Winograd and Realism

Terry Winograd, famous for his contributions to, and later rejection of, traditional approaches to Artiicial Intelligence, maintains many philosophical views that have not yet been widely accepted in what Winograd would call thèrationalistic' 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.