At the end of 2020, on 19 November, the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts of the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen hosted the first student conference devoted to the topic of postphenomenology. As far as I know, it was the very first conference in the Czech context to focus on reflecting on the ideas that have emerged over recent decades in this phenomenologically inspired analysis of technologies, which is still not very well known here. I was responsible for organising the conference and defining its themes together with my colleagues from the Pilsen department of philosophy, and I received financial support for it from the University of West Bohemia, to which I am grateful for all its financial and administrative support.
The idea of the conference was simple. The publication of a groundbreaking book entitled Technics and Praxis: A Philosophy of Technology, written by the American philosopher Don Ihde, can be dated to around 1979. In the United States it was the first English-language publication devoted to the philosophy of technology. Among Ihde’s other firsts, we can also credit him with founding a new, phenomenologically influenced analysis of technologies, which he called postphenomenology. How does postphenomenology differ from the existing philosophy of technology, and what role does the classical phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others play in it? Answering these and other questions was precisely the aim of our student conference, with all the advantages and limitations that naturally come with student conferences.
From the very beginning, however, we declared to the participants that we understand postphenomenology as a philosophical analysis of technologies whose main interest is not the technical artefact as such, but rather the mediating effects of technologies on our mind (intentionality), on our relationship to the world, to other people and to ourselves. Postphenomenology further proclaims that, unlike “armchair philosophy”, it aims to theorise on the basis of empirical knowledge about real technical artefacts. That is why the literature often speaks of postphenomenology not only as “philosophy of technology” but also as “philosophy from technology”. An empirical phenomenology of technology sounds good, at least in the articles of its proponents. But if we look at postphenomenology critically, ideally with a knowledge of classical phenomenology, philosophy of mind or contemporary media theory, how does postphenomenology fare?
As the organiser, I wanted to put this to the test, and so I invited as keynote speakers three philosophers who are, in my opinion, leading Czech figures in the respective disciplines. On questions of philosophy of mind, Dr Michal Polák from the Department of Philosophy at the University of West Bohemia accepted the invitation; the critical perspective of classical phenomenology was presented to us by Dr Martin Ritter, and the perspective of media theory by Dr Martin Charvát.
Since this was a student conference, the keynote lectures were followed by presentations of student papers. Besides my own paper, Don Ihde’s Postphenomenology as a Critique of Martin Heidegger’s “Metaphysics” of Technology and Materiality, we could see and hear the following students and their talks:
- Mgr. Jakub Fiala – Lost in Translation: When Self-Measurement Holds Up a Distorting Mirror to Us
- Bc. Karolína Hrichová and Bc. Veronika Hanáková – When Death Arrives
- Mgr. Radovan Bartošek – Technology and Freedom in a Time of Blanket Anti-Epidemic Measures
- PhDr. Pavel Farkas – Design and User Experience (UX) of the City
In this post I will focus on my summary of, and commentary on, the first keynote lecture. I expect to write up summaries of all the others here, one by one, in the near future. I must note that this is my own summary and interpretation, which does not mean that the presenters themselves necessarily agree with what I write here. With the formalities behind us, let us look at the individual talks.
Mgr. Michal Polák, Ph.D. – Postphenomenology, 4E and Neurocentrism
A colleague from the Pilsen department of philosophy, Dr Michal Polák, is among the leading philosophers of mind in the Czech Republic. Together with Dr Tomáš Marvan he has published several important articles on the neural correlates of the mind in leading international academic journals. And although Dr Polák’s intellectual background lies in naturalistic and analytic philosophy of mind, I considered it more than useful to hear a commentary on the (post)phenomenology of technology from a voice that belongs to the other side of the notional analytic/continental divide in philosophy, however many reservations I may have about this dichotomy.
Introduction
The main topic of Dr Polák’s lecture was to grasp postphenomenology as an approach that in some way defines itself against the classical and, it must be said, dominant position in analytic philosophy of mind, in which the mind is interpreted as a computational device that performs operations, algorithmically or statistically, on mental representations, which serve as the symbolic units and the “data” of these computational operations. If postphenomenology claims that technical artefacts are such fundamental objects that they constitute our mental structures and intentionality, then for Dr Polák this means that, logically, wherever there is intentionality there must also be some mental representation. That is why analytic philosophy of mind has something to say about postphenomenology: postphenomenology derives from phenomenology, whose central point was precisely the concept of intentionality, that is, the property of our mind of always being directed at some object. Last but not least, Dr Polák also asks: how exactly does postphenomenology differ from the philosophy of artificial intelligence or of technology, or from the sociology (of technologies)?
Defining postphenomenology
Dr Polák began his lecture by quoting leading representatives of postphenomenology and their definition of what the field is trying to do. According to (Rosenberg and Verbeek, 2015), for example, postphenomenology focuses “on the various ways in which technologies help to shape the relationship between human beings and the world. [Postphenomenologists] do not approach technologies as mere functional or instrumental objects, but rather as intermediaries [mediators] of human experiences and activities”. We further learned that postphenomenology “combines philosophical analysis with empirical investigation. Rather than applying philosophical theories to the study of technologies, the postphenomenological approach seeks to take existing technologies and technological developments as the starting point for philosophical analysis. [Postphenomenology] as a philosophy of technology is in this sense also a philosophy from technology.”
