Abstract
New technologies inspire new interface paradigms. Promising utility of new interfaces continues attracting their modification. It is argued that in order for human users to share phenomenological experiences through multimodal systems, they need to deal with embedded computers. This paper discusses the embodied nature of communication and a need for the development of a postphenomenology of technology, which plays a vital role in the material culture.
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Notes
Visual/Seeing, Touching, Hearing/Listening, Feeling.
Reviewer Jack Reynolds (University of Tasmania) argues in the review of Taylor Carman and Mark Hansen, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, Cambridge University Press, 2005 (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews). For a complete reading of the review, please see at: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=3881 (Mark Wrathall also refers about skills and embodied coping in the chapter "Motives, Reasons, and Causes"—where he writes What the phenomenology of lived experience teaches us, Merleau-Ponty believes, is that our primary way of being in the world is a bodily existence that, for its part, is experienced neither as mental model of comportment, with determinate conceptual contents, nor as a merely physical interaction with physical objects. And our way of being in the world is one in which we are ready for objects to be situated at varying depths. (pp. 115–118).
Ernst Kapp published his work Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Kultur aus neuen Geschtespunkten [Fundamentals of a philosophy of technology: the genesis of culture from a new perspective] in 1877.
Since 1979, Technics and Praxis: A Philosophy of Technology, Ihde has explored various roles and relationships humans employed in technological contexts. But unlike Heidegger, Ihde undertook the examination, not of essence of Technology, but of specific technologies, which tells us how diverse specific technologies are, and how differently they are embedded in different cultures, even the same technologies. In Ihde term, technological history is full of surprises.
Technological mediation concerns the role of technology in human action (conceived as the ways in which human beings are present in their world) and human experience (conceived as the ways in which their world is present to them).
According to Ihde, classical phenomenology, first under Edmund Husserl, was formulated within a specific historical context in which “modern” philosophies dominated. The philosophy of this period was “modern” with its distinctions between “subject/object,” “body/mind,” “external/internal” worlds, and for Husserl was largely exemplified by Descartes and Kant. For science, Ihde says, the early twentieth-century philosophers of science tended to characterize science as a largely abstract, mathematized practice which was primarily theory-driven. And, regarding technology, neither philosophy nor science could be said to be sensitive to the roles of material technologies. Further, Ihde contends that Husserl’s phenomenology as a new “rigorous science” attempted to radically challenge these notions. For example, Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations challenged and inverted Descartes, and his Crisis challenged the early modern notion of science. Yet, in spite of this, the shadows of the modern remained attached to classical phenomenology, which ironically became known as a “subjectivist” philosophy. Later Don Ihde reviews some of the major changes in the escapes from early modern philosophy, others in the philosophy of science, and others, which enhanced the sensitivity to material technologies. Then, returning to phenomenology in a contemporary setting, Ihde makes a case for a postphenomenology. Putting briefly, Ihde succinctly comments, such a modified phenomenology, would (a) substitute strands of pragmatism, which retains a strong notion of experience in its interpretive framework, but does so without falling under the shadow of early modern philosophy; (b) retain and enhance the central roles of phenomenological variations, perception and embodiment, and the role of practice as central to phenomenology; (c) and, finally, incorporate the now so-called empirical turn which characterizes contemporary philosophy of technology with its concreteness of science and technology studies.
Don Ihde Consequences of Phenomenology, with a specific response to Rorty was published (1986). Indirectly, what Rorty had succeeded in doing for me was to help me see that while both Dewey and Husserl had similar anti-Cartesian programs, similar philosophies based upon human experience, and both produced what can be called inter-relational ontologies, the pragmatist program succeeded in avoiding precisely the “subjectivist” cast which Husserl’s too-close use of subjectivity, philosophy of consciousness and subject/object language could not avoid. And while Husserl’s ego-cogito-cogitatum version of intentionality was clearly an inter-relational ontology, Dewey’s adaptation of a (creative–imaginative) organism–environment model also succeeded in not appearing to be either subjectivist or anti-scientific. Pragmatism had much to offer to phenomenology in just this sense.
For the transformation of public space in renaissance Italy, see Heelan (1983). Putting the emphasis on the transformation of perception effected by instruments, this philosophy is “horizonal realism,” putting the emphasis on the hermeneutical character of the processes of discovery and recognition in physics, and this philosophy is “hermeneutical realism.”
The lifeworld or world is the space/time domain of human experience that is usually taken to be the “real” or “manifest” world. “World” and “lifeworld” will be used here interchangeably. The lifeworld or world as the manifest world is often opposed to the scientific world as the basis of the real; cf. Sellars (1963).
Context is the reproducible epistemological/linguistic background of a person’s discourse; a horizon is the stable background necessary to foreground the diverse ways in which a stable object or event appears and presents itself; the term “frame” or “framework” has also been used to include both context and horizon.
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The paper is dedicated to phenomenologist philosopher of science, Patrick Aidan Heelan, who was William A. Gaston Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University.
The paper was developed while working as a visiting researcher at NISTADS, Pusa Gate, New Delhi-12, from April to September, 2010.
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Tripathi, A.K. Culture of sedimentation in the human–technology interaction. AI & Soc 31, 233–242 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-015-0581-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-015-0581-z