This paper uses Actor Network Theory to examine two cases of device-mediated educational change, one involving a computer-assisted interactive video module that provided a half-hour of instruction for a university course, the other an assistive communication device that proved a supposedly retarded pre-school child to be intelligent. The paper explores how device construction instigated by middle-level organizational workers can ramify into organizational change, and extends Actor Network theory by augmenting some of its conceptual tools. I argue that the organizational change (...) processes initiated by work on the devices played out in non-linear ways across the decades-long careers of their makers, and that to understand them we not only have to look across such extended time frames, but must also consider how agency and identity positions emerge and shift over time through the mediation of devices. (shrink)

Since the practice turn, the role technologies play in the production of scientific knowledge has become a prominent topic in science studies. Much existing scholarship, however, either limits technology to merely mechanical instrumentation or uses the term for a wide variety of items. This article argues that technologies in scientific practice can be understood as a result of past scientific knowledge becoming sedimented in materials, like model organisms, synthetic reagents or mechanical instruments, through the routine use of these materials in (...) subsequent research practice. The proposed theoretical interpretation of technology is examined through a case where a model organism—Drosophila melanogaster—acted as a technology for investigating a contested biological effect of a mechanical instrument: Hermann J. Muller’s experiments on X-ray mutagenicity in the 1920s. The article reconstructs how Muller employed two syntheticDrosophilastocks as tests for measuring X-rays’ capacity to cause genetic aberration. It argues that past scientific knowledge sedimented in theDrosophilastocks influenced Muller’s perception of X-ray-induced mutation. It further describes how Muller’s concept of X-ray mutagenicity sedimented through the adoption of X-ray machines as a ready-made resource for producing mutants by other geneticists, for instance George Beadle and Edward Tatum in their experiments onNeurospora crassa, despite ongoing disputes surrounding Muller’s conclusions. Technological sedimentation is proposed as a potential explanation why sedimentation and disputation may often coexist in the history of science. (shrink)

Postphenomenology was envisaged to lay bare the black box of technology through a phenomenological approach. The vision, in this sense, was to identify how technology might mediate both the subjectivity of its immediate user and the world around her. In this paper I will argue that to cognize technology’s effects fully, we need to enrich postphenomenology with further insights. In particular, SCOT and ANT may be integrated into postphenomenology. While the former can provide a historical narrative of how technology has (...) evolved throughout time, the latter may embed technology within a network where the interplay of the technology, the first user, other individuals and the society, on the whole, can be depicted. After a preliminary theoretical discussion, I will go through some case studies to articulate how SCOT and ANT can make a contribution to a systematic investigation of technology. (shrink)

The existence of a French philosophy of technology is a matter of debate. Technology has long remained invisible in French philosophy, due to cultural circumstances and linguistic specificities. Even though a number of French philosophers have developed views and concepts about technology during the twentieth century, “philosophy of technology” has never been established as a legitimate branch of philosophy in the French academic landscape so far. This book, however, demonstrates that a community of philosophers dealing with various issues related to (...) technology and built up on the legacy of the previous generations has emerged. In gathering scholars with quite diverse theoretical backgrounds and matters of concern, this volume outlines a coherent, albeit heterogeneous, philosophical trend. Five chief characteristics are identified in this introduction: a close connection between history and philosophy, with a focus on the temporalities of technology, the prevalence of the anthropological approach to technology whether it be social anthropology or paleoanthropology, a focus on technological objects that we characterize as a “thing turn” à la française, the dignification of technoscience as a philosophical category, and a pervading concern with ethical issues based on the anthropological interpretation of technology and quite distinct from current trends in applied ethics. (shrink)

