Philosophy of technology takes centre stage: a handbook maps the field

The most reliable sign that a field has come of age is that it produces its own handbook. Encyclopaedias and handbooks generate no new knowledge; what they put on record is what a field thinks about itself.

The philosophy of technology has crossed that threshold.

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology, edited by Shannon Vallor and published by Oxford University Press, runs to six hundred and ninety-six pages and is the most comprehensive map of the field to date. The title of its opening chapter states the intention: "Introduction to the Philosophy of Technology".

Vallor is among the best-known figures in the area. In Technology and the Virtues (2016) she set the virtues of the Aristotelian, Buddhist and Confucian traditions side by side and asked which of them we need in order to live well with technology.

Why it was counted a sideline#

The philosophy of technology sat at the edge of the discipline for a long time. The reason is simple, and instructive.

The classical division of philosophical labour sorts its subject matter into the natural and the man-made. Nature belongs to the philosophy of science, human action to ethics and political philosophy. The tool falls nowhere in that scheme: it is not natural, and it is not, properly speaking, an action. It is merely a means.

The assumption of the "mere means" was what kept technology below the threshold of philosophical interest. A hammer is morally neutral; what matters is who picks it up, and for what.

The field was founded by refusing exactly that assumption.

The line: from Heidegger to the algorithm#

Heidegger#

Martin Heidegger's essay of 1954, The Question Concerning Technology, is taken to be the founding document of the field.

Heidegger's basic claim is that technology is not a means but a mode of revealing. Modern technology sets nature up as a resource standing ready for use — Bestand, "standing reserve", in his term. A river is no longer a river but potential energy. A forest is a reserve of timber.

On this reading, the real question is not the misuse of technology but the way technology shapes, in advance, how we see the world.

Ellul#

Jacques Ellul, in the same years, put a bleaker thesis in La Technique: in modern society technique has become an autonomous system that imposes its own logic. The measure is efficiency, and efficiency subordinates every other value to itself.

Ellul's objection is often misread. It is not aimed at machines. It is aimed at efficiency becoming the sole criterion.

Ihde and postphenomenology#

The direction of the field changed with Don Ihde.

Heidegger and Ellul treated technology whole, as Technology with a capital letter. Ihde thought this too sweeping and turned the attention to particular technologies: this device, this user, this situation.

The approach he built is called postphenomenology, and its central concept is mediation. Technologies do not merely stand between us and the world; they shape our perception of it. A man in spectacles does not see his spectacles, he sees with them. A microscope does not show a new object; it moves the boundary of what can be seen at all.

Ihde classified these relations — instruments that merge with the body, instruments that turn the world into a text to be read, instruments that work in the background — and so gave the field a language of analysis. As we have discussed elsewhere on this site, that language is back in play in the argument over artificial intelligence.

Today: artificial intelligence and algorithms#

The liveliest chapters of the handbook are those in which the tradition is turned on contemporary questions.

A recommendation algorithm is a mediator in Ihde's sense: it settles what we are going to see. Unlike a pair of spectacles, though, it is run by an institution with interests of its own, and how it works is closed to the user.

The questions that follow make up the present agenda of the field. Who is answerable for an algorithm's decision? Is transparency a technical requirement or a moral demand? How are digital infrastructures to be opened to democratic scrutiny?

The question the field asks of itself#

The implicit thesis of the handbook can be put in a single sentence: the philosophy of technology is not a branch of applied ethics.

The difference matters. Applied ethics takes ready-made moral frameworks and applies them to new situations: what does utilitarianism say, what does Kant say? The philosophy of technology argues that the frameworks themselves are shaped by technological conditions.

An example. The concept of privacy changes its content as the technologies of recording and circulation change. In the nineteenth century an invasion of privacy was the neighbours overhearing; today it is being written into a database. The concept did not stay the same — technology redefined it.

The view from Turkey#

In Turkey the philosophy of technology has not yet been established as a separate sub-discipline; most of the work goes on under the headings of philosophy of science, ethics or media studies.

Yet at a moment when the argument over artificial intelligence occupies so much of both public and academic attention, having a language of one's own is a practical need. Vallor's handbook is a reference work that shows where such a language can be built from.

Publication details#

• Editor: Shannon Vallor
• Publisher: Oxford University Press (Oxford Handbooks series)
• Published: 15 February 2022 · 696 pages
• ISBN: 9780190851187