In this paper, we examine the qualitative moral impact of machine learning-based clinical decision support systems in the process of medical diagnosis. To date, discussions about machine learning in this context have focused on problems that can be measured and assessed quantitatively, such as by estimating the extent of potential harm or calculating incurred risks. We maintain that such discussions neglect the qualitative moral impact of these technologies. Drawing on the philosophical approaches of technomoral change and technological mediation theory, which (...) explore the interplay between technologies and morality, we present an analysis of concerns related to the adoption of machine learning-aided medical diagnosis. We analyze anticipated moral issues that machine learning systems pose for different stakeholders, such as bias and opacity in the way that models are trained to produce diagnoses, changes to how health care providers, patients, and developers understand their roles and professions, and challenges to existing forms of medical legislation. Albeit preliminary in nature, the insights offered by the technomoral change and the technological mediation approaches expand and enrich the current discussion about machine learning in diagnostic practices, bringing distinct and currently underexplored areas of concern to the forefront. These insights can contribute to a more encompassing and better informed decision-making process when adapting machine learning techniques to medical diagnosis, while acknowledging the interests of multiple stakeholders and the active role that technologies play in generating, perpetuating, and modifying ethical concerns in health care. (shrink)

Numerous studies in the fields of Science and Technology Studies and philosophy of technology have repeatedly stressed that scientific practices are collective practices that crucially depend on the presence of scientific technologies. Postphenomenology is one of the movements that aims to draw philosophical conclusions from these observations through an analysis of human–technology interactions in scientific practice. Two other attempts that try to integrate these insights into philosophy of science are Ronald Giere’s Scientific Perspectivism and Davis Baird’s Thing Knowledge. In this (...) paper, these two approaches will be critically discussed from the perspective of postphenomenology. We will argue that Giere and Baird problematically assume that scientific instruments have a determined function, and that all human members of a scientific collective have immediate access to this function. However, these assumptions also allow them to offer a clear answer to the question how scientists can collectively relate to scientific phenomena. Such an answer is not yet formulated within the postphenomenological perspective. By adding a postphenomenological touch to the semiotic approach in Actor-Network Theory, we offer an account of how different individual human–technology relations are integrated into larger scientific collectives. We do so by showing that scientific instruments not only help constitute scientific phenomena, but also the intersubjectivity within such collectives. (shrink)

During the Corona pandemic, it became clear that people are vulnerable to potentially harmful nonhuman agents, as well as that our own biological existence potentially poses a threat to others, and vice versa. This suggests a certain reciprocity in our relations with both humans and nonhumans. In his The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty introduces the notion of the flesh to capture this reciprocity. Building on this idea, he proposes to understand our relationships with other humans, as well as those (...) with nonhuman beings as having a chiasmic structure: to sense, or perceive another entity in a particular way simultaneously implies to be sensed or perceived in a particular way by this other entity. In this paper, we show how a postphenomenological perspective expands on Merleau-Ponty: first, it more radically interprets Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh by not only considering it to be a medium that is the condition of possibility for vision but as pointing to the constitution of an intercorporeal field in which entities—both human and nonhuman—mutually sense one another. Second, it augments Merleau-Ponty’s thought by drawing attention to how technologies mediate chiasmic relations. This is clarified through the example of the facemask, which reveals the chiasmic structure of our relation with nonhuman entities, and shows that technologies co-constitute interpersonal relationships by making humans present to one another in a particular way. We suggest that these aspects are not unique to the facemask, but point to a general technologically mediated chiasmic structure of human-world relations. (shrink)

A central issue in postphenomenology is how to explain the multistability of technologies: how can it be that specific technologies can be used for a wide variety of purposes (the “multi”), while not for all purposes (the “stability”)? For example, a table can be used for the purpose of sleeping, having dinner at, or even for staging a fencing match, but not for baking a cake. One explanation offered in the literature is that the (material) design of a technology puts (...) constraints on the purposes for which technologies can be used. In this paper, I argue that such an explanation—while partly correct—fails to address the role of the environment in which human beings operate in putting constraints on technology use. I suggest that James Gibson’s affordance theory helps highlighting how stabilities in technology use arise in the interaction between human being and environment. Building on more recent approaches in affordance theory, I suggest that the environment can be conceptualized as a “rich landscape of affordances” that solicits certain actions, which are not just cued by the environment’s material structure, but also by the normativity present in the form of life in which a human being participates. I briefly contrast the approach to affordances developed in this paper with how Klenk (2020) and Tollon (2021) have conceptualized the “affordance character” of technological artifacts, and highlight how a focus on the situated nature of affordances augments these earlier conceptualizations. (shrink)

While today there is much discussion about the ethics of artificial intelligence, less work has been done on the philosophical nature of AI. Drawing on Bergson and Ricoeur, this paper proposes to use the concepts of time, process, and narrative to conceptualize AI and its normatively relevant impact on human lives and society. Distinguishing between a number of different ways in which AI and time are related, the paper explores what it means to understand AI as narrative, as process, or (...) as the emergent outcome of processes and narratives. It pays particular attention to what it calls the “narrator” and “time machine” roles of AI and the normative implications of these roles. It argues that AI processes and narratives shape our time and link past, present, and future in particular ways that are ethically and politically significant. (shrink)

