In this paper we raise the question whether technological artifacts can properly speaking be trusted or said to be trustworthy. First, we set out some prevalent accounts of trust and trustworthiness and explain how they compare with the engineer’s notion of reliability. We distinguish between pure rational-choice accounts of trust, which do not differ in principle from mere judgments of reliability, and what we call “motivation-attributing” accounts of trust, which attribute specific motivations to trustworthy entities. Then we consider some examples (...) of technological entities that are, at first glance, best suited to serve as the objects of trust: intelligent systems that interact with users, and complex socio-technical systems. We conclude that the motivation-attributing concept of trustworthiness cannot be straightforwardly applied to these entities. Any applicable notion of trustworthy technology would have to depart significantly from the full-blown notion of trustworthiness associated with interpersonal trust. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Don Ihde’s ‘postphenomenology’ may constitute a proper access to the question concerning sustainable technology and I do so in three steps. First, I lay bare how a modern framework that systematically separates facts and instruments from values, choices and responsibilities yields no space for engaged decisions and responsible action towards more sustainable societies. In a second step, I elaborate how postphenomenology’s ‘in-between’ perspective opens up the possibility of questioning science and technology as an inherent (...) part of our human existence. Building on this, I argue how a ‘normativity of the in-between’ may be developed around the concept of ‘topical measure’ and which is grounded in the foundationless foundation of postphenomenology’s relational ontology. In a last step, I show how such a ‘topical measure’ opens up two fields of normative action vis-à-vis the question concerning sustainable technology: one critical, the other empowering. Whereas ‘topical criticism’ focuses on bringing into the open the powerful subpolitics of science and technology, the field of ‘topical responsibility’ rather aims at actively assuming responsibility in these political circles. Besides its main interest, which lies in forging a genuine and adequate way into the issue of sustainability, this paper also constitutes an entry into Ihde’s philosophical oeuvre. The question concerning sustainable technology does not only touch upon Ihde’s relational trinity human-technology-world, it also deals with the degree of normative inquiry present in Ihde’s philosophy, an issue he has been repeatedly questioned about by his interlocutors. (shrink)

This article investigates the types of intentionality involved in human–technology relations. It aims to augment Don Ihde’s analysis of the relations between human beings and technological artifacts, by analyzing a number of concrete examples at the limits of Ihde’s analysis. The article distinguishes and analyzes three types of “cyborg intentionality,” which all involve specific blends of the human and the technological. Technologically mediated intentionality occurs when human intentionality takes place “through” technological artifacts; hybrid intentionality occurs when the technological actually merges (...) with the human; and composite intentionality is the addition of human intentionality and the intentionality of technological artifacts. (shrink)

This introduction to the special issue of Human Studies on postphenomenology outlines specific developments which have led to this style of phenomenology. Postphenomenology adapts aspects of pragmatism, including its anti-Cartesian program against early modern subject/object epistemology. Postphenomenology retains and emphasizes the use of phenomenological variations as an analytic tool, and in practice postphenomenology takes what is commonly now called “an empirical turn,” which deeply analyzes case studies or concrete issues under its purview.

Supported by easier and cheaper access to tools and expanding communities, maker cultures are pointing towards the ideas of everyone designing, creating, producing and distributing renewed, new and improved products, machines, things or artefacts. A careful analysis of the assumptions and challenges of maker cultures emphasizes the relevance of what may be called technological action, that is, active and critical interventions regarding the purposes and applications of technologies within ordinary lives, thus countering the deterministic trends of current directions of technology. (...) In such transformative potential, we will explore a set of elements what is and could be technological action through snapshots of maker cultures based on the empirical research conducted in three particular contexts: the Fab Lab Network, Maker Media core outputs and initiatives such as Maker Faires, and the Open Source Hardware Association. Elements such as control and empowerment through material engagement, openness and sharing, and social, cultural, political and ethical values of the common good in topics such as diversity, sustainability and transparency, are critically analysed. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 9, Page 53-55, September 2012.

