Social Epistemology and Technology

Toward Public Self-Awareness Regarding Technological Mediation

Frank Scalambrino

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781783485321
• eBook ISBN: 9781783485345
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

How has technology changed what it means to be human and to be a member of a human society? How has technology changed the way we acquire knowledge of the world we inhabit? In light of these changes and the direction we are moving, how should the pursuit of knowledge be organized? Social Epistemology and Technology provides insights into such questions relating to public self-awareness regarding technology.

The concerns addressed in this book apply to a large and diverse audience including, but not limited to, those interested in social epistemology, technology, cultural studies, trans-humanism, augmented subjectivity, futurology, human sciences, social sciences, political sciences, communication, psychology, science and technology studies, and philosophy. This is the first book of its kind to focus solely on technology and its socially specific epistemological themes. It offers insight into public self-awareness regarding technology by providing an understanding of persons in relation to the technological changes that have occurred, and continue to occur, across the societies they people.

Part I

NORMATIVE DIMENSIONS OF TECHNOLOGICAL MEDIATION AND PUBLIC SELF-AWARENESS

Chapter 1

The Place of Value in a World of Information

Prolegomena to Any Marx 2.0

Steve Fuller

This chapter offers a genealogy of the concept of information, which today is very much embedded in “platform capitalism,” whereby keystrokes and clicks operationalize “the difference that makes a difference,” which by the mid-twentieth century had become the default position of a radically relativized understanding of the “value of information” (aka meaning). The first half of the chapter deals with how information became so relativized, which goes back to the general collapse in the distinction between short- and long-term assessments of value in the wake of Kant’s demystification of theodicy. Marx, fortified by Hegel, tried to keep this distinction alive, especially via the concept of exploitation, whereby whatever short-term benefit workers receive from their employers is supposedly undermined by a longer-term disadvantage (aka surplus value). Platform capitalism presents a subtler version of Marxian exploitation that does not rely on a clear sense of employment or wage. Moreover, Capitalism 2.0 replaces the physical space that was expropriated in Capitalism 1.0 with a possibility space that is equally ripe for expropriation. In this context, the concept of “digital prosumer” is a significant corrective measure to enable people to regain control of their data.

1. THE PLACE OF VALUE IN A WORLD OF INFORMATION

The title of this section echoes the title of the 1934–1935 William James Lectures delivered at Harvard by the Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Koehler, “The Place of Value in a World of Facts.” Koehler’s use of the word “value” would have been understood by Aristotle, for whom value was to be found in an organism’s state of equilibrium with its environment, which he understood as an optimal integration of the organism’s many functions. This was the “wisdom of the body” which the Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon had dubbed “homeostasis” a few years prior to Koehler’s lectures. For his part, Koehler was specifically focused on what it would mean for the brain to be in such a state of dynamic equilibrium with its environment. Implied in this entire line of thought is an equivalence of “value” and “health,” such that the healthy organism is performing as designed—or put in less explicitly genetic terms, the organism is being the best version of itself that it can.

The Christian cosmos complicates this Aristotelian take on things. Put more provocatively, there is no natural affinity between Aristotle and Christianity, which helps to explain the energy that the Roman Catholic Church has had to expend to keep the two aligned, despite the many fronts of dissent (aka heresy). After all, for the Christian, the true value of any creature can only be understood in ultimate, or “absolute,” terms—that is, once one understands the divine plan within which the creature’s existence fits, which in turn resolves all the messiness of life as lived. It follows that “homeostasis” is a temporary, not a final, state of being. In this respect, Christianity introduces a radically instrumentalist conception of value, as we are all means to God’s ends. However, humans remain unique because they are more than merely divine instruments. They are “ends in themselves,” as Kant famously put it, because we have been created in imago dei. But that simply means we enjoy (or endure!) a divided ontological status: Like the deity from whom we descend, we create things that aspire to ultimate value; yet at the same time we remain the most dutiful, albeit often unwitting, vehicles for realizing God’s intentions. The Christian aims to reconcile the two perspectives, with Jesus serving as the paradigm case (Fuller 2011, ch. 2).

