Архив статей журнала
This paper claims to show that the making of technology and the material agency of technical objects can be analyzed analogously to the making of meaning through words and speech acts. It proposes the development of a more comprehensive view on the making and working of technology that connects the social pragmatist approach of technical practice and symbolic interagency (Kant, Dewey, Mead) with the linguistic concept of pragmatics and speech acts (Peirce, Wittgenstein, Austin). Both, speech acts and technical acts can be considered as two modes of meaning-making in the social construction of reality. Furthermore, the paper exhibits some parallels between the objectification processes of language and technology. It emphasizes how both evolve from early stages of signs and tools in practical contexts to encoded collections of grammatical rules and technological toolslater on. Doing things with concrete things (technology) reveals two different modes of “efficacy” (Jullien). There is implicit experienced efficacy in the language of directed material forces and causes and also an explicit ascribed efficacy in the language of instituted ends–means relations. The text explores the analogy between language and technology through the lenses of semantics, syntax, pragmatics, and grammar. It emphasizes the importance of such an extended pragmatist/pragmatics approach in the face of new technologies that exhibits a high degree of self-activity, more modes of intra-action between physical and digital objects, and a growing interactivity at interfaces with human actors and environmental factors. They can be more appropriately understood, conceptualized, and also designed as sociotechnical constellations of distributed agencies between people, machines, and programs.
The emphasis on technical artifacts is a hallmark of contemporary philosophy of technology. How can Leroi-Gourhan’s conceptualization of the technical object enrich current discussions among philosophers of technology? This article aims not to exhaustively address this question but to briefly outline how LeroiGourhan, as an ethnologist, reconfigures the concept of the technical object inherited from ethnology. The article begins by presenting Leroi-Gourhan’s ambition to revisit the central question of ethnology: what is the origin of the division of the human mass into distinct ethnic units called “peoples”, distributed across the globe? According to Leroi-Gourhan, ethnology did not divide humanity at its natural junctures, leading to inaccurate historical conclusions. For him, “peoples” are not fixed and uniform entities defined by constant, specific characteristics. Instead, they arise from the temporary convergence of traits, such as language and technology, which have their own independent existence. These traits may come together at a certain point, but beyond that, they diverge. Ethnology should focus on these traits, not on the “peoples.” In particular, technology serves as a reliable indicator of how the human mass has been divided and dispersed across space and time. However, to draw solid conclusions on this matter, it is essential to approach the extensive technical documentation with a rigorous method of classification and analysis. The article examines this method, leading Leroi-Gourhan to redefine the very concept of the technical object. The article highlights Leroi-Gourhan’s focus on the concepts of “fact” and “tendency” in his analysis of technical objects. These objects are viewed both as solutions to general human challenges in transforming matter (representing “tendencies”) and as culturally significant items with varying “degrees of fact.” Thus, Leroi-Gourhan assigned a dual nature to technical objects, but in an interestingly different way than those analytical philosophers who have been discussing the dual nature of artefacts.