In the philosophy of technology after the empirical turn, little attention has been paid to language and its relation to technology. In this programmatic and explorative paper, it is proposed to use the later Wittgenstein, not only to pay more attention to language use in philosophy of technology, but also to rethink technology itself—at least technology in its aspect of tool, technology-in-use. This is done by outlining a working account of Wittgenstein’s view of language and by then applying that account (...) to technology—turning around Wittgenstein’s metaphor of the toolbox. Using Wittgenstein’s concepts of language games and form of life and coining the term ‘technology games’, the paper proposes and argues for a use-oriented, holistic, transcendental, social, and historical approach to technology which is empirically but also normatively sensitive, and which takes into account implicit knowledge and know-how. It gives examples of interaction with social robots to support the relevance of this project for understanding and evaluating today’s technologies, makes comparisons with authors in philosophy of technology such as Winner and Ihde, and sketches the contours of a phenomenology and hermeneutics of technology use that may help us to understand but also to gain a more critical relation to specific uses of concrete technologies in everyday contexts. Ultimately, given the holism argued for, it also promises a more critical relation to the games and forms of life technologies are embedded in—to the ways we do things. (shrink)

Most accounts of responsibility focus on one type of responsibility, moral responsibility, or address one particular aspect of moral responsibility such as agency. This article outlines a broader framework to think about responsibility that includes causal responsibility, relational responsibility, and what I call “narrative responsibility” as a form of “hermeneutic responsibility”, connects these notions of responsibility with different kinds of knowledge, disciplines, and perspectives on human being, and shows how this framework is helpful for mapping and analysing how artificial intelligence (...) (AI) challenges human responsibility and sense-making in various ways. Mobilizing recent hermeneutic approaches to technology, the article argues that next to, and interwoven with, other types of responsibility such as moral responsibility, we also have narrative and hermeneutic responsibility—in general and for technology. For example, it is our task as humans to make sense of, with and, if necessary, against AI. While from a posthumanist point of view, technologies also contribute to sense-making, humans are the experiencers and bearers of responsibility and always remain in charge when it comes to this hermeneutic responsibility. Facing and working with a world of data, correlations, and probabilities, we are nevertheless condemned to make sense. Moreover, this also has a normative, sometimes even political aspect: acknowledging and embracing our hermeneutic responsibility is important if we want to avoid that our stories are written elsewhere—through technology. (shrink)

Most accounts of responsibility focus on one type of responsibility, moral responsibility, or address one particular aspect of moral responsibility such as agency. This article outlines a broader framework to think about responsibility that includes causal responsibility, relational responsibility, and what I call “narrative responsibility” as a form of “hermeneutic responsibility”, connects these notions of responsibility with different kinds of knowledge, disciplines, and perspectives on human being, and shows how this framework is helpful for mapping and analysing how artificial intelligence (...) (AI) challenges human responsibility and sense-making in various ways. Mobilizing recent hermeneutic approaches to technology, the article argues that next to, and interwoven with, other types of responsibility such as moral responsibility, we also have narrative and hermeneutic responsibility—in general and for technology. For example, it is our task as humans to make sense of, with and, if necessary, against AI. While from a posthumanist point of view, technologies also contribute to sense-making, humans are the experiencers and bearers of responsibility and always remain in charge when it comes to this hermeneutic responsibility. Facing and working with a world of data, correlations, and probabilities, we are nevertheless condemned to make sense. Moreover, this also has a normative, sometimes even political aspect: acknowledging and embracing our hermeneutic responsibility is important if we want to avoid that our stories are written elsewhere—through technology. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy of technology after the empirical turn has surprisingly little to say on the relation between language and technology. This essay describes this gap, offers a preliminary discussion of how language and technology may be related to show that there is a rich conceptual space to be gained, and begins to explore some ways in which the gap could be bridged by starting from within specific philosophical subfields and traditions. One route starts from philosophy of language (both ‘‘analytic’’ and (...) ‘‘continental’’: Searle and Heidegger) and discusses some potential implications for thinking about technology; another starts from artefact-oriented approaches in philosophy of technology and STS and shows that these approaches might helpfully be extended by theorizing relationships between language and techno- logical artefacts. The essay concludes by suggesting a research agenda, which invites more work on the relation between language and technology. (shrink)