This article builds on the hypothesis that theoretical approaches to philosophy of technology are currently stuck in a false alternative: either embrace the “empirical turn” or jump back into the determinism, pessimism, and general ignorance towards specific technologies that characterized the “humanities philosophy of technology.” A third path is however possible, which consists of articulating an empirical point of view with an interest in the symbolic dimension in which technologies and technological mediations are always already embedded. Bourdieu’s sociology of the (...) symbolic forms represents an important and mostly unexplored resource in this respect. In this article, we introduce the notion of technological capital and its tree states—objectified, institutionalized, and embodied. In the first section, we briefly account of the empirical turn in philosophy of technology. Specific attention is then devoted to postphenomenology. We depict three perspectives in postphenomenology: standard postphenomenology, in which one single human-technology-world relation at a time is considered; the attempt of some technological mediation theorists to articulate postphenomenology and actor-network theory ; the original effort in Ihde, which is currently practiced by a minority of postphenomenologists, to combine an interest for the empirical dimension of technological mediations with an attention to the social and cultural conditions of possibility in which these mediations are embedded. In the second section, we consider some recent critiques of the limits of the empirical turn in philosophy of technology, especially related to postphenomenology. Furthermore, we argue that Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology may benefit the philosophy of technology. One might say that according to a Bourdieusian perspective, technologies are, in their invention, implementation, and use, embedded in symbolically organized interactions among social actors or groups. The notion of technological capital is introduced. A specific attention is given to its embodied state, which is related to the habitus. Such concept suggests that, to rephrase the famous sentence by Heidegger, “the essence of technology is not totally technological.” In the conclusion, we consider three risks related to a Bourdieusian approach to technology: transparency, determinism, and absolutism. (shrink)

According to the Value-Neutrality Thesis, technology is morally and politically neutral, neither good nor bad. A knife may be put to bad use to murder an innocent person or to good use to peel an apple for a starving person, but the knife itself is a mere instrument, not a proper subject for moral or political evaluation. While contemporary philosophers of technology widely reject the VNT, it remains unclear whether claims about values in technology are just a figure of speech (...) or nontrivial empirical claims with genuine factual content and real-world implications. This paper provides the missing argument. I argue that by virtue of their material properties, technological artifacts are part of the normative order rather than external to it. I illustrate how values can be empirically identified in technology. The reason why value-talk is not trivial or metaphorical is that due to the endurance and longevity of technological artifacts, values embedded in them have long-term implications that surpass their designers and builders. I further argue that taking sides in this debate has real-world implications in the form of moral constraints on the development of technology. (shrink)

This paper provides a systematic literature review, analysis and discussion of methods that are proposed to practise ethics in research and innovation. Ethical considerations concerning the impacts of R&I are increasingly important, due to the quickening pace of technological innovation and the ubiquitous use of the outcomes of R&I processes in society. For this reason, several methods for practising ethics have been developed in different fields of R&I. The paper first of all presents a systematic search of academic sources that (...) present and discuss such methods. Secondly, it provides a categorisation of these methods according to three main kinds: ex ante methods, dealing with emerging technologies, intra methods, dealing with technology design, and ex post methods, dealing with ethical analysis of existing technologies. Thirdly, it discusses the methods by considering problems in the way they deal with the uncertainty of technological change, ethical technology design, the identification, analysis and resolving of ethical impacts of technologies and stakeholder participation. The results and discussion of our literature review are valuable for gaining an overview of the state of the art and serve as an outline of a future research agenda of methods for practising ethics in R&I. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to contribute detailed ethnographic material to broaden the scope of what we mean by reproductive technology. Technology can be defined not only by a series of laboratory techniques (such as artificial insemination and embryo transfer) that are drafted into the daily management of the animal body, but also by a range of on-farm management strategies and working routines, as well as the cultural dispositions, social networks and tacit knowledge of the actors involved. RT is (...) communicated to lay operators and disseminated amongst semi-professional figures such as breed experts, herd inspectors and technical consultants. The practical contexts in which reproductive knowledge is popularized and applied provide ample scope for local negotiations, resistance and conflict. Professional knowledge about breed-improvement is personalised and appropriated by operators and plays a role in power relations and the exercise of personal charisma as well as being specific to context, in particular the nuances of pre-existing relationships of trust, friendship, kinship or hierarchy. No wonder then that many ambivalences and compromises coexist in the practice of applying ‘reproductive knowledge’ to breed selection. (shrink)

This article connects philosophical debates about cognitive enhancement and situated cognition. It does so by focusing on moral aspects of enhancing our cognitive abilities with the aid of external artifacts. Such artifacts have important moral dimensions that are addressed neither by the cognitive enhancement debate nor situated cognition theory. In order to fill this gap in the literature, three moral aspects of cognitive artifacts are singled out: their consequences for brains, cognition, and culture; their moral status; and their relation to (...) personal identity. (shrink)

