Abstract
An epistemology mainly oriented at a philosophical discussion of natural sciences and technology is sketched out on the basis of the author’s “methodological scheme-interpretationism” combining a realistic and a perspectival pragmatic approach. - In the main part, 12 characteristic features of the New Technologies are presented and discussed as, e.g., operationalization, computerization, models and modularity, virtuality and artificiality, interdisciplinary interaction, comprehensive and complex systems, telematization and remote control, robotics and AI technology and automatization as well as “socio-eco-techno-systems”, technology-driven globalization and the respective problems of individual and social responsibility. - Also, actual trends are listed and future tasks for the international ecological cooperation of states, UN and UNESCO bodies under urgent guidelines of humanitarian values and “practical/concrete humanity” are recommended.
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Notes
The “technicalization”, “technification”, or “technologisation” of the virtual and of “virtual worlds” is a very noticeable fact everywhere in highly industrialized media & technology systems and in information and communication technologies we all now use and more or less “live by”. There is the problem of gaining a "secondary reality" of information systems, e.g., most notably the Internet and other information and electronic systems technologies impinging more and more even on economic and political as well as "real life" decisions. In particular, real-time and online decisions have nowadays worldwide impact on this planet (see stock rates) as well as economic and social reverberations.
I am not denying thereby the extant phenomena of degradation and decay in information storage via electronic systems, but I claim that very complex information systems take on a quasi-life of their own insofar as no individual person or programmer can survey any more all the developments of a very complex distributed net functioning by co-operation and via all or, rather, practically innumerable parallel influences of millions of interactive users and programmers.
Just recently in August 2018 I had the privilege to deliver an invited “endowed lecture” (IbnRoshd Lecture) at the 24th World Congress of Philosophy (overall theme: Learning to be Human) in Beijing under the title “Ancient and Modern Practical Ethics of Humanity: Concrete Humanity from Mencius to Schweitzer” (cf. Lenk 2019).
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Lenk, H. Challenges for a Pragmatic Philosophy of New Technologies. Axiomathes 30, 649–665 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-019-09456-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-019-09456-9