Images in science are often beautiful but their beauty cannot be explained using traditional aesthetic theories. Available theories either rely upon concepts antithetical to science, e.g. regularity as an index of God’s design, or they omit concepts intrinsic to scientific imaging, e.g. the image is taken as a representation of “beautiful nature.” I argue that the scientific image is not a representation but a construction: a series of mutually defining intra-actions, where “intra-action” signifies that the object depicted cannot be extricated (...) from the technologies of picturing. But how can the beauty of intra-active, picturing-depicted constructions be explained, when philosophical aesthetics traditionally understands objects of appreciation to be distinct, discrete items? I argue that metaphor provides a model for the aesthetics of the scientific image, on the grounds that it is itself an intra-action that promotes salience in perception. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to give an outline of digital hermeneutics understood as the encounter between hermeneutics and digital technology, particularly the Internet. In the first part, I want to raise the attention of IT researchers and hermeneuticists to the theoretic and practical relevance of the encounter of their areas of research that are sometimes considered as incompatible to each other. There is still a lot of translation work to be done in order to get these two cultures (...) come closer to and profit from each other. The second part of the paper deals with the foundation of digital hermeneutics on what I call—following Heidegger’s and Vattimo’s paths—digital ontology as opposed to digital metaphysics. (shrink)

QBism is one of the main candidates for an epistemic interpretation of quantum mechanics. According to QBism, the quantum state or the wavefunction represents the subjective degrees of belief of the agent assigning the state. But, although the quantum state is not part of the furniture of the world, quantum mechanics grasps the real via the Born rule which is a consistency condition for the probability assignments of the agent. In this paper, we evaluate the plausibility of recent criticism of (...) QBism. We focus on the consequences of the subjective character of the quantum state, the issue of realism and the problem of the evolution of the quantum state in QBism. In particular, drawing upon Born’s notion of invariance as the mark of the real, it is argued that there is no essential difference between Einstein’s program of ‘the real’ and QBists’ realism. Also, it will be argued that QBism can account for the unitary evolution of the quantum state. (shrink)

Understanding phenomenology as a philosophical approach in which human-world relationships are analysed, as well as the constitution of subjectivity and objectivity within these relationships, this paper addresses some issues related to the transcendental dimension in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. An attempt is also made to re-address some issues related to phenomenology and its transcendental dimension as understood by adherents of hermeneutical phenomenology such as Paul Ricoeur. In essence, the focus of the paper is on exploring the following issues: what (...) is this transcendental turn in Husserl’s philosophy? Is this an ‘unfortunate turn’ toward a neo-Kantian brand of transcendental idealism? What is the significance of this transcendental dimension in Husserl’s phenomenology? Is there any distinctive phenomenological programme that, despite their differences, is common to both Husserl and Heidegger? This line of questioning proceeds from the observations made by Paul Ricoeur that, “with the development of his ‘hermeneutics of facticity’, Heidegger rejected Husserl’s neo-Kantian brand of transcendental phenomenology in favour of a de-transcendental and historicized way of doing philosophy, that Heidegger understood the subject to be ‘factic’, in contrast to Husserl’s pure ego as the source of the world constitution”(Hahn, 1995). Ultimately, however, the thrust of this exploration is towards understanding the transcendental way of doing philosophy and the so-called historicized way of philosophizing as two distinct ways to reach one common goal, the transcendental dimension of meaning. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 7, Edition 1 May 2007. (shrink)

This article offers a discussion of the connection between technology and values and, specifically, I take a closer look at ethically sound design. In order to bring the discussion into a concrete context, the theory of Value Sensitive Design (VSD) will be the focus point. To illustrate my argument concerning design ethics, the discussion involves a case study of an augmented window, designed by the VSD Research Lab, which has turned out to be a potentially surveillance-enabling technology. I call attention (...) to a “positivist problem” that has to do with the connection between the design context and the use context, which VSD seems to presuppose, and I argue that it is necessary to clearly distinguish between the two, since the designers’ intentions do not always correspond with the users’ practice; in fact, the relation between design and use is very complex and principally unpredictable. Thus, a design theory must accept that foresight is limited to anticipation rather than prediction. To overcome the positivist problem, I suggest a phenomenological approach to technology inspired by Don Ihde’s concept of multistability. This argument, which is general in nature and thus applies to any theory of design ethics, is intended as a constructive criticism, which can hopefully contribute to the further development of design ethics. (shrink)

Screen time has become a hot button issue in psychology with researchers fiercely debating its mental effects. If we want to understand the psychological dynamics of technology use, however, a numerical conceptualization of screen time will lead us to gloss over crucial distinctions. To make this point, the present article takes a hermeneutic approach to a negative form of screen time known as ‘phubbing’, which is the practice of snubbing conversational partners in favor of one’s phone. Using interview data, it (...) is demonstrated that whether or not phone use amounts to phubbing, that is, whether or not it tips over and becomes harmful, depends on a host of contextual factors such as relation (who), content (what), purpose (why), timing (when), and communication (how). These findings demonstrate that not all screen time is created equal: what is harmful and inappropriate in one context is benign in another, and vice versa. Simply put, screen time is not a numerical entity whose causal effects we can measure and explain, but a meaningful activity that we must try to understand. (shrink)