A central question in philosophical and sociological accounts of technology is how the agency of technologies should be conceived, that is, how to understand their constitutive roles in the actions performed by assemblages of humans and artifacts. To address this question, I build on the suggestion that a helpful perspective can be gained by amalgamating “actor-network theory” and “postphenomenological” accounts. The idea is that only a combined account can confront both the nuances of human experiential relationships with technology on which (...) postphenomenology specializes, and also the chains of interactions between numerous technologies and humans that actor-network theory can address. To perform this amalgamation, however, several technical adjustments to these theories are required. The central change I develop here is to the postphenomenological notion of “multistability,” i.e., the claim that a technology can be used for multiple purposes through different contexts. I expand the postphenomenological framework through the development of a method called “variational cross-examination,” which involves critically contrasting the various stabilities of a multistable technology for the purpose of exploring how a particular stability has come to dominate. As a guiding example, I explore the case of the everyday public bench. The agency of this “mundane artifact,” as actor-network theorist Bruno Latour would call it, cannot be accounted for by either postphenomenology or actor-network theory alone. (shrink)

In sociology, there has been a controversy about whether there is any essential difference between a human being and a tool, or if the tool–user relationship can be defined by co-actor symmetry. This issue becomes more complex when we consider examples of AI and robots, and even more so following progress in the development of various bio-machine hybrid technologies, such as robots that include organic parts, human brain implants, and adaptive prosthetics. It is argued that a concept of autonomous agency (...) based on organismic embodiment helps to clarify the situation. On this view, agency consists of an asymmetrical relationship between an organism and its environment, because the continuous metabolic and regulatory activity of the organism gives rise to its own existence, and hence its specific behavioral domain. Accordingly, most of current technologies are excluded from the class of autonomous agents. Instead, they are better conceptualized as interfaces that mediate our interactions with the world. This has important implications for design: Rather than trying to help humans to achieve their goals by duplicating their agency in artificial systems, it would be better to empower humans directly by enhancing their existing agency and lived experience with technological interfaces that can be incorporated into their embodiment. This incorporation might be especially facilitated by bio-machine hybrid technology that is designed according the principles of biological autonomy and multi-agent coordination dynamics. (shrink)

A review of the paradigms of social influence – suggestion, imitation, normalization, conformity, compliance, conversion – leads me to diagnose a triple malaise: the shrinkage of paradigms to cognitive dual-processing theories of information; the dominant methodology of laboratory experiments falls short of the reality of (mass) communication; and the focus of social influence on inter-subjectivity is only half of the story. I will suggest two extensions of social influence theory to include mass media communication and the inter-objectivity of artefacts. We (...) need to be able to conceptualize the modalities of why, how and to what effect somebody might put up a wall to influence neighbours instead of contenting themselves with putting up a public note ‘Do not trespass!’. Social influence by fait accompli needs to be within the remit of social psychology, otherwise it loses its relevance in a technological society where artefacts mediate most inter-personal relations. (shrink)

The paper deals with the quandary of the neutrality and transparency of technologies. First, I show how this problem is connected with the image of the opening of 'black boxes' that is pivotal to much of science and technology studies. Second, methodological and socio-political dimensions of the 'black box' metaphor are discussed. Third, I analyze three typical solutions to the problem of the neutrality of technologies outside and inside constructivist technology studies. It is demonstrated that despite their apparent differences, these (...) solutions are similar in their logic of conceptualizing technology as a neutral intermediary. Forth, I look for an alternative to this logic in the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour. Here technologies are conceived in terms of an eventful association of heterogeneous entities irreducible to its conditions of possibility. The construction of technologies is understood as mediation, or as a 'making-do' process where creators are surprised by their creations and vice versa. In Latour's actor-network, technologies are interpreted as opaque and non-neutral entities. Finally, I turn to some object-lessons from smart technologies powered by neural networks to demonstrate that these are empirical vindications of Latour's conception of technical mediation. Particular attention is paid to the opacity and (non)interpretability of machine learning algorithms. (shrink)

1. Artificial Intelligence is an ambiguous umbrella term. Until today there is no uniform definition of AI and the term carries several meanings. As exemplary, I will give two definitions of AI tha...