Why is post-phenomenology “post”?
Whenever we talk about anything with the prefix “post”, we should know what it defines itself against, what exactly it goes beyond. A complete answer would require a detailed analysis of what phenomenology is in the first place and what postphenomenology is, and finally a comparison of the two. There was no time for that during the presentation, but we learned that postphenomenology, unlike classical phenomenology, is oriented towards mediation. Of what? Of experiences and of our relationship to the world and to other people. In the founder of postphenomenology, Don Ihde, we see the “triadic” character of the human–technology–world relation explicitly, for instance in what is probably the most important book of postphenomenology, Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (1990). Peter-Paul Verbeek, probably the second most influential contemporary postphenomenologist after Ihde, claims that an important element of the postphenomenological analysis of technologies is the fact that postphenomenology rejects a fixed subject and object, and claims instead that subject and object are actively shaped and constituted in the course of mediation (Verbeek, 2005). It should occur to us to ask: what exactly do this constitution and this active shaping mean?
Dr Polák offers a partial answer by way of another quotation. On the one hand, Ihde (2003) seems to agree with the founder of classical phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, that it is appropriate to relativise the relation of object and subject, in the sense that for Husserl (and Husserlian phenomenology) there is no inner subject and outer object; rather, all we find is an inter-relational connection between the experiencing human being and the world of the experienced environment. Moreover, “for Husserl, all subjectivity is intersubjectivity”, as Ihde goes on to write. This brings a problem, because in Husserl there is no room for any “third between” that could mediate this inter-relational relationship between the one who experiences and what is experienced. Naturally, for postphenomenologists this “third between” is the medium of technology. Don Ihde urges that we need a new vocabulary that would allow us to speak of subjectivity not as a “closed box”, but as something thoroughly open to active shaping by technologies and, more generally, by human artefacts.
Intentionality
Intentionality played an important role in Dr Polák’s lecture. The standard definition of intentionality is that it is the property of the human mind of always relating to/representing/referring to some object. In the English-language literature we read that this property of “being about something” is called “Aboutness”. All mental acts thus have the property of “being about something”. Whether we think of our loved ones, feel pain in our knee or think about abstract things such as mathematics, our thinking always has some content of its own that we think about or perceive. For Dr Polák, as an analytic philosopher of mind, intentionality is moreover inherently about mental representations (it is representational in nature), and he further notes that there is a conceptual dependence between postphenomenology and intentionality. Here I would venture to note that I would have appreciated a somewhat more detailed analysis of what kind of conceptual dependence this is.
Certainly, postphenomenology (henceforth PP) claims that media and technologies co-constitute human subjectivity, and thereby mental states too. If mental states are inherently intentional, then media and technologies must have some influence on the constitution of intentionality itself. But is this influence only an influence on content? By influence on the content of mental states I simply mean that media and technologies can generate contents of mental states that would otherwise not be possible. That is probably an uncontroversial claim. A hundred years ago nobody had, or could have had, a mental state whose intentional object was an Apple iPhone. If this were what PP claimed, everything would be settled and we could all go home within ten minutes. What PP must claim in order to be interesting (at least for me), however, is something else. PP must claim that the very form or structure of mental states is owed to technological mediation. If that were the case, it would mean that mental states, and thereby the mind, must extend beyond the brain. A somewhat less radical claim could be that media and technologies make use of structures of the brain or mind that are latently present but unused, or used for entirely different purposes. An example that comes to mind here is neural recycling, where we observe that a person who becomes literate and learns to read and write (I see literacy here as a technology, following McLuhan or the American pragmatist philosophers) uses parts of the brain which in illiterate people (such people still exist in the world, so we can study the influence of literacy and illiteracy) are used for recognising faces. Would this be causation acting on the content or the form of mental states? Or on both?
4E cognition (Embodied, Embedded, Extended, Enactive)
Roughly since the publication of The Embodied Mind Cognitive Science and Human Experience (1991) by Varela, Rosch and Thompson, Cognition in the Wild (1995) by the cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins, and one of the best-known articles of 4E cognition, The Extended Mind (1998) by Andy Clark and David Chalmers, academia began to take more seriously the argument that human cognition and the mind exceed the boundaries of the human brain and extend into the body, and even into the surrounding environment. A good deal has changed in the world since these publications came out, and thanks to our everyday connection to the internet and our dependence on smartphones we can now more easily imagine the idea that external objects can be a constitutive part of our mind. In the years when these publications appeared, however, they were highly controversial, and all the more revolutionary for it. Today, on the shoulders of these ideas (and many others, including cybernetics and autopoietic dynamic modelling, but also science fiction and the early texts on the human as a cyborg from the sixties), an academic movement has emerged of closely and loosely collaborating philosophers, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, engineers and philosophising designers, which seriously explores the idea that our mind and cognition are embodied, embedded in the environment, extended and enactive.
