perception and cognition exist
objectively outside the mind. In the ongoing debate on this issue
among the Symbolic Systems faculty at Stanford, there has been much
opposition to Winograd,
partly resulting from some basic misunderstandings about the exact
nature of his rejection of realism, including its motivations and
implications. In this paper, I will carefully explain Winograd's
view on realism, and show why I think it is reasonable.