PERSON
John McCarthy
American computer scientist (1927–2011), coiner of the term 'artificial intelligence,' organizer of the Dartmouth Workshop of 1956, and one of the principal figures Dreyfus's critique targeted across four decades.
John McCarthy was the founding father of symbolic AI. He coined the term 'artificial intelligence' in the proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop, co-invented Lisp (the dominant AI programming language for decades), and developed the situation calculus and circumscription that shaped formal approaches to knowledge representation. His philosophical commitments—that intelligence is fundamentally symbol manipulation, that common sense can in principle be formalized, that the frame problem is a technical puzzle to be solved—made him Dreyfus's most consistent intellectual opponent. The opposition was productive: McCarthy's rigor forced Dreyfus to sharpen his arguments, and McCarthy's specific technical contributions gave Dreyfus's abstract phenomenological objections concrete targets. The two never agreed on the fundamentals, but the disagreement produced some of the most important philosophical exchanges in the history of AI.
In The You On AI Field Guide
McCarthy's 1956 proposal for the Dartmouth Workshop articulated the paradigm's founding ambition with characteristic directness: that 'every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so