The thesis of the paper is that semiotic processes are intrinsic to computation and computational systems. An explanation of computation that does not take this semiotic dimension into account is incomplete. Semiosis is essential to computation and therefore requires a rigorous definition. To prove this thesis, the author analyzes two concepts of computation: the Turing machine and the mechanistic conception of physical computation. The paper is organized in two parts. The first part (Sects. 2 and 3) develops a re-interpretation of (...) the Turing machine starting from Peirce’s semiotics. The author shows how this reinterpretation allows overcoming the dualism between a purist and a realist version of the Turing machine. The second part of the paper (Sect. 4) shows how a mechanistic explanation of physical computation such as the one developed by Piccinini is incomplete without considering semiotic relations. The paper intends to be a contribution to the philosophical debate on computation. (shrink)

The introduction of respiratory machines in the 1950s may have saved the lives of many, but it also challenged the notion of death itself. This development endowed “machines” with the power to form a unique ontological creature: a live body with a “dead” brain. While technology may be blamed for complicating things in the first place, it is also called on to solve the resulting quandaries. Indeed, it is not the birth of the “brain-dead” that concerns us most, but rather (...) its association with a web of epistemological and ethical considerations, where technology plays a central role. The brain death debate in Israel introduces highly sophisticated religious thought and authoritative medical expertise. At focus are the religious acceptance and rejection of brain death by a technologically savvy group of rabbis whose religious doctrine––along with a particular form of religious reasoning––is used to support the truth claims made from the scientific community but challenge the ways in which they are made credible. In our case, brain death as “true” death is made religiously viable with the very use of technological apparatus and scientific rhetoric that stand at the heart of the scientific ethos. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to contribute detailed ethnographic material to broaden the scope of what we mean by reproductive technology. Technology can be defined not only by a series of laboratory techniques that are drafted into the daily management of the animal body, but also by a range of on-farm management strategies and working routines, as well as the cultural dispositions, social networks and tacit knowledge of the actors involved. RT is communicated to lay operators and disseminated amongst (...) semi-professional figures such as breed experts, herd inspectors and technical consultants. The practical contexts in which reproductive knowledge is popularized and applied provide ample scope for local negotiations, resistance and conflict. Professional knowledge about breed-improvement is personalised and appropriated by operators and plays a role in power relations and the exercise of personal charisma as well as being specific to context, in particular the nuances of pre-existing relationships of trust, friendship, kinship or hierarchy. No wonder then that many ambivalences and compromises coexist in the practice of applying ‘reproductive knowledge’ to breed selection. (shrink)

As a concept, affordance is integral to scholarly analysis across multiple fields—including media studies, science and technology studies, communication studies, ecological psychology, and design studies among others. Critics, however, rightly point to the following shortcomings: definitional confusion, a false binary in which artifacts either afford or do not, and failure to account for diverse subject-artifact relations. Addressing these critiques, this article demarcates the mechanisms of affordance—as artifacts request, demand, allow, encourage, discourage, and refuse—which take shape through interrelated conditions: perception, dexterity, (...) and cultural and institutional legitimacy. Together, the mechanisms and conditions constitute a dynamic and structurally situated model that addresses how artifacts afford, for whom and under what circumstances. (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 offers a reading of internet-based activism or ‘hacktivism’ as a phenomenon that cannot be confined to the instrumental use of information technologies. It focuses on a subset of hacktivism – the distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack for political ends – that aims at making an internet host unavailable to its intended users. Since the early 2000s these attacks have been increasingly conducted by means of botnets – networks of infected computers that send bogus requests to a target website without the (...) consent of their users. The capacity of botnets to engender a more-than-human politics is analyzed from two distinct theoretical angles. First, drawing from Deleuze and Guattari, the hacktivist DDoS is discussed as an assemblage of signifying and a-signifying components, voluntary and involuntary actions. Second, Gilbert Simondon’s notions of transindividuation and transduction allow for a conceptualization of hacktivism as a sociotechnical assemblage with a high degree of indetermination. (shrink)

This article argues that understanding everyday practices in neurobiological labs requires us to take into account a variety of different action positions: self-conscious social actors, technical artifacts, conscious organisms, and organisms being merely alive. In order to understand the interactions among such diverse entities, highly differentiated conceptual tools are required. Drawing on the theory of the German philosopher and sociologist Helmuth Plessner, the paper analyzes experimenters as self-conscious social persons who recognize monkeys as conscious organisms. Integrating Plessner’s ideas into the (...) stock of concepts used in science and technology studies provides richer descriptions of laboratory life. In particular, this theory allows an understanding of a crucial feature of neurobiological brain research: the construction of the brain as the epistemic object of brain research. As such, the brain must be isolated from the acting and interacting organism in a complicated process. (shrink)

