Overview
Agre's formative period at the MIT AI Lab, spanning his PhD work through his postdoctoral research. During this time he moved from working within the planning paradigm to mounting a fundamental critique of it, developing deictic representation and the Pengi system as alternatives.
This period was shaped by the intellectual ferment at MIT in the 1980s, where the dominant symbolic AI paradigm was coming under pressure from multiple directions — connectionism, robotics, and situated action approaches. Agre's contribution was distinctive in drawing on continental philosophy, particularly phenomenology, to ground his technical critique.