The Computational Metaphor and Artificial Intelligence: A Reflective Examination of a Theoretical Falsework

be illustrated by the reaction to Winograd and Flores’s (1986) recent book Understanding Computers and Cognition. In personal comments, the book and its authors have been savaged. (Winograd, in particular, has been described as a turncoat because the book constitutes such a radical departure from his early work.) Published comments are, of course, more temperate (Vellino et al. 1987) but still reveal the hypersensitivity of the AI community in general to any challenge or criticism. Similar reactions to Since its inception at Dartmouth in 1956, AI has strongly been championed by its advocates (H. Simon, A. Newell, E. Feigenbaum, P. McCorduck, and so on) and strongly challenged by its critics (J. Weizenbaum, J. Searle, H. Dreyfus and S. Dreyfus, T. Roszack, and so on). Despite (perhaps because of) the significant amount of highly charged debate between defenders and debunkers, little merit has been afforded those who would engage in a reflective analysis of the underlying assumptions, paradigms, metaphors,and models of AI. Articles