In this essay, I first analyze the extension of hermeneutical interpretation in the Heideggerian sense to products of contemporary technology which are components of our “lifeworld”. Products of technology, such as airplanes, laptops, cellular phones, washing machines, or vacuum cleaners might be compared with what Heidegger calls the “Ready-to-hand” (das Zuhandene) with regard to utilitarian objects such as a hammer, planer, needle and door handle in Being and Time. Our life with our equipment, which represents the “Ready-to-hand” in Heidegger's sense (...) of the word, is determined by temporalization (Zeitigung) which cannot be separated and isolated from the wholeness of things in the world. In the second part of my paper, I explore the positive achievement of material hermeneutics (Don Ihde) with regard to its extension to technoscience and the discussion of how such hermeneutics can contribute to the preservation of our threatened lifeworld, but also to explore the possibilities of how technical inventions, medical innovations could improve our way of life. (shrink)

Digital technologies are frequently considered as lacking material aspects. Today, it is evident that behind digital technologies lies a huge and complex material infrastructure in the form of fiber optic cables, servers, satellites, and screens. Postphenomenology has theorized the relations to material things as embodiment relations. Taking into account that technologies can also have hermeneutic aspects, this theory defines hermeneutic relations as those in which we read the world through technologies. The article opens with a review of some theoretical developments (...) to hermeneutic relations with a special focus on digital technologies. The article suggests that in the digital world, material hermeneutics needs to be updated as it shifts from a scientific to an everyday technological context. Now, technologies not only “give voice” to things, they also produce new meanings to informational structures and direct users to certain meanings. When it comes to digital technologies, especially those involving artificial intelligence (AI), the technology actively mediates the world. In postphenomenological terms, it possesses a technological intentionality. The postphenomenological formula should be updated to reflect this type of technological intentionality, by reversing the arrow of intentionality so that it points to the user, rather than from the user. (shrink)

Digital technologies are frequently considered as lacking material aspects. Today, it is evident that behind digital technologies lies a huge and complex material infrastructure in the form of fiber optic cables, servers, satellites, and screens. Postphenomenology has theorized the relations to material things as embodiment relations. Taking into account that technologies can also have hermeneutic aspects, this theory defines hermeneutic relations as those in which we read the world through technologies. The article opens with a review of some theoretical developments (...) to hermeneutic relations with a special focus on digital technologies. The article suggests that in the digital world, material hermeneutics needs to be updated as it shifts from a scientific to an everyday technological context. Now, technologies not only “give voice” to things, they also produce new meanings to informational structures and direct users to certain meanings. When it comes to digital technologies, especially those involving artificial intelligence (AI), the technology actively mediates the world. In postphenomenological terms, it possesses a technological intentionality. The postphenomenological formula should be updated to reflect this type of technological intentionality, by reversing the arrow of intentionality so that it points to the user, rather than from the user. (shrink)

Numerous studies in the fields of Science and Technology Studies and philosophy of technology have repeatedly stressed that scientific practices are collective practices that crucially depend on the presence of scientific technologies. Postphenomenology is one of the movements that aims to draw philosophical conclusions from these observations through an analysis of human–technology interactions in scientific practice. Two other attempts that try to integrate these insights into philosophy of science are Ronald Giere’s Scientific Perspectivism and Davis Baird’s Thing Knowledge. In this (...) paper, these two approaches will be critically discussed from the perspective of postphenomenology. We will argue that Giere and Baird problematically assume that scientific instruments have a determined function, and that all human members of a scientific collective have immediate access to this function. However, these assumptions also allow them to offer a clear answer to the question how scientists can collectively relate to scientific phenomena. Such an answer is not yet formulated within the postphenomenological perspective. By adding a postphenomenological touch to the semiotic approach in Actor-Network Theory, we offer an account of how different individual human–technology relations are integrated into larger scientific collectives. We do so by showing that scientific instruments not only help constitute scientific phenomena, but also the intersubjectivity within such collectives. (shrink)

In recent years several approaches—philosophical, sociological, psychological—have been developed to come to grips with our profoundly technologically mediated world. However, notwithstanding the vast merit of each, they illuminate only certain aspects of technological mediation. This paper is a preliminary attempt at a philosophical reflection on technological mediation as such—deploying the concepts of ‘transparency’ and ‘opacity’ as heuristic instruments. Hence, we locate a ‘theory of transparency’ within several theoretical frameworks—respectively classic phenomenology, media theory, Actor Network Theory, postphenomenology, several ethnographical, psychological, and (...) sociological perspectives, and finally, the Critical Theory of Technology. Subsequently, we render a general, systematic overview of these theories, thereby conjecturing what a broad analysis of technological mediation in and of itself might look like—finding, at last, an essential contradiction between transparency of ‘use’ and transparency of social origins and effects. (shrink)

A noticeable push toward using agricultural crops for ethanol production and for undertaking research to expand the range of possible biofuels began to dominate discussions of agricultural science and policy in the United States around 2005. This paper proposes two complementary philosophical approaches to examining the philosophical questions that should be posed in connection with this turn of events. One stresses a critique of underlying epistemological commitments in the scientific models being developed to determine the feasibility of various biofuels proposals. (...) The second begins with a broader set of questions about the philosophical goals of agriculture, then queries the place that a turn to biofuels might have within the philosophy of agriculture. Both are portrayed as viable and important. The paper itself is a preliminary stage-setting reflection on the need for these two types of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

