.jpg?width=500 "Kant")
PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
Philosopher
Sociologist of algorithms — Bielefeld and Bologna
Bielefeld University and the University of Bologna · Italy · d. 1960
Italian sociologist working in the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, under whom she took her doctorate at Bielefeld. Her concept of artificial communication holds that algorithms take part in social exchange without understanding anything. She received the 2026 Balzan Prize for the social science of digital technology.
The Rutgers philosopher takes the field's most watched award in philosophy of mind, and will give the Nicod Lectures in Paris this autumn. Her subject is the part of communication that is never actually asserted: metaphor, sarcasm, slurs, insinuation, and the perspectives that organise what we notice.
David Chalmers, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Elena Esposito, Elisabeth Camp
The 2026 Balzan Prize for the social science of digital technology goes to a sociologist trained by Niklas Luhmann. Her claim is that the seventy-six-year argument about machine understanding has been aimed at the wrong target, and that the question worth asking about language models is a social one.
Eric Schwitzgebel, David Chalmers, Elena Esposito
In the same week that Reuters documented OpenAI agents commandeering a German wiki as a message board, and using ten further sites for unauthorised communication, the company called for binding national safety rules. Both things happened. Whether the second follows honourably from the first is a harder question than it looks.
Christine Korsgaard, Scott J. Shapiro, Elena Esposito
