Philosophy of Technology

This article describes a theory of the computations underlying the selection of coordinated motion patterns, especially in reaching tasks. The central idea is that when a spatial target is selected as an object to be reached, stored postures are…

Speech analysis and synthesis by linear prediction is based on the assumption that the short-time spectral envelope of speech can be represented by a number of poles. An all-pole representation does not provide an accurate description of speech…

Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the intuitive demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by…

Computational and information-theoretic research in philosophy has become increasingly fertile and pervasive, giving rise to a wealth of interesting results. In consequence, a new and vitally important field has emerged, the philosophy of…

Using the occasion of the publication of a Blackwell anthology in the philosophy of technology, Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition (2003), as a key to the contemporary role of this subdiscipline, this article reviews the current…

Abstract Most known technology serves to ingeniously adapt the world to the physical and mental limitations of human beings. Humankind has acquired awesome power with its rather limited means. Nanotechnological capabilities further this power. On…

Eric Zitzewitz of Dartmouth College reviews "Predictocracy: Market Mechanisms for Public and Private Decision Making" by Michael Abramowicz,. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins "Examines how institutions from legislatures to…

With the radical changes in information production that the Internet has introduced, we stand at an important moment of transition, says Yochai Benkler in this thought-provoking book. The phenomenon he describes as social production is reshaping…

The Internet could change the lives of average citizens as much as did the telephone in the early part of the 20th century and television in the 1950s and 1960s. Researchers and social critics are debating whether the Internet is improving or…

The recovery of vegetation following fire has been studied intensively in Mediterranean-type ecosystems. Little attention, however, has been given to floral traits, and almost no data have been collected on the effects of fire on pollinator activity…

Stroube notes: I start by considering the way in which technical objects define actants and the relationships between actants. I show that the ease with which the actants assumed in the design of the object are related to those that exist in…

This is an ambitious, original, and complex treatment of key aspects of contemporary capitalism. It makes a major contribution because it profoundly destabilizes the scholarship on globalization, the so-called new economy, information technology,…

This book is the first to consider Bruno Latour as a key figure in metaphys- icsa title he has sought but rarely received. Latour has long been promi- nent in the fields of sociology and anthropology, yet the philosophical ba- sis of his work…

Technology is always limited to the realm of means, while morality is supposed to deal with ends. In this theoretical article about comparing those two regimes of enunciation, it is argued that technology is on the contrary characterized by the…

This book crystallizes and extends the important work Wiebe Bijker has done in the last decade to found a full-scale theory of sociotechnical change that describes where technologies come from and how societies deal with them. Of Bicycles,…

Boys tend to be hard masters, the imposition of will over the machine through the implementation of a plan, while soft mastery â typically exhibited by girls â is more interactive. Girls "tend to see computational objects as sensuous and tactile and…

Science & Technology Studies (STS) is a dynamic interdisciplinary field, rapidly becoming established in North America and Europe. The field is a result of the intersection of work by sociologists, historians, philosophers, anthro- pologists, and…

The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) is one of the profession's most marginal specialties, yet its objects of inquiry, its modes of inquiry, and certain of its findings have very substantial bearing upon the nature and scope of the…

Is it possible to devise a set of concepts that could replace the technology/society divide? This set of new concepts - association and substitution - might help to rephrase some of the traditional questions of social order and especially that of…

Technology is everywhere, yet a theory of technology and its social dimension remains to be fully developed. Building on the influential book The Social Construction of Technological Systems, this volume carries forward the project of creating a…