Illusions of control and fantasies of power are important themes in human history and culture. The first objective of this paper is to explore Zarathustran fantasies in the information society, and our dreams of God-like control and mastery over ourselves and the Universe. This paper does not try to be faithful to Nietzschean philosophical concepts of Zarathustra, but instead explore cultural themes, which can be related to a mythology of God-like control and omniscient perception. It draws together strands from science (...) fiction, anthropology, philosophy, technology development, systems engineering, socio-technical systems, finance and e-business to set out how we have fallen for the technocultural illusions we have created. The paper then shifts gear, and in an attempt to address these technocultural problems, identifies an intellectual trajectory centred on an anthropological perspective. Using examples from e-business and Schwartz’s universal model of human values, applied into a technocultural context, the paper shows how it is possible to create meaningful systems of organisation that utilise advanced technologies to help provide a deeply value-laden cultural system. Our world is changing fundamentally and dramatically, and we desperately need new approaches to help us understand these transitions. The paper’s primary contribution is to critique both human-centred thinking, and mechanistic, Taylorist views of organisation and technology. It stimulates debate concerning the relationship between technology and culture as it is worked out in the information society. Shifting the perspective from humans as social, functioning creatures, this paper offers a new human-centred approach based upon humans as cultural, valuing beings. (shrink)

This paper builds a three-part argument in favour of a more transcendentally focused form of ‘postphenomenology’ than is currently practised in philosophy of technology. It does so by problematising two key terms, ‘constitution’ and ‘postphenomenology’, then by arguing in favour of a ‘transcendental empiricist’ approach that draws on the work of Foucault, Derrida, and, in particular, Deleuze. Part one examines ‘constitution’, as it moves from the context of Husserl’s phenomenology to Ihde and Verbeek’s ‘postphenomenology’. I argue that the term tends (...) towards different senses in these contexts, and that this renders its sense more problematic than the work of Ihde and Verbeek makes it appear. Part two examines ‘postphenomenology’. I argue that putatively ‘poststructuralist’ thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze may be better characterised as ‘postphenomenologists’, and that approaching them in this way may allow better access to their work from a philosophy of technology perspective. Part three argues for a ‘transcendental empiricist’ approach to philosophy of technology. In doing so, it argues for a rewriting of contemporary philosophy of technology’s political constitution: since an ‘empirical turn’ in the 1990s, I argue, philosophy of technology has been too narrowly focused on ‘empirical’ issues of fact, and not focused enough on ‘transcendental’ issues concerning conditions for these facts. (shrink)

Many philosophers of science and technology who see themselves as coming “after” Husserl also claim that their phenomenology is hermeneutical. Yet they neither practice the same sort of phenomenology, nor do they all have the same understanding of hermeneutics. Moreover, their differences often seem to be more a function of different pre-selected substantive commitments—say, to take a “material” turn or to be resolutely “empirical”—than the product of any serious effort to clarify what it is be hermeneutical. In this essay, after (...) some discussion of Dilthey’s reception among post-Husserlians (especially Patrick Heelan and Don Ihde), I consider how aspiring hermeneuts might make their own pre-possession of substantive and methodological commitments a hermeneutical topic. This is, of course, is not just a scholarly question of how post-Husserlian phenomenologists might make themselves more phenomenological. Without thoughtful self-awareness of these commitments, one’s assumptions about the use of technology, design, the place of science in the larger culture and in relation to conceptions of human flourishing—all of these assumptions are likely to pass through into technoscientific practice with insufficient critical consideration. (shrink)

Many philosophers of science and technology who see themselves as coming “after” Husserl also claim that their phenomenology is hermeneutical. Yet they neither practice the same sort of phenomenology, nor do they all have the same understanding of hermeneutics. Moreover, their differences often seem to be more a function of different pre-selected substantive commitments—say, to take a “material” turn or to be resolutely “empirical”—than the product of any serious effort to clarify what it is be hermeneutical. In this essay, after (...) some discussion of Dilthey’s reception among post-Husserlians (especially Patrick Heelan and Don Ihde), I consider how aspiring hermeneuts might make their own pre-possession of substantive and methodological commitments a hermeneutical topic. This is, of course, is not just a scholarly question of how post-Husserlian phenomenologists might make themselves more phenomenological. Without thoughtful self-awareness of these commitments, one’s assumptions about the use of technology, design, the place of science in the larger culture and in relation to conceptions of human flourishing—all of these assumptions are likely to pass through into technoscientific practice with insufficient critical consideration. (shrink)

Don Ihde: Heidegger’s technologies: Postphenomenological perspectives Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-10 DOI 10.1007/s11007-012-9215-z Authors Robert C. Scharff, Department of Philosophy, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824-3574, USA Journal Continental Philosophy Review Online ISSN 1573-1103 Print ISSN 1387-2842.