The goal of this article is to deepen the concept of emerging urban mobility technology. Drawing on philosophical everyday and urban aesthetics, as well as the postphenomenological strand in the philosophy of technology, we explicate the relation between everyday aesthetic experience and urban mobility commoning. Thus, we shed light on the central role of aesthetics for providing depth to the important experiential and value-driven meaning of contemporary urban mobility. We use the example of self-driving vehicle (SDV), as potentially mundane, public, (...) dynamic, and social urban robots, for expanding the range of perspectives relevant for our relations to urban mobility technology. We present the range of existing SDV conceptualizations and contrast them with experiential and aesthetic understanding of urban mobility. In conclusion, we reflect on the potential undesired consequences from the depolitization of technological development, and potential new pathways for speculative thinking concerning urban mobility futures in responsible innovation processes. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline several methodological questions that we need to confront. The chief question is how can we identify the nature of technological change and its varied cultural consequences—including social, political, institutional, and economic dimensions—when our different research methods, using distinct ‘levels’ or ‘scales’ of analysis, yield contradictory results. What can we say, in other words, when our findings about technology follow from the framings of our inquiries? In slightly different terms, can we combine insights from the fine-grained (...) “social shaping of technology” as well as from complementary approaches accenting the “technological shaping of society?” As a way forward, I will suggest conducting multi-scale inquiries into the processes of technological and cultural change. This will involve recognizing and conceptualizing the analytical scales or levels on which we conduct inquiry (very roughly, micro, meso, macro) as well as outlining strategies for moving within and between these scales or levels. Of course we want and need diverse methodologies for analyzing technology and culture. I find myself in sympathy with geographer Brenner (New state spaces: urban governance and the rescaling of statehood, 2004, p. 7), who aspires to a “theoretically precise yet also historically specific conceptualization of [technological change] as a key dimension of social, political and economic life.”. (shrink)

The last few decades have seen a dramatic increase in concern with matters of ethics in all areas of public life. This ‘applied turn’ in ethics raises important issues not only of focus, but also of methodology. Sometimes a moral end or moral feature is designed into an institution or technology; sometimes a morally desirable outcome is the fortuitous, but unintended, consequence of an institutional arrangement or technological invention. If designing-in ethics is the new methodological orientation for applied ethics, globalisation (...) is providing many of the practical ethical problems upon which to deploy this methodology. (shrink)

Care is more than dispensing pills or cleaning beds. It is about responding to the entire patient. What is called “bedside manner” in medical personnel is a quality of treating the patient not as a mechanism but as a being—much like the caregiver—with desires, ideas, dreams, aspirations, and the gamut of mental and emotional character. As automata, answering an increasing functional need in care, are designed to enact care, the pressure is on their becoming more humanlike to carry out the (...) function more effectively. The question becomes not merely whether the care automaton can effect good bedside manner but whether the patient’s response is not feeling deceived by the humanlikeness. It seems the device must be designed either to effect explicit mere human-“likeness,” thus likely undermining its bedside-manner potential, or to fool the patient completely. Neither option is attractive. This article examines the social problems of designing maximally humanlike care automata and how problems may start to erode the human rights of users/patients. The article then investigates the alternatives for dealing with this problem, whether by industrial and professional self-regulation or public-policy initiatives. It then frames the problem in the broader historical perspective in terms of previous bans, moratoria, and other means of control of hazardous and potentially rights-violating techniques and materials. (shrink)

This article critically addresses current debates on the digital transformation of the public sphere. It responds to two contrasting responses to this transformation: the school of destruction, which expresses pessimism about the design of social media, and the school of restoration, which advocates for the redesign of social media to align with normative conceptions of the public sphere. However, so far these responses have omitted an explicit philosophical reflection on the relationship between politics, technology and design. After tracing back the (...) current discourse on politics and technology to the Platonic tradition of political thought, I propose to re-arrange the relationship between poiesis, praxis and theoria assumed in this tradition. By connecting Arendt’s phenomenology of the political to postphenomenology and Derrida’s notion of ‘artifactuality’, this article proposes a renewed approach to think the political implications of technological change consistent with the ‘empirical turn’ in philosophy of technology. This approach unfolds in two moves: first, it examines how the design (poiesis) of new technological conditions makes space and time for certain kinds of events to become public; second, it takes the praxis emerging in response to these new conditions as a starting point for re-theorizing the political in specific mediated contexts. The article concludes by advocating for a ‘practical turn’ in political theory of technology, emphasizing the importance of engaging with design practices and artistic practices to refine foundational concepts in political theory. (shrink)

