Reopening the Black Box of Technology Artifacts and Human Agency

The argument presented in this article is that the premises governing human-technology interaction partly derive from the distinctive ways by which each technology defines a domain of reference, and organizes and codifies knowledge and experience within it. While social in its origins and its implications, technology constitutes a distinct realm of human experience that is not reducible to social or institutional relations. Drawing on Goodman’s (1976, 1978) cognitive philosophy the article proposes a scheme for analyzing the very architecture of items and relations underlying the constitution of cognition-based artifacts. Such an analysis is used as a basis for inferring the malleability and negotiability of technologies and the forms by which they admit human involvement and participation.

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