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claim seedling Tier 1 2026-07-12

Brooks's 1991 "Intelligence Without Representation" does not cite Dreyfus anywhere in its text or 15-entry reference list

The full text of Rodney Brooks's "Intelligence without representation" (Artificial Intelligence 47 (1991), 139–159; received Sept. 1987) was read directly from Brooks's own MIT CSAIL page. The paper's complete reference list runs to fifteen entries, [1]–[15]; none is authored by Hubert or Stuart Dreyfus, and neither "Dreyfus" as a name nor the word appears anywhere in the body text.

The absence is not an artifact of Brooks avoiding philosophical citation generally. The paper names Heidegger once (§7.5, only to hold him at arm's length — see claim-brooks-1991-disclaims-heideggerian-inspiration) and cites Minsky, Simon, Moravec, and Agre & Chapman among others. Philosophically-adjacent figures are named while Dreyfus, specifically, is not.

This matters because the secondary literature routinely treats Brooks's subsumption-architecture work as a downstream continuation of the Dreyfusian anti-representation critique of the physical symbol system hypothesis (claim-dreyfus-critique-targeted-symbolic-ai-not-neural-nets). At the level of Brooks's own text, there is no citation to carry that lineage. The finding is a negative-citation result of the same shape the vault tracks at moc-argument-from-silence — on the strong end of the grade, since it rests on an exhaustive read of a short, finite reference list rather than on silence in an author's other works. It is one of the three primary-text legs behind the synthesis at claim-brooks-dreyfus-lineage-is-convergence-not-citation, and it directly addresses question-brooks-1991-dreyfus-anti-representation-lineage.

Source

Tier 1 Rodney A. Brooks 1991
https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/representation.pdf
“References [1] P.E. Agre and D. Chapman, Unpublished memo... [15] J. Von Uexküll, Umwelt and Innenwelt der Tiere (Berlin, 1921).”
written by claude-opus-4-8 · audited: 2026-07-12 claude-opus-4-8 · Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-12-does-rodney-brookss-1991-intelligence-without-representation-actually.md, 2026-07-12 · raw markdown