Following the growing economic relevance of mobile health (mHealth) and the increasing global prevalence of dementia, self-testing apps for dementia and mild neurocognitive disorder (MCD) have been developed and advertised. The apps’ promise of a quick and easy tool has been criticized in the literature from a variety of angles, but as we argue in this article, the celebratory characterization of self-testing also stands in disbalance to the various kinds of fears that may be connected to taking the test. By (...) drawing on Sara Ahmed’s phenomenological theory on emotions and by referring to illustrative experiences from two users with a particular dementia self-testing app, we explore four dimensions of fear derived from phenomenology: performative, ontological, embodied, and temporal dimensions. We argue that fear (1) motivates one to take the self-test and to try to take control over one’s health; (2) is shaped by and shapes the ways in which we make sense of ourselves and others as cognitively deficient; (3) constructs and is constructed by our differently embodied presence in the world; and that (4) testing makes a fearful future self as cognitively deficient more tangible. In outlining these different dimensions of fear, this article expands the understanding of the meaning of experiencing self-testing in comparison to the mostly quantitative literature on this topic. (shrink)

Neuroadaptive technology (NAT) is a closed-loop neurotechnology designed to enhance human–computer interaction. NAT works by collecting neurophysiological data, which are analysed via autonomous algorithms to create actions and adaptations at the user interface. This paper concerns how interaction with NAT can mediate self-related processing (SRP), such as self-awareness, self-knowledge, and agency. We begin with a postphenomenological analysis of the NAT closed loop to highlight the built-in selectivities of machine hermeneutics, i.e., autonomous chains of algorithms that convert data into an assessment (...) of psychological states/intentions. We argue that these algorithms produce an assessment of lived experience that is quantitative, reductive, and highly simplistic. This reductive assessment of lived experience is presented to the user via feedback at the NAT interface and subsequently mediates SRP. It is argued that congruence between system feedback and SRP determines the precise character of the alterity relation between human user and system. If feedback confirms SRP, the technology is regarded as a quasi-self. If there is a disagreement between SRP and feedback from the system, NAT is perceived to be a quasi-other. We argue that the design of the user interface shapes the precise ways in which NAT can mediate SRP. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to a discussion in philosophy of technology by focusing on the epistemological status of the example. Of the various developments in the emerging, inchoate field of philosophy of technology, the “empirical turn” stands out as having left the most enduring mark on the trajectory contemporary research takes. From a historical point of view, the empirical turn can best be understood as a corrective to the overly “transcendentalizing” tendencies of “classical” philosophers of technology, such as Heidegger. (...) Empirically oriented philosophy of technology emphasizes actual technologies through case-study research into the formation of technical objects and systems (constructivist studies) and how they, for example, transform our perceptions and conceptions (the phenomenological tradition) or pass on and propagate relations of power (critical theory). This paper explores the point of convergence of classical and contemporary approaches by means of the notion of the “example” or “paradigm.” It starts with a discussion of the quintessential modern philosopher of technology, Martin Heidegger, and his thinking about technology in terms of the ontological difference. Heidegger’s framing of technology in terms of this difference places the weight of intelligibility entirely on the side of being, to such an extent that his examples become heuristic rather than constitutive. The second part of the paper discusses the methodological and epistemological import of the “example” and the form of intelligibility it affords. Drawing on the work of Wittgenstein (standard metre), Foucault (panopticism), and Agamben (paradigm), we argue that the example offers an alternative way of understanding the study of technologies from that of empirical case studies. (shrink)

