Do socially disruptive technologies really change our concepts or just our conceptions?

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Abstract

New technologies have the potential to severely “challenge” or “disrupt” not only our established social practices but our most fundamental concepts and distinctions like person versus object, nature versus artificial or being dead versus being alive. But does this disruption also change these concepts? Or does it merely change our operationalizations and applications of the same concepts? In this paper, I argue that instead of focusing on individual conceptual change, philosophers of socially disruptive technologies (SDTs) should think about conceptual change as a change in a network of interrelated concepts. What really generates a potential social disruption are changes of inferential relations between concepts – whether or not this entails a change of the respective individual concepts. Philosophers of socially disruptive technologies are therefore in the privileged position of being able to avoid commitments regarding the individuation of individual concepts.
Original languageEnglish
Article number102160
JournalTechnology in Society
Volume72
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Feb 2023
Externally publishedYes

Funding

This work is part of the research programme Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies, which is funded through the Gravitation programme of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO grant number 024.004.031). I thank Jeroen Hopster, Steffen Koch and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

FundersFunder number
Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek024.004.031

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