In this article we investigate whether long-term radioactive waste management by means of geological disposal can be understood as a social experiment. Geological disposal is a rather particular technology in the way it deals with the analytical and ethical complexities implied by the idea of technological innovation as social experimentation, because it is presented as a technology that ultimately functions without human involvement. We argue that, even when the long term function of the ‘social’ is foreseen to be restricted to (...) safeguarding the functioning of the ‘technical’, geological disposal is still a social experiment. In order to better understand this argument and explore how it could be addressed, we elaborate the idea of social experimentation with the notion of co-production and the analytical tools of delegation, prescription and network as developed by actor-network theory. In doing so we emphasize that geological disposal inherently involves relations between surface and subsurface, between humans and nonhumans, between the social, material and natural realm, and that these relations require recognition and further elaboration. In other words, we argue that geological disposal concurrently is a social and a technical experiment, or better, a long-term socio-technical experiment. We end with proposing the idea of ‘actor-networking’ as a sensitizing concept for future research into what geological disposal as a socio-technical experiment could look like. (shrink)

The new social theories of practice have been inspired by Wittgenstein's late philosophy, phenomenology and more recent sociological theories. They regard embodied skills and routinized, mostly unconscious habits as a key foundation of human practice and knowledge. This position leads to an overstatement of the significance of the habitual dimension of practice. As several critics have suggested this approach omits the problems of transformative agency and change of practices. In turn classical practice theories, activity theory and pragmatism have analyzed the (...) mechanisms of change. Pragmatism suggests that a crisis of a habit calls for reflection. Through working hypotheses and experimentation this leads to a transformation of a practice. Activity theory introduced the concept of remediation. A collective elaboration of shared mediational artefacts is needed to transform an activity. (shrink)

AbtractTechnologies both new and old provide us with a wide range of cognitive artifacts that change the structure of our cognitive tasks. After a brief analysis of past classifications of these artifacts, I shall elaborate a new way of classifying them developed by focusing on an aspect that has been previously overlooked, namely the possible relationships between these objects and the cognitive processes they involve. Cognitive artifacts are often considered as objects that simply complement our cognitive capabilities, but this “complementary (...) view” seems to be an oversimplification. Assuming an “interaction-centered approach”, this article identifies three essential ways in which cognitive artifacts carry out their function: complementing, constituting and substituting our cognitive processes, and builds a taxonomy of these objects that is grounded on these relations. In so doing, it also addresses the chaotic set of different micro-functions carried out by cognitive artifacts, which have not thus far been dealt with, sorting these functions into three corresponding categories. The second part of the article analyzes in greater detail how cognitive artifacts work in our cognitive life, identifying a new kind of functions, called semi-proper functions, and providing a new definition of cognitive artifact based on the previous analysis of these objects. (shrink)

In What Things Do , Verbeek (What things do: philosophical reflections on technology, agency and design. Penn State University Press, University Park, 2005a ) develops a vocabulary for understanding the social role of technological artifacts in our culture and in our daily lives. He understands this role in terms of the technological mediation of human behavior and perception. To explain mediation, he levels out the modernist separation of subjects and objects by decreasing the autonomy of humans and increasing the activity (...) of things. His approach consists primarily within a clever integration of the theories of Latour and Ihde, which provides a comprehensive understanding of the social role of technological artifacts. Despite the fact that Verbeek’s book is carefully thought out and already quite influential in the field of philosophy of technology, his approach raises some conceptual and pragmatic questions. The conceptual questions concern (a) the precise meaning of the concept of mediation and the possibility of distinguishing between different forms of mediation, and (b) the differences and similarities between human and technological agency and intentionality. The pragmatic questions concern the application of his theory to the realm of engineering ethics. Particularly pressing is the question of how to assign (moral) responsibility to humans when technological artifacts are mediating the outcomes of human actions. With this article, I will raise these issues, and look forward to Verbeek’s reply. (shrink)

This article focuses on the power of technological mediation from the point of view of autonomist Marxism. The first part of the article discusses the theories developed on technological mediation in postphenomenology and critical theory of technology with regard to their respective power perspectives and ways of coping with relations of power embedded in technical artifacts and systems. Rather than focusing on the clashes between the hermeneutic postphenomenological approach and the dialectics of critical theory, it is argued that in both (...) the category of resistance amidst power-relations is at least similar in one regard: resistance to the power of technology is conceptualized as a reactive force. The second part of the article reads technological mediation through the lens of the antagonistic power-perspective on class struggle developed in autonomist Marxism. The outline of a provisional autonomist philosophy of technology is developed using Foucauldian dispositifs of biopower in contrast to the hermeneutic and dialectical approach. It is thus argued that resistance should here be understood in terms of practice that subverts the technically mediated circuit of production itself. (shrink)