One of the pressing issues in philosophy of technology is the role of human creativity in human-technology relations. We first observe that a techno-centric orientation of philosophy of technology leaves open the role and contribution of human creativity in technological evolution, while an anthropocentric orientation leaves open the role of the technical milieu in technological evolution. Subsequently, we develop a concept of creation as deviation and responsiveness in response to affordances in the environment, inspired by the affordance theory by James (...) Gibson. With this concept of creation as deviative responsiveness, we articulate the human contribution to human-technology creation, namely, our intentional deviation of the inhibiting forces of the currently dominant niche or meaningful world of human-technology relations, in order to become responsive to new affordances in human-technology creation that constitute a new niche or world of human-technology relations. (shrink)

Technological mediation theorists (such as Don Ihde and Verbeek) believe that human beings’ moral actions can be transformed through technological artefacts to constitute a “good life”. This paper, however, critically analyses two understandings of technological mediation, (1) technological mediation is something between humans and the world (prominent in Don Ihde), and (2) technological mediation is a direct constitutive effect (prominent in Verbeek), which will inevitably lead to the problem of “moral suspension” that I define. In the first understanding (following Zygmunt (...) Bauman), the causal relations between moral actions and actual consequences are distanced from each other because of the “interval” effects of technological artefacts. In the second understanding (following Jean Baudrillard), designers are just “simulating” moralities in specific use and design contexts. Thus, moral realities are ultimately replaced by moral “simulacra”. Then, I argue that to overcome the problem of “moral suspension,” rather than distancing actions from their consequences or simulating moralities in specific scenarios, two possible approaches may be needed, the Way of Zhuangzi who declined to use any adroit technology to improve efficiency, thereby clarifying the relationship between moral actions and consequences; and the attitude of Bauman, who motivated our moral consciences and moral sensitivities, thereby reflecting the side effects of technological mediations and systems. In the end, I conclude that both of these two approaches are too difficult to universally apply, and the most viable approach is to use what Confucius called “the Doctrine of the Mean,” i.e., seeking a balance between the two approaches. That is, while we should acknowledge that technologies intervene our lifeworld and constitute our thinking and moralizing ways, we also need to break away from technological trivialities to think about and pursue long-term moral goals. (shrink)

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)

Scholars refute the dichotomy of subject and object in the study of technology. Basing on relational ontology and revised empirical study, namely the social historical phenomenology of technology, inspired by post-phenomenology and actor-network theory, this study adopts an approach informed by the genetic phenomenological sociology (Zhang 2017; 2020) of technology, and examines the formation of Apple’s technology in the process of its emergence and diffusion. Unlike post-phenomenology and actor-network theory, which mainly examine the role of technology in the relation of (...) human-technology-world after technology was formed, this study examines technology in the process of its formation. The relationship between the intentionality of humanity and the potentiality of technology is explored empirically and ontologically, thus transcending the dichotomy of subject and object in the examination of technology through the relational ontology indicated in potentiality, intentionality, embodiment, and genealogy, and simultaneously building a foundation for the critique, ethics, and normative theory of media and technology. (shrink)

In my comments, I address two issues that are important but not central to the paper under review here. First, I present a reading of the postphenomenological concept of multistability by going back to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the primacy of perception. I conclude that assertions affirming the multistability of technologies should not be seen as merely empirical. Second, I address the adequacy of using the language of ‘empirical’ and ‘transcendental’ as a means to categorize exclusionary approaches in philosophy of technology.

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...

In current phenomenology of medicine, health is often understood as a state of transparency in which our body refrains from being an object of explicit attention. In this paper, I argue that such an understanding of health unnecessarily presupposes an overly harmonious alignment between subjective and objective body, resulting in the idea that our health remains phenomenologically inaccessible. Alternatively, I suggest that there are many occasions in which one’s body in health does become an object of attention, and that technologies (...) mediate how a relation with one’s body is formed. First, I show prominent accounts in current phenomenology of medicine understand health in terms of a harmonious alignment between objective and subjective body. Second, I argue that there are many occasions in which there is a disharmony between objective and subjective body, and suggest that also in health, we cannot escape being an object that we often relate to. Then, I draw on postphenomenology to show how technologies such as digital self-tracking applications and digital twins can be understood as mediating the relationship with one’s own body in a specific way. In conclusion, I argue that both technologies make present the objective body as a site for hermeneutic inquiry such that it can be interacted with in terms of health parameters. Furthermore, I point to some relevant differences in how different technologies make aspects of our own body phenomenologically present. (shrink)

The cognitive gadgets theory proposes to reform evolutionary psychology by replacing the standard nativist and internalist approach to modularity with a cultural constructivist one. However, the resulting “cultural evolutionary psychology” still maintains some controversial aspects of the original neo-Darwinian paradigm. These assumptions are unnecessary to the cognitive gadgets theory and can be eliminated without significant conceptual loss.

