Using Wittgenstein for Understanding and Evaluating Technology (2017)
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
>I proposed a holistic, transcendental, social, and critical phenomenology and hermeneutics of technology use that discusses technologies – understood, after the empirical turn, as technological artefacts – in the context of the technology games, form of life, and other grammars that make possible and structure that use.
Huh?
This viewpoint was actually the implicit argument of Operationalists like Bridgman, Fourier.
It was the explicit argument of Bohr, who believed "we are all suspended in language". Bohr took this further and believed that perceptual experience itself was a linguistic model to communicate the stimuli, the outside world, to the perceiver. In the same way, everything is a language, a game (set of rules) for communication.
The utility of this viewpoint is to create technology which conforms and supports existing cultural/linguistic/behavior norms rather than one which obstructs them.
I.e. ripping away the Facebook moniker for the social media platform and replacing it with descriptive language indicating what it actually does. Will update or reply with inevitable disappointment when my expectations fail to be lived up to.
I advise anyone to put in the time to read the article, but as someone pretty familiar with Wittgenstein already, I'll try to condense it, and provide some lower level context through which more immediate everyday application of it can be made use of.
For starters:
There are two major flavors of Wittgenstein generally discussed. Early or Tractatus Wittgenstein, or late Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein.
We're concerned with the latter.
Major points: Language is a toolbox. Meaning is derived from assigning uses of language through "language games" to "forms of life". Language that cannot be traced back to a language game is meaningless, as the "language game" is basically a nominative signpost through which the underlying linguistic grammars and the forms of life the use of language is meant to represent intersect to confer meaning.
Meaning in reference to language comes in two flavors:
Explicit (surface) meaning: meaning can clearly be articulated grammatically; includes syntax, basically the "what you said" part of an argument with your Significant Other
Implicit: meaning communicated through living. Cultural meaning. The sun will rise tomorrow. You grab a towel to dry off. Know how. You do X which leads to Y, which leads to Z. The "what I meant" part of an argument with your Significant other. Just to make sure I'm getting this across clearly, let's use a Hemmingway story.
For sale: Baby booties. Never worn.
Explicit meaning: A seller is offering to sell something. The something is a pair of baby booties. The baby booties have the quality of never having been worn.
Implicit meaning: The seller is trying to part ways with a pair of baby booties. This suggests someone was expecting a child to be born, normally a happy occasion, but since the seller is trying to get rid of them with the quality of never having been worn, it suggests something tragic has happened; I.e. death of the child, or mother and child.
None of that is explicitly stated, but nevertheless, can be communicated through common experience. Explicit meaning derives from rules, implicit requires common experience to be communicated properly, and is much harder to formalize.
Now that you've had a crash course on Wittgenstein, let me try to condense the rest of the piece.
So the author posits that there are transcendent grammars which shape our use of various technologies, and that these grammars by necessity transcend their merely technological context, and also incorporate facets of the culture and forms of life of the communities utilizing the technology.
Examples I'd extrapolate:
Internet/networking as used by Americans: Primarily disseminative in nature. Censorship extremely difficult. Robust. Limitations or control are far harder sells, due to cultural norms.
Vs.
Internet/networking by China: Tightly controlled. Increasingly difficult to freely/anonymously transact through due to intense regional regulation. Ubiquitous, utilized to enable pervasive Informational Awareness/Personnel tracking.
The author focuses on social robots in particular, but to be quite honest, toward the end, I just wasn't getting that much useful.
I think there's validity to looking at the ways differences in cultural values will lead the same technology to wildly divergent use cases; there is value there.
Not really feeling like there's a breakthrough here though. I'm not quite mind blown enough yet.