"Human beings are somehow already situated in such a way that what they need in order to cope with things is distributed around them where they need it, not packed away like a trunk full of objects, or even carefully indexed in a filing cabinet."
— Dreyfus, Hubert L. (b. 1929)
Author
Place of Publication
Cambridge
Publisher
MIT Press
Date
1999
Metaphor
"Human beings are somehow already situated in such a way that what they need in order to cope with things is distributed around them where they need it, not packed away like a trunk full of objects, or even carefully indexed in a filing cabinet."
Metaphor in Context
Whatever it is that enables human beings to zero in on the relevant facts without definitively excluding others which might become relevant is so hard to describe that it has only recently become a clearly focused problem for philosophers. It has to do with the way man is at home in his world, has it comfortably wrapped around him, so to speak. Human beings are somehow already situated in such a way that what they need in order to cope with things is distributed around them where they need it, not packed away like a trunk full of objects, or even carefully indexed in a filing cabinet. This system of relations which makes it possible to discover objects when they are needed is our home or our world. To put this less metaphorically it is helpful to return to Charles Taylor's extension of the horse-racing example.
(p. 260)
(p. 260)
Provenance
Reading and searching at Google Books
Citation
Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason 6th printing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
Date of Entry
02/22/2011