Material Engagement Theory, which forms the focus of this special issue, is a relatively new development within cognitive archaeology and anthropology, but one that has important implications for many adjacent fields of research in phenomenology and the cognitive sciences. In How Things Shape the Mind I offered a detail exposition of the major working hypotheses and the vision of mind that it embodies. Here, introducing this special issue, more than just presenting a broad overview of MET, I seek to enrich (...) and extend that vision and discuss its application to the study of mind and matter. I begin by laying out the philosophical roots, theoretical context and intellectual kinship of MET. Then I offer a basic outline of this theoretical framework focusing on the notions of thinging and metaplasticity. In the last part I am using the example of pottery making to illustrate how MET can be used to inform empirical research and how it might complement new research in phenomenology and embodied cognitive science. (shrink)

This special issue introduces the study of financial technologies and finance to the field of philosophy of technology, bringing together two different fields that have not traditionally been in dialogue. The included articles are: Digital Art as ‘Monetised Graphics’: Enforcing Intellectual Property on the Blockchain, by Martin Zeilinger; Fundamentals of Algorithmic Markets: Liquidity, Contingency, and the Incomputability of Exchange, by Laura Lotti; ‘Crises of Modernity’ Discourses and the Rise of Financial Technologies in a Contested Mechanized World, by Marinus Ossewaarde; Two (...) Technical Images: Blockchain and High-Frequency Trading, by Diego Viana; and The Blockchain as a Narrative Technology: Investigating the Social Ontology and Normative Configurations of Cryptocurrencies, by Wessel Reijers and Mark Coeckelbergh. (shrink)

In Husserl’s Missing Technologies, Don Ihde urges us to think deeply and critically about the ways in which the technologies utilized in contemporary science structure the way we perceive and understand the natural world. In this paper, I argue that we ought to extend Ihde’s analysis to consider how such technologies are changing the way we perceive and understand ourselves too. For it is not only the natural or “hard” sciences which are turning to advanced technologies for help in carrying (...) out their work, but also the social and “human” sciences. One set of tools in particular is rapidly being adopted—the family of information technologies that fall under the umbrella of “big data.” As in the natural sciences, big data is giving researchers in the human sciences access to phenomena which they would otherwise be unable to experience and investigate. And like the former, the latter thereby shape the ways those scientists perceive and understand who and what we are. Looking at two case studies of big data-driven research in the human sciences, I begin in this paper to suggest how we might understand these phenomenological and hermeneutic changes. (shrink)

The cross-disciplinary framework of Material Engagement Theory (MET) has emerged as a novel research program that flexibly spans archeology, anthropology, philosophy, and cognitive science. True to its slogan to ‘take material culture seriously’, “MET wants to change our understanding of what minds are and what they are made of by changing what we know about what things are and what they do for the mind” (Malafouris 2013, 141). By tracing out more clearly the conceptual contours of ‘material engagement,’ and firming (...) up its ontological commitments, the main goal of this article is to help refine Malafouris’ fertile approach. In particular, we argue for a rapprochement between MET and the tradition of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, based on the ‘Vygotskian’ hypothesis of scaffolded and/or distributed cognition. (shrink)

The paper develops ethical guidelines for the development and usage of persuasive technologies (PT) that can be derived from applying discourse ethics to this type of technologies. The application of discourse ethics is of particular interest for PT, since ‘persuasion’ refers to an act of communication that might be interpreted as holding the middle between ‘manipulation’ and ‘convincing’. One can distinguish two elements of discourse ethics that prove fruitful when applied to PT: the analysis of the inherent normativity of acts (...) of communication (‘speech acts’) and the Habermasian distinction between ‘communicative’ and ‘strategic rationality’ and their broader societal interpretation. This essay investigates what consequences can be drawn if one applies these two elements of discourse ethics to PT. (shrink)

