CONCEPT
The Background Problem
The vast, tacit, culturally constituted fabric of shared understanding against which every explicit act of thought occurs—and which, Dreyfus argued, cannot be formalized without infinite regress and cannot be fully captured even by statistical approximation from text.
The background is Dreyfus's term for the totality of shared practices, common-sense assumptions, and tacit understandings that make intelligent action possible. It is the knowledge that a restaurant is not a place to lie down, that 'Can you pass the salt?' is not a question about physical capability, that a colleague's 'Fine' is not always fine. These understandings are not stored as rules, not retrieved from memory, not the product of inference from premises. They are the medium within which explicit thought operates, constituted by the way embodied beings inhabit a culturally shared world. Dreyfus identified the background as the fundamental obstacle to artificial intelligence in any form—first for symbolic AI, which tried to formalize it and failed catastrophically, then for statistical AI, which approximates it with extraordinary sophistication but whose remaining gaps, Dreyfus argued, become most consequential precisely where common sense matters most.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Classical symbolic AI attempted to