Current reading:

• James Paul Gee: Discourse Analysis
• Ian Hutchby: Conversation and Technology
• Christopher Gauker: Conditionals in Context
• Meredith Williams: Wittgenstein,Mind and Meaning

Recent reading

• Yan Huang: Pragmatics. A recent textbook that I used in the Pragmatics course in 2007.
• Norbert Wiener: The Human Use of Human Beings. A classic book on cybernetics and society.
• N. Katherine Hayles: How we became posthuman.
• Hubert L. Dreyfus: What computers can't do. A very influential critique of GOFAI, which has prompted new research directions such as Brooks' three-layered architectures, neural nets, and reinforcement learning. BTW, In the 1993 edition, all these are subjected to a similarly devastating critique resting on the same argument as the 1972 edition: that commonsense background cannot be formalised.
• Saul A Kripke: Wittgenstein on rules and private language. I'm working on alternatives to cognitivst/representationalist semantics.
• Winther/Jorgensen: Diskursanalys som teori och praktik. I want to connect this to the Kripke book; poststructuralist discourse analysis presupposes a Wittgenstinian view on language but concentrates on exploring the consequences for science and society. This shows the broad implications of different theories of language.
• Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores: Understanding Computers and Cognition. Winograd, a former AI champion, takes the Dreyfusian critique seriously, combines it Maturana's ideas about autopoiesis, and ends up a researcher in human-computer interaction. A very nice book, but the final chapter on the "communicator" software is not convincing.
• Joseph Weizenbaum: Computer power and human reason. This is a very political book warning against the risks of science viewing man as an object, and of technology in general. Some interesting points but the case is severly overstated, appearing to lead to the conclusion that science, and computer science in particular, should be completely abandoned.
• Hubert L. Dreyfus: Being-in-the-world. This was my introduction to the phenomenological critique of the traditional style of Artificial Intelligence which is still very much alive in research on dialogue systems.

Future reading

• Christopher Gauker: Words without meaning. Appears to offer an alternative to representational semantics, while still retaining explanatory power.