Considering the key mediating role that smartphones play in everyday life, a postphenomenological analysis to better understand how we have power over these devices, how these artefacts empower and simultaneously can overpower us, seems highly relevant. This article will show that in order to engage in such a much-needed postphenomenological analysis, one will first have to address three fundamental, methodological challenges. The first challenge is brought forth by the personalized interface of smartphones, hindering postphenomenologists to unravel the so-called multistability of the device through variational analysis, which typically is an anchoring point in their analysis. The second challenge is that the networked ontology of smartphones disrupts the ideal-typical hermeneutic relationship end-users have with their smartphone. The third, closely related challenge comes with the general focus of postphenomenology on the everyday life, first-person experience of users which leaves many, significant stabilities hidden behind the smartphone’s interface. The hypothesis of this article is that some people may actually be in a position to look beyond the interface of their smartphones. Their every-day life experience of the smartphone differs from the experience of most smartphone owners because, amongst others, they are imbedded in a macroperception which allows them to bring to the fore what the design of the artefact may hide for others. However, our current postphenomenological lens is not equipped to catch these people with their deviating first-person experiences. This article will turn to critical constructivism to refocus the lens and identify these people. In order to then also include this variety of experiences in the postphenomenological analysis, I will suggest that postphenomenologists should not merely depend on already existing empirical research but also start collecting these experiences themselves by engaging in for instance interviews and focus groups with these identified people. Looking for the friction between these particular, deviating phenomenological experiences and the standard perception, should help us to establish where and how overpowering smartphones shape everyday life.
This project aims to examine the reception of the Western philosophy of technology in China. This process has undergone developmental phases of initiation, transition, and prosperity in China. Specifically, this article analyzes translations of Western works, critical receptions of disciplinary themes and topics, and the Chinese reception of the Western philosophy of technology in terms of the continental–analytic divide. This study originally argues for the theoretical and practical reasons underlying this reception and the subsequent influences. The Chinese reception of the Western philosophy of technology is theoretically related to ancient and modern intellectual traditions in Chinese history and culture. From a practical perspective, the phasic characteristics of the exchange and reception of the Western philosophy of technology correlate with Chinese political, economic, and societal changes. The Western philosophy of technology has greatly influenced Chinese philosophical views on technology and inspired developments of the Chinese philosophy of technology. This article argues that the Chinese reception of the Western philosophy of technology is critical based on principles of openness and caution, which mirrors the Chinese spirit of seeking truth from facts for technological practice. Therefore, Chinese scholars place the Western philosophy of technology in the Chinese context to encourage favorable developments of the Chinese philosophy of technology. Based on the family resemblance and critical reaction, the philosophies of technology in the West and China are cooperatively and competitively enhanced through intercultural exchange and critical reception. Finally, this study predicts new trends regarding Chinese interest in the Western philosophy of technology.
This paper considers the particular ways in which the familiar letter (for thousands of years the predominant means of communicating over distance) and twenty-first century technologies like the Internet differingly shaped and shape our experience of distance and presence. It follows Heidegger, Dreyfus, and Borgmann in critiquing the kinds of experience and action the Internet makes possible, and—by way of Benjamin’s concept of “aura”—argues that while mediated communication over distance might have never been easier, faster, or cheaper, this increase in our effective power comes at the cost of a diminution of the affective power of the messages carried.
While Michel Foucault’s significance as a social theorist is undisputed, his importance as a technological theorist is frequently overlooked. This article considers the richness and the range of Foucault’s technological thinking by surveying his works and interviews, and by tracking his influence within Actor-Network Theory (ANT). The argument is made that we will not fully understand Foucault without understanding the central place of technology in his work, and that we will not understand ANT without understanding Foucault.
Philosophers of technology are not playing the public role that our own theoretical perspectives motivate us to take. A great variety of theories and perspectives within philosophy of technology, including those of Marcuse, Feenberg, Borgmann, Ihde, Michelfelder, Bush, Winner, Latour, and Verbeek, either support or directly call for various sorts of intervention—a call that we have failed to heed adequately. Barriers to such intervention are discussed, and three proposals for reform are advanced: (1) post-publication peer-reviewed reprinting of public philosophy, (2) increased emphasis on true open access publication, and (3) increased efforts to publicize and adapt traditional academic research.