Dr Polák is critical of 4E cognition. Not because the research has not produced interesting results, but because, as a proponent of neurocentrism, Dr Polák does not find in the 4E discourse any compelling arguments that would convince him that the brain and the nervous system are not the most appropriate place for studying psychological phenomena. By neurocentrism is meant: “[…] the propensity of scholars to embrace the brain and remainder of the central nervous system (CNS) as inherently the most appropriate level of analysis for conceptualizing and treating psychological phenomena, including mental disorders” (Satel & Lilienfeld, 2013). For Dr Polák, one of the important arguments for neurocentrism and the representational framework of the mind is that this paradigm has significant explanatory benefits. From my point of view that may well be true, but Newton’s vision of the universe also had great explanatory power, even though it turned out to be only a subset of the ways of modelling natural processes and the structure of the universe. Isn’t it possible that 4E cognition could be the Einsteinian relativity of the cognitive sciences?
According to Dr Polák, the main thesis of 4E cognition is the following: “the brain is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for cognition/conscious states”, and therefore “there is no minimal neural substrate sufficient to produce visual experience” (quoted from Noë and Thompson, 2004, 17). Like Newton’s vision of the universe, research on neural representations does not by itself give us an answer as to how the activation of cortical maps produces a conscious visual percept. And therefore, as Dr Polák comments on 4E cognition, we need an understanding of the activity of the human body and of the surroundings of the perceiving subject. There was not enough room in the presentation to define and explain the starting points of each “E” of 4E cognition, but below I give a very brief summary of what Dr Polák talked about.
Embodied cognition
The embodiment of cognition consists in the mind being constitutively dependent on the sensorimotor processes of the body, and at the same time embodied cognition thereby claims that many (if not all) cognitive processes can do without mental representations. A strict, “hard” definition of embodied cognition would say that without a body a human being cannot think. A somewhat “softer” definition would say that some non-trivial cognitive processes are constitutively dependent on the human body.
Situated cognition (embedded cognition)
Embedded/situated cognition draws attention to the importance of the contextual aspects of the environment and their constitutive influence on cognitive processes. As Dr Polák also mentions, in the context of this “E” we speak of the structural interweaving and dynamic linking (coupling) of the brain, the body and the surrounding environment. (Pouw, 2014) writes that “[…] cognitive activity is not something that simply happens internally, but involves a continuous transaction between the current states of brain, body and environment”. As one of the counter-arguments to the role of the environment in mental states, Dr Polák mentions direct stimulation of the brain, which can evoke percepts even without any perception of the environment. The question here is how deterministic the proponents of situated/embedded cognition want to be. If they claim that only the environment can evoke a given percept, we have a problem; if they claimed that both direct stimulation and the external environment can evoke a given percept, brain and environment could perhaps be allowed to exist side by side. Last but not least, though, I would be interested to know whether direct stimulation can evoke a percept that the person has never perceived before. What if direct stimulation of the brain works for evoking a given percept only because that person’s brain has previously been exposed to cultural and social influences?
Extended cognition
My favourite and also the most controversial “E” of 4E cognition. Extended cognition claims that the environment, but also the use of technical artefacts such as the smartphone, is not merely metaphorically part of our mind, or rather does not merely have a causal influence on the internal mental processes of the brain. The extended mind hypothesis claims something more dramatic: the iPhone is literally part of our mind, and mental processes are extended into the external objects around us. One of the main advocates of the extended mind is Andy Clark. The literature discusses not only the basic thesis of whether it makes sense to analyse mental processes outside the brain, but also Clark’s own definitions of the types of externalism. For instance, already in the first article, The Extended Mind (1998), Clark and Chalmers claim that if external processes function in such a way that, were they to take place internally in the brain, we would have no problem calling them cognitive, then, unless we have better arguments, we should a priori regard these processes as cognitive. That, roughly, is Clark’s convoluted definition of his well-known Parity Principle, which derives from a functionalist conception of the mind.
Conclusion
Throughout the lecture one could see and hear that Dr Polák regards any form of externalism about the mind, or any attempt to integrate technical artefacts into the explanation of how the mind works, as useful, but on the basis of the existing arguments he sees no reason to give up neurocentrism and the representational paradigm of the mind. For me, that is a fair assessment from an analytic philosopher of mind. And I agree with him that even within the 4E paradigm there have been voices from the very beginning saying that 4E research can be integrated into the existing paradigm of neurocentrism. Classically trained phenomenologists, of course, have many reservations about neurocentrism and see the focus on the brain as, if not downright wrong, then an inadequate level of analysis of human perception and cognitive processes. For that reason too, it was useful that Mgr. Martin Ritter, Ph.D., one of the leading Czech (classical) phenomenologists and one of the few academic philosophers who take media and technologies seriously in their thinking, accepted our invitation to the conference.