In practice, this means zooming in and out between a micro and macro view of things, which suggests that the value of an action changes over time—before, during, and after it happens—as it comes to be seen in light of other actions. Thus, in the moment of theosis, when the “transfigured” Jesus realizes that he is the Son of God, he glimpses his own relatively casual demise on the cross followed by a more substantial redemption. This sensibility was captured more abstractly in the late seventeenth century as “theodicy,” the branch of theology devoted to “justifying the ways of God to men.” Although Voltaire’s Candide ridiculed this vision for reducing all suffering to a failure to perceive a deferred good, less than a century later it was secularized in Hegel’s philosophy of history as the “cunning of reason,” which then made its way to Marx’s dialectical materialism. But of equal importance is theodicy’s legacy to classical political economy, which secularizes and democratizes humanity’s divided ontological status—now, in terms of two opposing sources of value. On the one hand, the labor theory of value is a secular and democratized version of the idea that human action is naturally endowed with godlike creativity; on the other hand, the utility theory of value is a secular and democratized version of the idea that the ultimate significance of human action is only known in the long run by the benefit that others derive from it.

An ideal market may be seen as capturing, through the price mechanism, the state of play in the dialectic between these two conceptions of economic value. Thus, our potentially boundless creativity is disciplined by the specific wants of others that need to be served, while at the same time those wants become more refined as consumers are forced to decide from among the plethora of products at their disposal. In this way, naïveté and excess come to be focused into efficiently taken decisions. As a result, the economy’s set-point is continually shifted as people become more sophisticated in terms of what they produce and consume (Fuller 2006b). In this context, Condorcet’s conception of markets as a vehicle of overall human progress proves more illuminating than that of his contemporary, Adam Smith (Rothschild 2001). Condorcet’s use of tâtonnement (“groping”) for the stabilization of prices—what Léon Walras characterized as “equilibrium”—was also used by various Lamarck-inspired thinkers to characterize the microstructure of evolution (Fuller 2015, 162ff). Thus, the meaning of each individual’s life amounted to the management of one’s personal supply and demand curve. One recent philosopher who has drawn on this insight to ground a general metaphysics of value has been Robert Nozick (1981, ch. 5). Unfortunately his efforts have gone largely ignored, even though they could provide the normative basis for a “deep liberalism” (Fuller 2015, 126ff).

The neat story I have been telling of the secularization of theodicy into the dialectics of economic value has yet to take account of Kant’s influence, which was to radicalize the distance between the two poles of the dialectic, rendering each inscrutable to the other. Once Kant’s “transcendental” turn reduced our centrality to the cosmos from necessary truth to wishful thinking (in the existence of God), the value attached to human labor became attenuated to simply one’s ownership of the decisions taken to act in an uncertain world, while “utility” evaporated into “fate,” as the consequences of our actions came to be seen as fundamentally beyond our control. Thus, whatever efficacy—let alone legacy—that might be ascribed to the human condition on the basis of art or technology was ontologically undercut. From a materialistic standpoint, Kant seemed to reduce human history to a series of ephemeral states, and the price mechanism itself reduced to the fleeting outputs of a stock exchange ticker tape. In this way, the path from Kant (via Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel) to existentialism was paved.

The academic side of this Kantian dismemberment of value is enshrined as the familiar fact-value distinction from the philosophy of social sciences. It is often presented as a secular dogma that serves to stave off the dreaded “naturalistic fallacy,” which threatens to derive an “ought” from an “is.” Thus, in a remarkable inversion of the original theology, the sociologist Max Weber described the mixing of facts and values—as, say, economists do when they presume the inherent goodness of productivity increases—as the “original sin” of social scientific inquiry (Proctor 1991, 89). Contra Weber, one might have thought that like Adam’s expulsion from Eden, the traumatic moment was precisely Kant’s own expulsion of values from the world of fact. In any case, it was against this Kantian context that starting in the mid-nineteenth century, under the influence of Hermann Lotze, it became common to speak of “value” in the plural as “values.” It is easy to overlook the significance of this move, which may be regarded retrospectively as the first step toward the “postmodern condition” (Lyotard 1979/1984). The grammatical innovation signaled the radical privatization of value, with the burden of proof shifted to those who would make claims for “common value,” perhaps even including “public good” (Fuller 2015, 109ff).

