I gave a talk today called Internet of Nothings: Technology and Our Relationship With the Things in Our World at LXJS, a JavaScript conference in Lisbon, Portugal. I’m excited to have been given the opportunity to talk about the philosophy of technology! There’s an embedded video of the talk below, and I’ve included the slides, […]
Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book This chapter is the first of four on the relationship of technology to social and political issues. Borgmann is trying to argue that we should conceive of and judge society and politics in the light of technology, and that […]
Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book One of the foundational aims of Borgmann’s whole book is the attempt to actually give an explanation for technology. Hence we discussed what counts as an explanation in the scientific realm in earlier chapters. In this middle section of […]
Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book The point of this chapter, according to Borgmann, is to provide more rigor around what has thus far been an intuitive account of the device paradigm. He begins with the question of whether there are any competing analyses of […]
Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book In this chapter, Borgmann explores what he calls the Foreground of technology. This is essentially the world of the use (i.e., consumption) of technological devices, rather than the world of their construction or operation. As we are all aware, […]
Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book With chapter 9 we come to one of the most important chapters of TCCL. In it Borgmann elucidates the Device Paradigm, which is his way of explaining technology by reference to paradigmatic examples of it. The idea is that […]
Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book This chapter begins Part 2 (The Character of Technology), the first half of which (chs 8-12) aims to describe and articulate the paradigm of technology, and the second half of which (chs 13-16) aims to ask how we have […]
Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book At this point in our exploration of the relationship between modern science and technology, what can we say with confidence? First, that modern science shows us that the world exists in a large matrix of possible states of affairs. […]
Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book In this chapter we examine how far the validity of scientific explanation (the style of explanation called deductive-nomological) extends. Can there be any objections to the claim that scientific explanation is the proper mode of explanation for every question? […]
Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book Chapter 5 of TCCL is concerned with the validity of scientific explanation. Borgmann contrasts this with the scope of scientific explanation, which will be discussed in the next chapter. The example which runs throughout the chapter is the process […]