An emerging philosophical perspective called “postphenomenology,” which offers reflection upon human relations to technology, has the potential to increase our understanding of the functions performed by imaging technologies in scientific practice. In what follows, I review some relevant insights and expand them for use in the concrete analysis of practices of image interpretation in science. As a guiding example, I explore how these insights bear upon a contemporary debate in space science over images of the fossilized remains of a river (...) delta on the surface of Mars. These considerations include an analysis of the ways that the objects of study are transformed by the mediating imaging technologies, such as the Mars Orbiter Camera. (shrink)

The emerging school of thought called “postphenomenology” offers a distinct understanding of the ways that people experience technology usage. This perspective combines insights from the philosophical tradition of phenomenology with commitments to the anti-essentialism and nonfoundationalism of American pragmatism. One of postphenomenology’s central positions is that technologies always remain “multistable,” i.e., subject to different uses and meanings. But I suggest that as this perspective matures, philosophical problems are emerging around the notion of multistability, what I call “the problem of invariance” (...) and “the problem of grounding.” These problems point out things that remain unclear within the postphenomenological framework, such as how it handles structural claims regarding a technology’s various stabilities, and how it grounds its claims. How can postphenomenology make structural claims about technology and yet remain anti-essentializing? And on what epistemological basis does it ground its claims about human-technology relations? The paper concludes with a series of prescriptions that, if followed, enable postphenomenology to make edifying claims about technology, all while avoiding the problems of invariance and grounding, and maintaining its commitments to anti-essentialism and nonfoundationalism. (shrink)

The philosophical tradition of phenomenology, with its focus on human bodily perception, can be used to explore the ways scientific instrumentation shapes a user’s experience. Building on Don Ihde’s account of technological embodiment, I develop a framework of concepts for articulating the experience of image interpretation in science. These concepts can be of practical value to the analysis of scientific debates over image interpretation for the ways they draw out the relationships between the image-making processes and the rival scientific explanations (...) of image content. As a guiding example, I explore a contemporary debate over images of the surface of Mars which reveal a landmass that resembles river delta formations on Earth, and which thus has important implications for the history of Martian climate and water flow. The phenomenological framework I develop can be used to help evaluate the different interpretations on offer for these images, and to analyze the roles in this discussion played by spacecraft equipped with cameras and laser and thermal imaging devices. (shrink)

The goal of this article is twofold. First, it aims at sketching the outlines of material hermeneutics as a three-level analysis of technological artefacts. In the first section, we introduce Erwin Panofsky’s three levels of interpretation of an artwork, and we propose to import this approach in the field of philosophy of technology. Second, the rest of the article focuses on the third level, with a specific attention towards big data and algorithms of artificial intelligence. The thesis is that these (...) new technologies are not only radically transforming our interactions with the world, or our modes of production and consumption, but also our worldview. In the second section, we rely on Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism to describe the Scholastic “mental habit” or worldview and its principles. In the third section, we confront this worldview with the mechanistic and informationistic worldviews. Our contribution consists in arguing that (1) despite the differences, the Scholastic, mechanistic, and informationistic worldviews are part of the same logical and causal order that dominated Western epistemology, and (2) today we are facing the appearance of a new worldview that we call “data worldview”. Examples from design, architecture, and visualization of knowledge will be set all along the article. (shrink)

Today, there is an emerging interest for the potential role of hermeneutics in reflecting on the practices related to digital technologies and their consequences. Nonetheless, such an interest has neither given rise to a unitary approach nor to a shared debate. The primary goal of this paper is to map and synthetize the different existing perspectives to pave the way for an open discussion on the topic. The article is developed in two steps. In the first section, the authors analyze (...) digital hermeneutics “in theory” by confronting and systematizing the existing literature. In particular, they stress three main distinctions among the approaches: between “methodological” and “ontological” digital hermeneutics; between data- and text-oriented digital hermeneutics; and between “quantitative” and “qualitative” credos in digital hermeneutics. In the second section, they consider digital hermeneutics “in action”, by critically analyzing the uses of digital data for studying a classical object such as the political opinion. In the conclusion, we will pave the way to an ontological turn in digital hermeneutics. Most of this article is devoted to the methodological issue of interpreting with digital machines. The main task of an ontological digital hermeneutics would consist instead in wondering if it is legitimate, and eventually to which extent, to speak of digital technologies, or at least of some of them, as interpretational machines. (shrink)

This article develops a framework for analysing how digital software and models become mediums for creative imagination in architectural design. To understand the hermeneutics of these relationships, we develop key concepts from Material Engagement Theory (MET) and Postphenomenology (PP). To push these frameworks into the realm of digital design, we develop the concept of Digital Materiality. Digital Materiality describes the way successive layers of mathematics, code, and software come to mediate enactive perception, and the possibilities of creative material engagement actualised (...) in work with software. Just as molecular materials come to transform action with material objects, so digital materiality comes to enable and transform creative practices with computers. Digital architectural design form a new space for ongoing enactive discovery and creativity through manipulation of digital models and their underlying software environments. By shifting relationships within their digital models, architects can direct their attention, intention, and imagination towards widely different aspects of the model. Here, creative imagination becomes a fundamentally situated activity where mind emerges through dynamic interaction between a variety of embodied, material, and cultural domains. (shrink)

