Category: Presentations

Neuroscience and neurotechnology has the potential to improve views of cognitive functioning and learning processes, and help refine learning techniques contributing to educational attainment. Optimism about productive dialogue and collaboration between neurotech and education is highly recommendable. Some skepticism, if not cynicism, is also urged in the short term. Overhyped claims about potential “cognitive enhancers” through brain stimulation, in the wake of pharmacological “smart pills,” have arrived. It has already been popularly imagined that neurotech for improving mental abilities won’t necessitate any tough learning or formal education, or much conscious effort at all. Little about developmental psychology, cognitive science, or neurology supports this fantasy, but the fundamental problem is a collective forgetfulness that education itself is already a technology, among the oldest wielded by humanity. By keeping Hickman’s pragmatic philosophy of technology in mind, we can avoid reductionist fallacies about the psychology of learning, and cautiously evaluate how neurotech may best serve genuine education. Tools should improve persons, without making persons into tools.

---

Neuropragmatism draws on Larry Hickman’s conception of technology and technoscience and his distinction between nature-as-nature and nature-as-culture. Just as the technical precedes the scientific, nature comes before the cultural — all the while science remains technical, culture natural — these parallel distinctions not only clarify limitations within cultural neuroscience or neuroanthropology (notably, the creeping Cartesian materialism) but also provide means for imagining future democratic vistas. This act of imagination is a further call for reconstructing our sense of ourselves in our world by expanding, and thereby enriching, the transaction between organism and environment such that the cybernetic and the neural are no longer restrained to the bodily but become embedded in our biocultural environments.

Neuropragmatism provides a vision of neurotechnological culture, in both means and end, that is an ecologically novel future for how we construct our democratic niches. To achieve such a richly cybernetic culture, a vision must be sketched that is scientifically reasonable, in order to generate realistic hope that such a way of life is readily available from where we are now, given enthusiasms (warranted or not) about technology, and fears (warranted or not) that democracy is on its way out.

---

This essay will discuss if research activities can be seen as generating “products”, as well as what are the consequences of inspecting and evaluating them as such, instead of evaluating their contribution as ideas, thinking, research data, and materials for a collective process of inquiry.

---

There are dozens of proposals for integrating ethics into the early planning and assessment of technological innovation. Beginning with John Dewey in the United States, the call continued with Hans Jonas and the rise of environmental justice and regulatory risk assessment. Schemes for integrating ethics into the innovation process were advanced under the banners of “constructive technology assessment,” “anticipatory governance,” “democratizing technology,” and “responsible innovation,” among others. During the same era, the call for protecting the interests of human and animal subjects were framed as “research ethics” and research organizations created Institutional Review Boards to oversee scientific activity.

This paper tracks some of Larry Hickman’s contributions to these trends. Hickman first followed Langdon Winner’s critique of “straight line rationality” by demonstrating how Dewey’s approach offers much that has been unrealized in subsequent attempts to reform the innovation process. Later, Hickman demonstrates how pragmatist ethics and epistemology provide a positive program of action that complements the negative critique the Frankfurt School. While Hickman’s suggestions could be incorporated into virtually any of the new proposals for integrating ethics into technological research, development, and dissemination, the sheer plethora of new approaches suggests that the field lacks the continuity to follow up on Hickman’s suggestions.

In this paper, I will explores some reasons why the field remains fragmented, emphasizing weaknesses in the pragmatist approach. First, I will acknowledge the significance of obvious explanations: the technical community’s unfamiliarity with ethical inquiry and the lack of both administrative and financial commitment to ethics-oriented research. There is, in short, an epistemic gap between the message that innovators are prepared to hear and the sophisticated response that Hickman’s pragmatism offers. This gap may be a practical limitation to philosophical pragmatism in many of its manifestations.

---