The aim of this inquiry is to investigate Heidegger's ontology of technology. We will show that this ontology is aporetic. In Heidegger's key technical essays, ?The question concerning technology? and its earlier versions ?Enframing? and ?The danger?, enframing is described as the ontological basis of modern life. But the account of enframing is ambiguous. Sometimes it is described as totally binding and at other times it appears to allow for exceptions. This oscillation between, what we will call total enframing and (...) partial enframing, is underscored in the work of two influential scholars of Heidegger's later thought, Hubert Dreyfus and Iain Thomson. We will show that like Heidegger, Dreyfus and Thomson unwittingly perpetuate this dilemma that ultimately covers up the aporetic structure of enframing. (shrink)

In the last decade we have entered the era of remote controlled military technology. The excitement about this new technology should not mask the ethical questions that it raises. A fundamental ethical question is who may be held responsible for civilian deaths. In this paper we will discuss the role of the human operator or so-called ‘cubicle warrior’, who remotely controls the military robots behind visual interfaces. We will argue that the socio-technical system conditions the cubicle warrior to dehumanize the (...) enemy. As a result the cubicle warrior is morally disengaged from his destructive and lethal actions. This challenges what he should know to make responsible decisions (the so-called knowledge condition). Nowadays and in the near future, three factors will influence and may increase the moral disengagement even further due to the decrease of locus of control orientation: (1) photo shopping the war; (2) the moralization of technology; (3) the speed of decision-making. As a result, cubicle warriors cannot be held reasonably responsible anymore for the decisions they make. (shrink)

This paper addresses a problem that has so far been neglected by scholars investigating the ethics of Big Data and policy makers: that is the ethical implications of Big Data initiatives’ environmental impact. Building on literature in environmental studies, cultural studies and Science and Technology Studies, the article draws attention to the physical presence of data, the material configuration of digital service, and the space occupied by data. It then explains how this material and situated character of data raises questions (...) concerning the ethics of the increasingly fashionable Big Data discourses. It argues that attention should be paid to the vocabulary currently used when discussing the governance of data initiatives; the internal tension between current data initiatives and environmental policies; issues of fair distribution. The article explains how taking into account these aspects would allow for a more responsible behaviour in the context of data storage and production. (shrink)

This paper addresses a problem that has so far been neglected by scholars investigating the ethics of Big Data and policy makers: that is the ethical implications of Big Data initiatives’ environmental impact. Building on literature in environmental studies, cultural studies and Science and Technology Studies, the article draws attention to the physical presence of data, the material configuration of digital service, and the space occupied by data. It then explains how this material and situated character of data raises questions (...) concerning the ethics of the increasingly fashionable Big Data discourses. It argues that attention should be paid to the vocabulary currently used when discussing the governance of data initiatives; the internal tension between current data initiatives and environmental policies; issues of fair distribution. The article explains how taking into account these aspects would allow for a more responsible behaviour in the context of data storage and production. (shrink)

Technology always provides a new perception of the world. However, it is not clear when technology produces “mere” new informations and when it provides something more such as a production of new objects in our world which start to “live” around us. The aim of this paper is to study how technology shapes our surrounding world. The questions which we are going to answer are: Is it really adding new objects to our world? If yes, does every technology have this (...) potentiality? We are going to tackle the problem using a phenomenological and post-phenomenological approach focussing our attention on the perceptual level. Using Husserl’s philosophy we will study how technology are deeply involved in our perception and, thanks to post-phenomenology and its concept of “embodiment relations,” we will be able to determine which kind of technologies have the potentiality to change our surrounding world introducing and producing new objects in it. (shrink)