This article defends three interconnected premises that together demand for a new way of dealing with moral responsibility in developing and using technological artifacts. The first premise is that humans increasingly make use of dissociated technological delegation. Second, because technologies do not simply fulfill our actions, but rather mediate them, the initial aims alter and outcomes are often different from those intended. Third, since the outcomes are often unforeseen and unintended, we can no longer simply apply the traditional (modernist) models (...) for discussing moral responsibility. We need to reinterpret moral responsibility. A schematic layout of a model on Social Role-Responsibility that incorporates these three premises is presented to allow discussion of a new way of interpreting moral responsibility. (shrink)

During the past decade, the “script” concept, indicating how technologies prescribe human actions, has acquired a central place in STS. Until now, the concept has mainly functioned in descriptive settings. This article will deploy it in a normative setting. When technologies coshape human actions, they give material answers to the ethical question of how to act. This implies that engineers are doing “ethics by other means”: they materialize morality. The article will explore the implications of this insight for engineering ethics. (...) It first augments the script concept by developing the notion of technological mediation. After this, it investigates how the concept of mediation could be made fruitful for design ethics. It discusses how the ambition to design behaviorinfluencing technologies raises moral questions itself and elaborates two methods for anticipating technological mediation in the design process: performing mediation analyses and using an augmented version of constructive technology assessment. (shrink)

This paper aims to critically evaluate some impacts of the so-called “posthumanist turn” for philosophy of technology, with special reference to the problem of ontological status of artifacts. In the first place, we reconstruct the meaning and scope of posthumanist turn in social and human sciences, while we indicate in what sense this turn questions a group of traditional operative concepts for philosophy. Second, we propose to admit a “weak” version of posthumanism for philosophy of technology. In this sense, two (...) lines of research compatible to this “weak” approach are pointed out. The first one consists in the exploration of immanent aspects of technical objects. The second one commits us to introduce the category of “hybridization” in order to account for the complex and multidimensional relationships between humans and environments. (shrink)

In the domain of evolutionary cognitive archaeology, the early body ornaments from the Middle Stone Age/Palaeolithic are generally treated as mere by-products of an evolved brain-bound cognitive architecture selected to cope with looming social problems. Such adaptive artefacts are therefore taken to have been but passive means of broadcasting a priori envisaged meanings, essentially playing a neutral role for the human mind. In contrast to this epiphenomenalist view of material culture, postphenomenology and the Material Engagement Theory have been making a (...) case for the active role of artefacts on the count that they can actually shape and restructure the human mind. By bringing these dissenting voices together, the paper at hand employs an enactive way of thinking in order to challenge the epiphenomenalist take on early body ornaments. In fact, two variants of enactivism are presented, each advancing a unique explanation of how the engagement of early humans with body ornaments transformed their minds along the two postphenomenological categories of embodied and hermeneutic cognition. Our theoretical frameworks specifically seek to explore how early beadworks could have scaffolded the creation of semiotic categories and the development of cognitive processes. Despite relying on inherently different premises, both theories suggest that beads fostered the emergence of an epistemic apparatus which thoroughly transformed the way humans engaged with the world. Having concurred on the ornaments’ transformative effects, we ultimately conclude that the epiphenomenalist paradigm best be replaced with an enactive approach grounded on the dictates of postphenomenology and the MET. (shrink)

The ArgumentA large part of our critical acumen depends on a clear distinction between what is real and what is constructed, what is out there in the nature of things and what is in there in the representation we make of them. Something has been lost however for the sake of this clarity and a heavy price has been paid for this dichotomy between ontological questions on the one hand and the epistemological questions on the other: it has become impossible (...) to understand the simplest features of action. What the critical gesture smashes into pieces is precisely the very possibility of hearing as synonyms the two sentences, “I have fabricated it well, thus it is autonomous.” The paper tries to find a way to avoid the critical gesture and link again together facts and fetishes, producing this rather strange hybrid: factishes. (shrink)