While throughout history, knowledge and information have been mostly bound in language and text, new twenty-first-century media increasingly tend to break with this tradition of linear sequentiality. This paper will present an account of how this development may be explained by a relationship between the use of digital technologies on the one hand, and the (human) user’s cognitive processes on the other. This will be done by, first, outlining two existing conceptions of human cognition and, subsequently, by confronting these with observations in the field of philosophy of media, most prominently the position of Marshall McLuhan.
Our article attempts to provide some clarity to the debate about the proper relationship between science and public policy by drawing on the philosophical field of logic. We argue that based on an analysis of the most fundamental ways that empirical and evaluative truth claims can be used together in arguments, the tendency to conceive of this relationship either in dual terms of “pure” vs. “applied” or complex “multi-disciplinary” or “multi-cultural” systems of categorization should be rejected in favor a basic four-part division. A significantly improved understanding of the connection between science and public policy can be based on an examination of the four most basic kinds of logical connection between empirical and evaluative statements. One such improvement is a better understanding of how funding should be divided between state and private interests.
Homo Sapiens Technologicus intends to propose a contemporary ethics adapted to our technological world. With this goal in mind, Michel Puech structures his reflection in five parts. First, he proposes an existential analysis of the relationship between man and technology. Then, he proceeds to a critical analysis of the dynamics underlying contemporary technology, with a specific attention to the coevolutions of man and artefacts. The third part shows the gap between the potential of contemporary technology and traditional practices – philosophical, political, institutional, etc. – surrounding them. Afterwards, Puech emphasizes various strategies to bridge this gap and to serve as foundations for a new wisdom. Finally, from the perspective of practical philosophy, he characterizes this new kind of wisdom, which will modify our relationship with technology.
Within science technology and society studies the focus has long been on descriptive microanalyses. Several authors have raised the issue of the normative implications of the findings of research into socio-technical devices and infrastructures, while some claim that material artifacts have moral significance or should even be regarded as moral actors. In this contribution the normative impact of technologies is investigated and compared with the normative impact of legal norms, arguing that a generic concept of normativity is needed that does not depend on the intention of whoever designed either a law or a technology. Furthermore this contribution develops the idea that modern law, which has been mediated by the technologies of the script and the printing press, may need to rearticulate its basic tenets into emerging technologies in order to sustain what has been called the paradox of the 'Rechtsstaat'.
Chasing Technoscience embodies a trajectory that every PhD student, and everybody interested in Science and Technology Studies and the Philosophy of Science and Technology, should follow. It interviews some of the most important scholars in the field, reads some of their most recent texts, critically analyzes their positions and relates them to each other. The book can be considered an ‘advanced introduction’ to the interface between empirically oriented research of science and technology on the one hand, and the philosophy of science and technology on the other.
Social reality is multifaceted and comprises at least social conventions and norms, social roles and relations, social institutions and social artefacts. John Searle’s ambitious project in his Construction of Social Reality is to show in general terms how social reality can be accommodated to physical reality (Searle 1995). This raises a host of issues including how individual mentality and sociality are to be related, and how sociality and morality are to be related. Elsewhere I have argued against Searle’s anti-individualist conception of sui generis ‘we-intentions’ (Miller 2001, ch. 2). Specifically, I have argued in favour of what I term the collective end account of joint action according to which sui generis ‘we-intentions’ are neither desirable nor necessary. I have also suggested that Searle’s constructivist collective acceptance account of social forms emasculates central moral notions such as that of right and duty. On Searle’s account, human rights and correlative moral duties, for example, can exist only by virtue of collective acceptance of specific practices. Accordingly, in morally degenerate societies in which human rights are never respected, we must conclude that there simply are no human rights to be respected, for we have no external moral standpoint from which to make moral judgements in relation to collectively accepted social practices.
The notion of the socio-technical system was created in the context of labor studies by the Tavistock Institute in London about the end of the fifties (Emery/Trist, 1960). During the first decades of our century, labor studies had been largely concerned with the adaptation of humans to the organizational and technical framework of production; I just mention well known names such as Frederick Winslow Taylor or Henry Ford. In the thirties already, it is true, some researchers, like Elton Mayo (1946) and others in their famous Hawthorne studies, discovered the so-called human factor in industrial relations, but they mainly focused on individual psychology. Although these findings seemed to disprove the idea of technological determinism, in labor studies and industrial sociology, nevertheless, this idea remained prevalent for a long time. Technology was considered to be the independent, more or less autonomous variable; the mental and social conditions of human work had to follow the given technical structures and could be improved just marginally in one or the other case.