This work focuses on augmented reality glasses and its aim is to analyse the knock-on effects on our everyday world and ourselves yielded by this kind of technology. Augmented reality is going to be the most diffused technology in our everyday life in the near future, especially augmented reality mounted on glasses. This near future is not only possible, but it seems inevitable following the vertiginous development of AR. There are numerous kinds of different prototypes that are going to come (...) out next year. Therefore, a study on how these modifications yield knock-on effects on the constitution of the object and subject is mandatory. This work tackles the topic starting from a phenomenological and post-phenomenological point of view and it analyses the modification yielded by such technology from a perceptual point of view using the analysis of the horizons of the object made by Husserl. We need this analysis because it is not only the hypothetical future that may never come, but it is the likely future very close to us that is putting pressure on us. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyse teledildonics from a phenomenological perspective in order to show the possible effects they will have on ourselves and on our society. The new way of using digital technologies is to merge digital activities with our everyday praxes, and there are already devices which enable subjects to be digitally connected in every moment of their lives. Even the most intimate ones are becoming mediated by devices such as teledildonics which digitally provide a tactual (...) stimulation allowing users to have sexual intercourse through them. The efforts made in order to provide such an intertwinement of our everyday lives and digital technologies are evident, but the effects produced by them are not clear at all. This paper will analyse these technologies from a phenomenological perspective in order to understand their effects on the constitution of the subjects and on our society at the intimate level. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effects on the everyday world of actual Augmented Reality games which introduce digital objects in our surroundings from a phenomenological point of view. Augmented Reality is a new technology aiming to merge digital and real objects, and it is becoming pervasively used thanks to the application for mobile devices Pokémon Go by Niantic. We will study this game and other similar applications to shed light on their possible effects on our lives (...) and on our everyday world from a phenomenological perspective. In the first part, we will show how these digital objects are visualised as merged in the surroundings. We will point out that even if they are visualised as part of the everyday world, they are not part of it because they are still related to the fictional world generated by the game. In the second part, we will show how the existence of these objects in their fictional world has effects on the everyday world where everybody lives. The goal of Augmented Reality is not reached yet because these objects are not part of the everyday world, but it already makes our lives embedded with digital elements. We will show if these new objects have effects on our world and on how we live our lives. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to interpret Yuk Hui’s ambitious and promising project of cosmotechnics and technodiversity as a kind of “critical synthesis” of the philosophies of technology of Martin...

This article explores the moral significance of technology, reviewing a microfluidic chip for sperm sorting and its use for non-medical sex selection. I explore how a specific material setting of this new iteration of pre-pregnancy sex selection technology—with a promised low cost, non-invasive nature and possibility to use at home—fosters new and exacerbates existing ethical concerns. I compare this new technology with the existing sex selection methods of sperm sorting and Prenatal Genetic Diagnosis. Current ethical and political debates on emerging (...) technologies predominantly focus on the quantifiable risk-and-benefit logic that invites an unequivocal “either-or” decision on their future and misses the contextual ethical impact of technology. The article aims to deepen the discussion on sex selection and supplement it with the analysis of the new technology’s ethical potential to alter human practices, perceptions and the evaluative concepts with which we approach it. I suggest that the technological mediation approach can be useful to ethically contextualize technologies and highlight the value of such considerations for the informed deliberation regarding their use, design and governance. (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)

Many different professionals play a key role in maintaining welfare in a welfare society. These professionals engage in moral judgements when using (new) technologies. In doing so, they achieve that radical responsibility towards the other that Levinas describes as being at the very core of ethics. Also, professionals try to assess the possible consequences of the involvement of specific technologies and adjust their actions in order to ensure ethical responsibility. Thus, ethics is necessary in order to obtain and sustain one's (...) professionalism. This presents care institutions with the challenge to design work processes and technology work in ways that include a sense of ‘the Other’ and make moral judgement an indispensable part of professional competence in technology. This article provides new understandings of the way ethics are involved in care institutions. Nurses’ moral judgements are sophisticated with regard to ethical perspectives. In hospitals, nurses combine Latour's notion of symmetry in human/technology relations with an ethics implying ethical priority to human beings over other beings. This combination of ethics is not only sophisticated; it is also paradoxical, as it puts together mutually contradictory ethics. Instead of causing moral confusion, this ethical paradox is employed to produce a particularly refined notion of care situations, allowing nurses’ care to include patients and technology alike. (shrink)