Latour is widely considered a critic and renewer of research in the social sciences. The ecologically minded Left has also acclaimed him as a theorist interested in bringing nature back both into sociological theory and into society and politics. To enable a more detailed discussion of Latour’s claims, I will here outline his theory and the ways in which it is related to classical theory, such as Durkheim, and the methodology of the interpretive paradigm, such as Schütz. My thesis is (...) that Latour’s empirical studies may be read as unfolding the methodological consequences of the interpretive paradigm, and that his early work is a brilliant proof of Durkheim’s theory of the morphology of social facts. Latour has now elaborated the insights he gained from concrete laboratory studies toward a general theory of the social, of society, and of politics. These generalizations have made his theory at least partly problematic. The political implication of Latour’s theory of society is a generalization of the call for equality to encompass everything; in other words, Latour criticizes the exclusion of nonhuman entities from political representation. The paper closes by discussing the political consequences of this proposal. (shrink)

At one point in We will never have been modern Latour notes that his thinking is a “challenge to philosophy”. This article argues that Latour's challenge lies in his repeated claim that his ontology makes us able to think again about the “passing of time”. If this is indeed the case then, this essay looks to Martin Heidegger to think of the question of temporality and ontology. This essay will in effect find that on a deeper level Latour repeats crucial (...) Heideggerian insights with regard to the ontological difference between being and beings. Yet on other points too Heidegger's impact is notable: for Heidegger too, something has gone wary with modernity and our modern constitution. Here too Latour's metaphors point in a rather Heideggerian direction, for the “invisible” modern constitution has become “visible” in certain ontic events—Latour notes the end of communism. This recalls Heidegger's critique of metaphysics. The article will then focus on Latour's distinction between delegation and what is being delegated, a distinction that pervades the conclusion of his 1991 book. Latour thus introduces a difference between delegation and what is being delegated. How not to recognize a duplicate of Heidegger's ontological difference? And, once recognized, what does this mean for our thinking of being and the thinking of the event of world which has been delegated to us? (shrink)

Inquiry into the history of practices in the manner of Foucault's philosophical genealogy requires that we distinguish between practical action, on the one hand, and mere behavior, on the other. The need for this distinction may help explicate an aspect of Foucault's philosophical genealogy that might otherwise appear misplaced, namely his attention to rationalities and its attendant conceptual material. This article shows how a genealogical attention to practice goes hand in hand with an attention to the role of the conceptual (...) within our practices. This is done by first drawing on considerations furnished by a Wittgensteinean branch in analytic philosophy recently developed by Robert Brandom. With an account of conceptual normativity and reflexivity in hand, the article turns second to a crucial site of conceptual self-transformation by drawing on work from a particular Foucauldian lineage developed in the work of Arnold Davidson. Davidson's work helps us understand the crucial status of concepts of persons for any historical inquiry into practices. (shrink)

Traditionally, philosophers have ascribed moral agency almost exclusively to humans. Early writing about moral agency can be traced to Aristotle and Aquinas. In addition to human moral agents, Aristotle discussed the possibility of moral agency of the Greek gods and Aquinas discussed the possibility of moral agency of angels. In the case of angels, a difficulty in ascribing moral agency was that it was suspected that angels did not have enough independence from God to ascribe to the angels genuine moral (...) choices. Recently, new candidates have been suggested for non‐human moral agency. Floridi and Sanders suggest that artificially intelligence programs that meet certain criteria may attain the status of moral agents; they suggest a redefinition of moral agency to clarify the relationship between artificial and human agents. Other philosophers, as well as scholars in Science and Technology Studies, are studying the possibility that artifacts that are not designed to mimic human intelligence still embody a kind of moral agency. For example, there has been a lively discussion about the moral intent and the consequential effects of speed bumps. The connections and distributed intelligence of a network is another candidate being considered for moral agency. These philosophical arguments may have practical consequences for software developers, and for the people affected by computing. In this paper, we will examine ideas about artificial moral agency from the perspective of a software developer. (shrink)

This investigation provides an in-depth exploration of the dialectics of action and technology in the works of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, both in terms of the concrete use contexts of technological artifacts and the entanglement between individual agents and their sociotechnical surroundings. Furthermore, it briefly outlines some potentials of Sartre’s thoughts for debates in contemporary philosophy of technology. Throughout his works, Sartre approaches human action from different yet dialectically interrelated perspectives that are always accompanied by and developed in relation to (...) reflections about technology. Against the background of a complementary conception of human action that is derived from Sartre’s major works, the implementation of matter in the course of action primarily represents an instrumentalization. Things are thus always disclosed as implement things due to the practical character of human existence. Although things do not prescribe action, the material characteristics and properties of these things render them more useful for attaining some and more adverse for attaining other ends. Despite the ontological freedom of human beings, their position in societal forms of organization, to which Sartre refers to as practical ensembles, delimits their choice of means and necessitates them to satisfy their needs and desires with the limited means available. In this way, la force des choses arises, not as a result of the characteristics of technology but as an outcome of sociality and politics. (shrink)