Practice-based philosophy of science has gradually arisen in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) and science and technology studies (STS) during the past decades. It studies science as an ensemble of practices and theorising as one of these practices. A recent study has shown how the practice-based approach can be methodologically justified with reference to Peirce and Dewey. In this article, I will explore one consequence of that notion: science, as practice, is necessarily social. I will disambiguate five different senses (...) in which science is social. First, science presupposes language, which is essentially social. Second, practices, including science, are adaptations of the behaviour of an organism to an environment, of which other organisms are a part. Third, practices, including science, are public and hence shareable. Fourth, scientific knowledge can serve as a vehicle of social and moral reform. Fifth, scientific knowledge can be applied to improve the human condition. This fivefold result bears on the problem of realism. (shrink)

Practice-based philosophy of science has gradually arisen in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) and science and technology studies (STS) during the past decades. It studies science as an ensemble of practices and theorising as one of these practices. A recent study has shown how the practice-based approach can be methodologically justified with reference to Peirce and Dewey. In this article, I will explore one consequence of that notion: science, as practice, is necessarily social. I will disambiguate five different senses (...) in which science is social. First, science presupposes language, which is essentially social. Second, practices, including science, are adaptations of the behaviour of an organism to an environment, of which other organisms are a part. Third, practices, including science, are public and hence shareable. Fourth, scientific knowledge can serve as a vehicle of social and moral reform. Fifth, scientific knowledge can be applied to improve the human condition. This fivefold result bears on the problem of realism. (shrink)

ArgumentFilm scholars have long posed the question of the specificity of the film medium and the apparatus of cinema, asking what is unique to cinema, how it constrains and enables filmmakers and audiences in particular ways that other media do not. This question has rarely been considered in relation to scientific film, and here it is posed within the specific context of cell biology: What does the use of time-based media such as film coupled with the microscope allow scientists to (...) experience that other visualization practices do not? Examining three episodes in the twentieth-century study of the cell, this article argues that the apparatus of microcinematography constitutes what might be thought of as a technical portal to another world, a door that determines the experience of the world that lies on the other side of it. In this case, the design of apparatuses to capture time-lapsed images enabled the acceleration of cellular time, bringing it into the realm of human perception and experience. Further, the experience of the cellular temporal world was part of a distinct kind of cell biology, one that was focused on behavior rather than structure, focused on the relation between cells, and between the cell and its milieu rather than on cell-intrinsic features such as chromosomes or organelles. As such, the instruments and technical design of the microcinematographic apparatus may be understood as a kind of materialized epistemology, the history of which can elucidate how cinema was and is used to produce scientific knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that AI-powered voice assistants, just as all technologies, actively mediate our interpretative structures, including values. I show this by explaining the productive role of technologies in the way people make sense of themselves and those around them. More specifically, I rely on the hermeneutics of Gadamer and the material hermeneutics of Ihde to develop a hermeneutic lemniscate as a principle of technologically mediated sense-making. The lemniscate principle links people, technologies and the sociocultural world in the (...) joint production of meaning and explicates the feedback channels between the three counterparts. When people make sense of technologies, they necessarily engage their moral histories to comprehend new technologies and fit them in daily practices. As such, the lemniscate principle offers a chance to explore the moral dynamics taking place during technological appropriation. Using digital voice assistants as an example, I show how these AI-guided devices mediate our moral inclinations, decisions and even our values, while in parallel suggesting how to use and design them in an informed and critical way. (shrink)

Philosophical and technoculture studies surrounding the existential understanding of the human–technology–world experience have seen a slow but steady increase that makes a turn to material hermeneutics in the second decade of the twenty-first century (Ihde in Postphenomenology: essays in the postmodern context. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1993; Capurro in AI Soc 25(1):35–42, 2010; Romele in Digital hermeneutics: philosophical investigations in new media and technologies. Routledge, Abingdon, 2020; among others). This renewed focus makes sense because human–technology–world experiences need to be interpreted. (...) And many of these are more complicated to study, precisely because technology is at the root of the experiences. One interesting subset of technologies is media technologies, also called digital media, which intertwines the device and the content to mediate together in the world (Irwin in Digital media: human-technology connection. Lexington Books, Lanham, 2016). Visual media technologies and media content, together, through what is called moving image technologies, create virtual role-playing, virtual and augmented reality, video games, and social media focused worlds that have become central experiences in contemporary culture. Just as image-based scientific instruments read the world in different ways, so to do these visual mediated experiences. How might this comingled “reading” of technology explain the digital film language and experience? I contend that understanding the existential “early” film experience helps understand the new age of cinema, with implications for digital media, digital representation of the visual, and technoscience and technoculture studies. The material hermeneutics perspective called postphenomenology is one way to study these visually focused human–technology–world perceptual and interpretive experiences. Don Ihde’s methodological framework (1990, 1993, 1996, 2002, 2010, 2012, 2016, 2019) is both an idea from technoscience studies and a set of nuanced vocabulary that helps to explore and reveal variations, patterns, and trajectories of the whole-body experience of technology. This use case will first explore traditional cinema and then the “new age” term “moving image”, to learn more about this complicated and radically transforming technological experience. Work by Don Ihde and Vivian Sobchack is considered. (shrink)