However, it would be a mistake to regard the fact-value distinction as requiring the subjectivization of values, in the sense of immunizing them from scientific treatment. On the contrary, Lotze himself had been a student of Gustav Fechner, the founder of experimental psychophysics, a discipline dedicated to determining the change in a physical stimulus needed to make a “just noticeable difference” in an organism’s sensory response (Heidelberger 2004). It would be more correct to say that the neo-Kantian turn initiated by Lotze involved simply the relativization of values, which may be understood just as objectively as any other empirical phenomenon—namely, as the products of specific social conditions or personal histories or even, as B. F. Skinner might put it, “schedules of reinforcement.” Thus, two individuals or cultures may hold radically different values, but both can be understood empirically and comparatively. Whether these individuals or cultures can live amicably in the same society without one or both undergoing radical existential change is another matter entirely, of course. Indeed, this was the context in which the problem of “cross-cultural rationality” was raised in the twentieth century, typically under the shadow of imperialism (e.g., Wilson 1970; Hollis and Lukes 1982).

Perhaps the most lasting impact of this value relativization has been felt through the account of information provided by the Shannon-Weaver model of communication, which locates the value of a transmitted signal in what the anthropologist Gregory Bateson famously dubbed “the difference that make a difference” to a receiver’s decision-making capacity. While such differences can be empirically specified (i.e., the new input that decides a matter for a particular receiver), they cannot be universalized or perhaps even generalized very widely across individuals. However, that has not stopped the concept itself from becoming generalized—and popularized. When the Shannon-Weaver model was first proposed in the 1940s, it was seen as providing an operational definition of “meaning” (Gleick 2011). More recently, in a world increasingly saturated with data in search of inferential levers, the phrase “tipping point” has gained currency to capture what statisticians call “criticality,” the moment when a change in degree becomes a change in kind (Gladwell 2000).

A decade before the popularization of “tipping point,” and still thinking in terms of psychophysics, I coined the term “axioaetiotics” for the study of how value judgments change in response to changes in one’s sense of the causal structure of history (Fuller 1993, 169ff). In particular, the more the value of an action or event rises, the more necessary it appears to have been to the realization of a valued outcome. (Imagine the value of cause X rising as the prior probability of a highly valued effect Y decreases.) Conversely, claims that an outcome was “overdetermined” lower the value of its actual causes because other historically available factors would have sufficed to produce something comparable. Anyone familiar with the passing fashions in historiography, several of which exist simultaneously at a given time, knows that intuitions about the value-cause nexus are quite fluid, yet they often determine how we evaluate present-day claims to legitimacy.

The set of historiographical intuitions that have most concerned me turn on the Scientific Revolution’s historic dependency on certain factors uniquely operating in seventeenth-century Europe. Put the other way around: Would China, by all standards the world’s superpower until 1800, have eventually had its own scientific revolution—even without Western interference? The persistent return of a negative verdict by historians of science suggests that the nature of science is indeed connected with something distinctly Western. I have pursued this point at length elsewhere (esp. Fuller 2015, ch. 6). However, one implication worth flagging here is that if the significance of the Scientific Revolution has been as great for world history as is normally supposed (e.g., Herbert Butterfield thought it second only to the rise of Christianity), then it becomes at least in principle justifiable to impose science on cultures that would otherwise never have come to it (aka imperialism). The Scientific Revolution would seem to be the difference that has made all the difference—at least in terms of providing the framework for making sense of the subsequent course of world history, especially if told as the story of our self-transcendence of our species limitations...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Halftitle
• Introduction: Publicizing the Social Effects of Technological Mediation
• PART I: NORMATIVE DIMENSIONS OF TECHNOLOGICAL MEDIATION AND PUBLIC SELF-AWARENESS
• PART II: EXPLORING CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF HUMANS AND HUMANITY
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Contributors