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Revisiting Ihde’s Fourfold “Technological Relationships”: Application and Modification

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Abstract

The question of how we relate to the world via technology is fundamental to the philosophy of technology. One of the leading experts, the contemporary philosopher Don Ihde, has addressed this core issue in many of his works and introduced a fourfold classification of technology-based relationships. The conceptual paper at hand offers a modification of Ihde’s theory, but unlike previous research, it explores the functional compositions of Ihde’s categories instead of complementing them with additional relational categories. The result is a simplification and reduction of the analytical categories of Ihde’s theory, where alterity and background relations are ontologically reduced to ratios between the mediated relationships. The paper uses cutting-edge robotics as a hermeneutic tool in order to present this point and concludes with a discussion of the usefulness of applying static categorization to complex technology and of various challenges and limitations.

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Notes

  1. Hereafter: Telenoid or T.

  2. For readers not familiar with Ihde’s work, the book chapter A Phenomenology of Technics (Ihde 2004) presents the main points of his theory, relevant for this paper.

  3. Throughout the paper, square brackets indicate modifications to the quotes.

  4. It is worth noting, as Paul-Peter Verbeek has done in What things do (Verbeek 2005, p. 123ff.), that technology in the first two relationships functions as a mediator, where in the third it is a relata in itself.

  5. The alterity relation is not formulated separately in his earlier work Technics and Praxis.

  6. Hereafter: continuum assumption

  7. Advanced Telecommunication Research Institute International

  8. The practical application context is, however, beyond the scope of this paper—for more information in this regard see, e.g., Yamazaki et al. (2012). Furthermore, a more detailed description of the Telenoid’s functionality can be found on the homepage of the ATR’s Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratory (http://www.geminoid.jp/projects/kibans/Telenoid-overview.html).

  9. This does not necessarily conflict with Ihde’s theory as such; however, his theory has a different emphasis, which does not provide enough information to directly affirm or reject this conjecture.

  10. Assuming that the total degree of alterity and the total degree of background relations can be formulated analogously.

  11. Recently, game designers seem to have noticed this end user pattern, since new systems also react to the controller’s positioning in space.

  12. Ihde does not claim that there is no relation to the world in an alterity relation per se (see for instance Ihde 1990, p. 107), but he does in this particular case and therefore it must be addressed here.

  13. In accordance with Ihde’s distinction between I, world, and technology.

  14. The degrees can never be zero, as this would conflict with the continuum assumption.

  15. Although highly interesting, the question of isomorphism is beyond the scope of the paper.

References

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Hiroshi Ishiguro and Shuichi Nishio from the Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratory, ATR for being so kind as to include me in the pilot testing of the Telenoid in Svendborg (Denmark) in March 2011. It was a great honor and an invaluable learning experience. In addition, I am grateful to Nishio and Ryuji Yamazaki (Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratory) for providing me with the pictures and illustrations (Figs. 1, 2, and 3) and allowing me to use them in this paper.

Finally, I am much obliged to Johanna Seibt (Aarhus University) for all her invaluable comments and suggestions on the various drafts of this paper.

This paper is a significantly improved version of a section of my PhD dissertation (Nørskov 2011). Most of these changes have been worked out under the PENSOR project funded by the Velux Foundation.

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Nørskov, M. Revisiting Ihde’s Fourfold “Technological Relationships”: Application and Modification. Philos. Technol. 28, 189–207 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-014-0149-8

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