The article discusses the technical image, a central concept in Vilém Flusser’s later main work Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985a). After identifying its various dimensions, the analysis frames the concept as an amalgamation of disciplines, theories, and artistic practices the cultural philosopher Flusser explored during the 1960s and especially the 1970s. In particular, the field of information aesthetics developed by Max Bense and Abraham A. Moles, among others, as well as artistic video practices in France and the United (...) States played an important role in both Flusser’s biography and the formation of his technical image concept. At the same time, in Flusser’s cultural philosophy the technical image is the condition and result of a new kind of human imagination, which in this paper is specified as ‘projective imagination’. (shrink)

As a long‐time scholar of science and art practices, I look particularly at the role of tools and instruments which make these practices possible. I note that science, historically, has favoured visualist imaging, but art, particularly in performance modes, often uses acoustic imaging. Early modern science was dominantly optical in instrumentation, but uses of optics often preceded science use in early modern times. In late modern times, much more complex instrumentation often originated in the sciences, but artists frequently adapted to (...) acoustic practices. Sonifying science, from imaging space phenomena to medical phenomena, is traced here, focusing upon medical sonification in detecting cancers. (shrink)

One of us coined the notion of an “epistemology engine.” The idea is that some particular technology in its workings and use is seen suggestively as a metaphor for the human subject and often for the production of knowledge itself. In this essay, we further develop the conceptand claim that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological commitments, although suggestive, did not lead him to appreciate the epistemological value of materiality. We also take steps towards establishing how an understanding of this topic can provide the (...) basis for reinterpreting the history of phenomenology. (shrink)

Here what I would like to accomplish is to set something of the stage from which the growing recognition of what I shall now term technoscience’s visualism —a term which can accommodate both sciences and engineering, and both imaging and design practices—takes its recognition. I shall very briefly look at the ‘godfathers and peers’ who help set this stage, and then proceed to an examination of a few moments in the development of visualism from da Vinci to computer assisted design (...) (CAD) and beyond. (shrink)

I would like to introduce the notion of machine hermeneutics in this paper. The notion refers to hermeneutical activity performed by machines. Machines are now capable of making the very interpretive tasks, using artificial intelligence algorithms based on the technology of machine learning that used to be the exclusive domain of human beings. In making this claim, I am not talking about possible conscious machines of the future, but those existing here and now. With facial recognition algorithms, for example, machines (...) are now performing routinely what must be regarded as hermeneutical analyses with astounding accuracy and power. Thus, machine hermeneutics supplements Don Ihde’s notion of material hermeneutics. In the latter, it is still human beings who do the interpretation, through the lenses provided the natural sciences; in this case, the natural sciences, or the technology afforded by the sciences, intervene between the human being and the world. In machine hermeneutics, on the contrary, the intervening comes in two layers. On the one hand, there is the usual intervention that Ihde talks about, but on the other, the artificial intelligence algorithm performs its own kind of intervention and interpretation, presenting an already interpreted result to the human beings, who then perceive it through the aid of the usual intervention such as the normal eyeglasses. Then the paper discusses the problem of how to justify the kind of perception that undergoes this process. In what sense can it be said that the algorithm is performing the right action, i.e., one such that the process comes up with a right picture of the world? I contend that this does not merely consist of technical excellence for the technology involved, but also ethical excellence. The two cannot be considered one apart from the other. (shrink)

The paper discusses the limitations of engineering ethics as implemented in practice, with a focus on the fact that engineering and other activities are carried out without any consideration of whether the activities are themselves ethical, and on the gap between legality and ethics. This leads to the following three central ideas of the paper. The first is the need for engineers to both be aware of and critique their own values and be able to widen their perspective to that (...) of the ‘other’, i.e., marginalised and minority groups and the environment. This understanding of the ‘other’ and values is also applied to the discussion of ethical issues relating to minority world (‘developed’) country engineers working in majority world (‘developing’) countries. The second central idea is the fact that structural and contextual factors in the form of barriers and enablers affect ethical values and practices. Individuals are not necessarily unethical in themselves, but the context and organisational ethos may present barriers to ethical behaviour and encourage the development of unethical values. These barriers and enablers are investigated through a pilot survey. The third central idea is the relationship between individual and collective responsibility and the need for support to enable engineers to think and behave ethically. (shrink)