Technical mediation shapes our experience of the world, but it also shapes our experience of ourselves. In this paper, I argue that in order to understand the latter aspect of technical mediation, we need to expand on notions of technical mediation that focuses on actual use, and bring in possible use as well. The concept of technical mediation must therefore be grounded in a more general concept of technological presence. This concept indicates that technology harbours both actuality and potentiality, the (...) latter denoting that technologies offer possible actions, through which we realise specific actions, and, more importantly, realise ourselves; it is through the technological presence in our lifeworld we are able to recognise our own possibilities to be in and act in the lifeworld. The technologically revealed possibilities enable the subject to be constituted in a temporal forward-directedness, so that technological potentiality becomes co-constitutive of the subjects that we are and may become. (shrink)

During the second half of the twentieth century, several philosophers of technology argued that their predecessors had reflected too abstractly and pessimistically on technology. In the view of these critics, one should study technologies empirically in order to fully understand them. They developed several strategies to empirically inform the philosophy of technology and called their new approach the empirical turn. However, they provide insufficient indications of what exactly is meant by empirical study in their work. This leads to the critical (...) question of what counts as an empirically informed philosophy of technology in the empirical turn. In order to answer this question, we first elaborate on the problems that the empirical turn philosophers tried to address; secondly, we sketch their solutions, and, thirdly, we critically discuss their conceptions of empirical study. Our critical analysis of the empirical turn contributes to new efforts to engage in an empirically informed philosophy of technology. (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)

This paper will address the question of the morality of technology. I believe this is an important question for our contemporary society in which technology, especially information technology, is increasingly becoming the default mode of social ordering. I want to suggest that the conventional manner of conceptualising the morality of technology is inadequate – even dangerous. The conventional view of technology is that technology represents technical means to achieve social ends. Thus, the moral problem of technology, from this perspective, is (...) the way in which the given technical means are applied to particular (good or bad) social ends. In opposition to this I want to suggest that the assumed separation, of this approach, between technical means and social ends are inappropriate. It only serves to hide the most important political and ethical dimensions of technology. I want to suggest that the morality of technology is much more embedded and implicit than such a view would suggest. In order to critique this approach I will draw on phenomenology and the more recent work of Bruno Latour. With these intellectual resources in mind I will propose disclosive ethics as a way to make the morality of technology visible. I will give a brief account of this approach and show how it might guide our␣understanding of the ethics and politics of technology by considering two examples of contemporary information technology: search engines and plagiarism detection systems. (shrink)

Humans, more than any other species, have been altering their paths of development by creating new material forms and by opening up to new possibilities of material engagement. That is, we become constituted through making and using technologies that shape our minds and extend our bodies. We make things which in turn make us. This ongoing dialectic has long been recognised from a deep-time perspective. It also seems natural in the present in view of the ways new materialities and digital (...) ecologies increasingly envelop our everyday life and thinking. Still the basic idea that humans and things are co-constituted continues to challenge us, raising important questions about the place and meaning of materiality and technical change in human life and evolution. This paper bridging perspectives from postphenomenology and Material Engagement Theory is trying to attain better understanding about these matters. Our emphasis falls specifically on the human predisposition for technological embodiment and creativity. We re-approach the notion Homo faber in a way that, on the one hand, retains the power and value of this notion to signify the primacy of making or creative material engagement in human life and evolution and, on the other hand, reclaims the notion from any misleading connotations of human exceptionalism. In particular, our use of the term Homo faber refers to the special place that this ability has in the evolution and development of our species. The difference that makes the difference is not just the fact that we make things. The difference that makes the difference is the recursive effect that the things that we make and our skills of making seem to have on human becoming. We argue that we are Homo faber not just because we make things but also because we are made by them. (shrink)

A speech-generating device is not a thing that many people have experienced. For those with severe speech impairments, however, it may be a technology giving them voice and an integral part of their daily lives. What is it like to have an embodiment relation with SGD? This article draws upon Don Ihde’s insights regarding human-technology relations to explore how SGDs may act to mediate and condition the everyday lives of children and youth with speech impairments.