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Postphenomenology vs Postpositivism

Don Ihde vs Bruno Latour

Fernando Flores Morador - Lund University - October 2014

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• My presentation will try to clarify the differences between Postphenomenology and Postpositivism.

• Contemporary studies of technology and its relation to science are very much inspired by the works of Don Ihde and Bruno Latour.

• My concern is pedagogical; during the last two years I have noticed that many students have difficulties in differentiating between these two philosophical approaches.

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Introduction

• Don Ihde is a phenomenologist who has developed a very original synthesis between phenomenology and American pragmatism which he has named “postphenomenology”.

• The pragmatic approach makes his phenomenology operable in a social context. Therefore the postphenomenology of Ihde can be applied to archaeological, anthropological or sociological research.

Ihde, Don. Expanding Hermeneutics. Visualism in Science. 1998; p. 80.

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• On the other hand, Latour’s writings, which have been identified with the general name of ANT (actor-network-theory), are akin to

• the works of the Postpositivists, e.g. Kuhn’s sociology of science along with Austin and Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language

• with the additional outsider influence from Foucault’s work, specially his theory of power as bio-power.

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• Postpositivism rose as a consequence of the crisis of Positivism suffered after the Second World War and the Vietnam War.

• This crisis opened for the readings of Phenomenology and other specific approaches traditionally belonging to Continental Thought.

• Let us see in the next section about the particularities of these two different approaches.

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• We believe that Ihde’s pragmatic phenomenology allows an operative use of philosophy in social contexts.

• However, Ihde’s approach is not congruent with a positivist approach.

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The Phenomenological standpoint

• The first aspect of phenomenology that we want to stress is that…

• “all my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view”.

• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of perception, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962; p. VIII.

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• In short, phenomenology cannot and does not try to approach the world “from above” with impartiality or objectivity.

• The phenomenological perspective is “from inside”.

• “Probably the chief gain from phenomenology is to have united extreme subjectivism and extreme objectivism in its notion of the world or of rationality.”

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To inhabit an object

• The phenomenologist relations to things is “intentional” that means that

• “to look at an object is to inhabit it,

• and from this habitation to grasp all things in terms of the aspect which they present to it.”

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• “Thus every object is the mirror of all others. When I look at the lamp on my table, I attribute to it not only the qualities visible from where I am, but also those which the chimney, the walls, the table can 'see’.”

• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of perception, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962; p.68.

• Phenomenology is the consequence of breaking with the radical dualism of the Cartesian metaphysics of a world of extension and a subject without it.

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• For phenomenology, there are no “objective” things with fast forms and properties.

• Neither the usability of things is forever determined

• because intentionality “inhabits” the things of the world and this act changes with experience.

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Phenomenology belongs to “Continental Thought”

• “Continental Thought”is the name of a family of philosophies which include different expressions of earlier forms of phenomenology and hermeneutics.

• “[Phenomenology] Has been long on the way, and its adherents have discovered it in every quarter, certainly in Hegel and Kierkegaard, but equally in Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice; p. VIII.

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Some aspects of the standpoints of ANT

• Actor-network-theory also tried to break with the radical dualism of the Cartesian metaphysics.

• This is achieved by creating the category of the world of things as hybrids,

• the former Cartesian objective world populated with objective things becomes now a world populated by things that are both “culture and nature”.

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• In that sense is correct to assume that ANT attempts to distance itself from Positivism and consequently approaches to Continental Thought.

• Because one common characteristic of Continental Thought that has been particularly influential to Postpositivism is the hermeneutical approach, which makes the question of “truth” contextual dependent.

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Positivism is anti-subjectivism

• But the worldview of Positivism was characterized not only by a Cartesian metaphysics but also by a radical “anti-subjectivism”.

• Positivism has been possible through the negation of the cognitive importance of the subjective dimension.

• As we are going to see ANT does not break with the anti-subjectivism of Positivism

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Positivism is against historicism

• The positivistic approach is also resistant to any form of historicism

• It defends an anachronic reduction of historical periods to epistemological standpoints.

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Latour’s categories are not historical

• Latour’s work has been described as a critic to “Modernism”.

• Latour then, must see modernity from a historical perspective and that raises an immediate question:

• is Latour’s standpoint historicist?

18 Latour, Bruno, We have never been modern, Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1993; p. 135.

Let us see how Latour describes his theoretical approach

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• We notice that his categories of postmodernity, premodernity and modernity are not referring to historical periods but are names of epistemological frameworks.

• In this manner Latour’s work fits in perfectly in the positivistic anachronic reduction of historical periods to epistemological standpoints.

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Latour and “non-human” agency

• At the starting point of Latour’s work we find the concept of acts perpetrated by artifacts described as “non-humans”:

• “Early this morning, I was in a bad mood and decided to break a law and start my car without buckling my seat belt. My car usually does not want to start before I buckle the belt. It first flashes a red light ‘‘FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELT!,’’ then an alarm sounds; it is so high pitched, so relentless, so repetitive, that I cannot stand it. (…) Where is the morality? In me, a human driver, dominated by the mindless power of an artifact?”

Latour, Bruno. “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts”; in Bijker & Law (1992) - Shaping Technology / Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. MIT Press, 1992; p. 225-226.

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Confusing acts with actions

• This animation of devices is not surprising because in the positivist tradition “acts” are mistaken with “actions”.

• The confusion is highly relevant, because actions are never intentional.

• By the same reason, positivism confuses “technics” –the physical aspects of a device- with “technology” –the phenomenological aspects of it.

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Non-human (artificial) intelligence

• The agency of things in Latour’s approach remember us the efforts made by the defenders of artificial intelligence and artificial life in the earlier days of computer science.

• Can a machine think?

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• The question about the artifacts capability to think is similar to that of as asking if the gramophones “can sing”, or if a video camera “possesses the sense of sight”.

• While the gramophone reproduces the voice or music and the book reproduces words, the computer reproduces abstract human action (no “acts”).

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Intentional congruency and causality

• So, we understand that according to ANT, the relations of the subject with the things of the lifeworld are simply causal, never intentional.

• On the contrary, from a phenomenological perspective, things are never involved in causal relations; causality cannot be derived from pure descriptions. Instead, they are involved in relations of congruency.

• The agency of the car’s alarm may cause me to use the belt, but it would never make me to do it for a social reason.

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• The flashing red light of the text ‘‘FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELT!’’ and the relentless high pitched and repetitive sound of the alarm have no authority upon the subject.

• It is easy to avoid the “demands of the car” for instance buckling the belt before sitting.

• Very different would be the case if a person demands or commands me to fasten my belt because not doing it would imply an intentional conflict.

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Some last words

• We believe that we must distinguish two kinds of eclecticism, one that may be constructive if it is comparing different perspectives to enrich the treatment of a theme.

• And another that is not desirable if it assumes phenomenological premises to draw positivist conclusions or vice versa.

• The results cannot be of any help in any philosophical context.

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The End