Health authorities increasingly request that general practitioners use information and communication technologies such as electronic patient records for accountability purposes. This article deals with the use of EPRs among general practitioners in Britain. It examines two ways in which GPs use the EPR for accountability purposes. One way is to generate audit reports on the basis of the information that has been entered into the record. The other is to let the computer intervene in the clinical process through prompts. The (...) article argues that GPs' ambivalence toward using the EPR makes them active in finding ways that turn the EPR into a meaningful tool for them, that is, a tool that helps them provide what they see as good care. The article's main contribution is to show how accountability and autonomy are coproduced; less professional autonomy does not follow from more requests to document one's work. Instead, new forms of autonomy are produced in the sociotechnical network that is made up by health policy and local engagements with patients and technology. (shrink)

Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) offers an ‘infra-language’ of the social that allows one to trace social relations very dynamically, while at the same time dissolving human agency, thus providing a flat and de-centred way into sociology. However, ANT struggles with its theoretical design that may lead us to reduce agency to causation and to conceptualize actor-networks as homogeneous ontologies of force. This article proposes to regard ANT’s inability to conceptualize reflexivity and the interrelatedness of different ontologies as the fundamental problem of the (...) theory. Drawing on Günther, it offers an ‘infra-language’ of reflexive relations while maintaining ANT’s de-centred approach. This would enable us to conceptualize actor-networks as non-homogeneous, dynamic and connecting different societal rationales while maintaining the main strengths of ANT. (shrink)

In contemporary Science, Technology and Society studies, Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory is often used to study how social change arises from interaction between people and technologies. Though Latour’s approach is rich in the sense of enabling scholars to appreciate the complexity of many relevant technological, environmental, and social factors in their studies, the approach is poor from an ethical point of view: the doings of things and people are couched in one and the same behaviorist vocabulary without giving due (...) recognition to the ethical relevance of human intelligence, sympathy and reflection in making responsible choices. This article argues that two other naturalist projects, the non-teleological virtue ethics of Charles Darwin and the pragmatist instrumentalism of John Dewey can enrich ANT-based STS studies, both, in a descriptive and in a normative sense. (shrink)

Recent scholarship provides the opportunity for an assessment of the underexplored but promising marriage between science and technology studies and Internet governance research. This article seeks to provide such an assessment by reviewing and discussing, in particular, three volumes: Laura DeNardis’s The Global War for Internet Governance, The Power of Networks: Organizing the Global Politics of the Internet by Mikkel Flyverbom, and Governance, Regulations and Powers on the Internet edited by Eric Brousseau, Meryem Marzouki, and Cécile Méadel. Approaching IG through (...) an STS lens, these authors bring to the fore a number of related issues that political and legal sciences have addressed only incompletely so far, but are crucial to understand today’s governance of the Internet as a complex sociotechnical system of systems. In their research, STS scholars of IG highlight the day-to-day, mundane practices that constitute IG; the plurality and “networkedness” of hybrid devices and arrangements that populate, shape, and define IG processes; the performative function of these arrangements vis-à-vis the virtual, yet very material, worlds they seek to regulate; the invisibility, pervasiveness, and agency of infrastructure. (shrink)

Yuk Hui refers to cosmotechnics as the deep interweaving of human action and technology as shaped by diverse moral universes. In this article, I pit two views of cosmotechnics against each other. I...

How could social scientists and cultural theorists take responsibility in engaging with science? How might they develop an experimental sensibility to the links between the production of knowledge and the production of existence or forms of life? Critically outlining key fields in the social and cultural studies of science, we interrogate a number of approaches to these questions. The first approach tries to make sense of how science operates in relation to economic, political and cultural forces. The second analyses science (...) as a form of embodied work or practice. The third engages with science as collaborative-collective elaboration of events, ranging across cultural theory, contemporary art and participant ethnographies. This outline sketches a vector of responsibility across this diverse range of engagements, suggesting that contemporary movements between science and other knowledges constitute ethical and political imperatives. (shrink)