Dreyfus & Dreyfus's 1988 Daedalus essay blames classical AI's mid-1980s stall on the commonsense-knowledge problem, crediting Heidegger's critique of Husserl together with the later Wittgenstein's reversal

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In the same 1988 Daedalus essay that draws the Minsky/Husserl frames-noema parallel (claim-dreyfus-1988-minsky-frames-recapitulate-husserl-noema), Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus credit their philosophical lineage with having predicted the specific failure that, in their account, had by then stalled classical AI: "Indeed, the commonsense knowledge problem has blocked all progress in theoretical AI for the past decade." (p. 32). The essay frames this as vindication of the critique's original diagnosis: that formalizing everyday background knowledge — the very problem Minsky's frames were built to solve — was the load-bearing obstacle classical AI never cleared, not an incidental difficulty around its edges.

The lineage the essay credits is a pair, not Heidegger alone. Every attribution sentence names Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein together: "In the light of Wittgenstein's reversal and Heidegger's devastating critique of Husserl, one of us — Hubert — predicted trouble for symbolic information processing" (p. 31), and the verdict, that the project "had run into just the difficulties Heidegger and Wittgenstein had discovered" (p. 34). Heidegger's critique of Husserl supplies the phenomenological argument; Wittgenstein's abandonment of his own Tractatus supplies a parallel collapse from inside the analytic tradition the essay says AI inherited.

The essay also states the blockage's duration twice, and inconsistently. At p. 32 it is "the past decade"; five printed pages later, at p. 37, it is "fifteen years" — "the commonsense knowledge problem, which has blocked the progress of symbolic representation techniques for fifteen years, may be looming on the neural net horizon." Both sentences open with "Indeed." The two figures are not reconciled anywhere in the essay, and they back-date the stall's onset to roughly 1978 and roughly 1973 respectively — a difference that matters, since the later date puts the stall after Minsky's frames and the earlier one puts it around them.

These are the essay's larger stakes for the frames/noema parallel: not a structural resemblance between two representational theories, but a claim that phenomenology's objection to representationalism predicted in advance where symbolic AI would stall. The essay also calls classical AI "a perfect example of what Imre Lakatos has called a degenerating research program" (p. 33, endnote 58 → Lakatos, Philosophical Papers, ed. Worrall, CUP 1978) — one sentence, no page cited, undeveloped — and names Rosenblatt's connectionism as the rival the same critique vindicates (claim-dreyfus-1988-connectionism-was-vindicated-not-target, entity-imre-lakatos, claim-jordanous-precursor-quote-and-dreyfus-1988-vindication-quote-are-same-essay).