
Using Wittgenstein for Understanding and Evaluating Technology (2017) - lainon
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6209041/
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rdlecler1
If I can’t extract even a speck of nutritional value from an article after
three minutes I give up. Terribly written.

>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?

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osullivj
Indeed. Ironically it's exactly the sort of philosophical muddle that
Wittgenstein sort to dispel. I was hoping to find an application of the
private language argument to tech, but it seemed like the author only picked
up on games and forms of life. None of the emphasis on external performance,
feedback from others and rule following that we get from Kripke's famous
reading.

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ethn
The overall stirring is that technology, interfaces to leveraging processes
with less energy than otherwise, depend on existing cultural and linguistic
artifacts—which are themselves technologies (they facilitate social agreement,
cooperation by providing norms, signaling, and metrics e.g. rituals,
mathematics, and behavioral disambiguation through communication). That is
technology serves to further the abstractions provided by existing linguistic,
cultural, and technological means. However, once those abstractions become
integrated, if they are a "game-changing" technology they will begin to alter
the very cultural and linguistic abstractions in which they depend on. In this
way, they mutually manifest a feedback loop to accelerate the utility of each
other.

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.

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salawat
Just started digging into it, but seeing as he's using the Investigations, I'm
expecting a bit more emphasis on linking up technologies with a nominative
signpost that more clearly elucidated the essence of what it is actually
doing.

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.

~~~
salawat
Okay. About halfway through. (Philosophical reading is not an activity to do
lightly. It's a bit like climbing a mountain.)

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.

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salawat
Okay. Latter half basically takes the fundamentals of analyzing language vis a
vis it's use, and the general transcendental natures of grammars, and applies
the same process to technology.

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.

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AnthonBerg
Is the paper doing what it talks about?

~~~
ethn
Yes it is, I’ll explain it in a top-level comment for any other frustrated
readers.

