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Understanding Computers and Cognition
Winograd and Flores's 1986 manifesto arguing that contrary to current belief, one cannot construct machines that exhibit intelligent behavior—a Heideggerian bomb dropped into the AI establishment.
Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design (1986) was the product of Terry Winograd's collaboration with Fernando Flores, synthesizing Heideggerian phenomenology, Maturana's biology of cognition, and speech act theory into a systematic critique of AI's rationalistic foundations. The book's central claim was stark: computers cannot understand, and the attempt to build artificial minds rests on a philosophical error. Intelligence is not symbol manipulation; understanding is not representation-formation; human cognition is embodied, situated, and constituted by history in ways formal systems cannot replicate. The practical prescription followed directly: design computers to support human understanding, not to replace it.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book proceeded in three movements. First, a philosophical dismantling of the 'rationalistic tradition'—the assumption, traceable through Descartes, Leibniz, and logical positivism, that knowledge is forming correct representations of an objective world and intelligence is manipulating those representations according to formal rules. Every expert system, every natural language interface, every planning system assumed this foundation. SHRDLU