Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The datafication of the worldview

  • Original Article
  • Published:
AI & SOCIETY Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The goal of this article is twofold. First, it aims at sketching the outlines of material hermeneutics as a three-level analysis of technological artefacts. In the first section, we introduce Erwin Panofsky’s three levels of interpretation of an artwork, and we propose to import this approach in the field of philosophy of technology. Second, the rest of the article focuses on the third level, with a specific attention towards big data and algorithms of artificial intelligence. The thesis is that these new technologies are not only radically transforming our interactions with the world, or our modes of production and consumption, but also our worldview. In the second section, we rely on Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism to describe the Scholastic “mental habit” or worldview and its principles. In the third section, we confront this worldview with the mechanistic and informationistic worldviews. Our contribution consists in arguing that (1) despite the differences, the Scholastic, mechanistic, and informationistic worldviews are part of the same logical and causal order that dominated Western epistemology, and (2) today we are facing the appearance of a new worldview that we call “data worldview”. Examples from design, architecture, and visualization of knowledge will be set all along the article.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Panofsky borrowed this example from Karl Mannheim and his “Interpretation of the Weltanschauung”. See Hart (1993).

  2. It must be noticed that in the specific case of digital technologies, textual and object-oriented hermeneutics intersect each other. In “digital hermeneutics” (Romele 2020a) one deals with double entry signs, which are both readable and executable, representative and performative. I thank Luca Possati for this remark.

  3. In this article, we make the example of the public transport systems in a metropolis. Transport systems are full of designs that allow specific uses and prohibit others, such as the anti-homeless benches. They also have several norms which cannot be directly embedded into the technological design, like the prohibition in many cities to perform music on buses and subways. But what is particularly interesting is that often social actors/group have a ‘sense’ of what is allowed and what is not. For instance, whilst all parts of Paris are well connected to each other by public transports, people from poorer arrondissements of the Rive Droite have perfectly internalized the fact of not going into the richer arrondissement of the Rive Gauche—and vice versa of course. This does not happen because they cannot, nor because they are not allowed to, but because they do not “authorize themselves” to do so.

  4. On the cultural dimension of material hermeneutics, see Tripathi (2017, 137), who defines technology as a “fundamental cultural force”. The author opportunely stresses that postphenomenologists should give more importance to “cultural variability”, and they should address the meaning of “socio-cultural activity” (Tripathi 2017, 140).

  5. Ihde (1990, 126) makes the example of the Papua New Guinea people the Puluwateans: “The Puluwateans steered by wave patterns, without a compass. Once becoming acquainted with the compass, these navigators adopted its use—largely because the compass was at first an object of fascination rather than something useful. A compass conferred prestige. But once it had been adopted and used for of its purposes—to steer a straight course—it became possible to unlearn (de-skill) the more difficult wave perceptions, which were part of a complex initiation process in seamanship”.

  6. For an exhaustive history of the habitus in philosophy and social sciences, see Sparrow and Hutchinson (2013).

  7. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Notre_Dame_de_Paris_main_gate.jpg. Accessed May 1, 2020.

  8. Tripathi (2016) opportunely stresses that the objects of visual hermeneutics are neither texts nor linguistic phenomena, but things which come into vision through instrumental magnifications, allowing perception to go where it has not gone before. Ihde examines for instance a style of interpretation based in material practices relating to imaging technologies which have given rise to the visual hermeneutics in technoscience studies. We argue that such a visual hermeneutics should be expanded towards the impact of these visual representations on the social and cultural imaginaries of science and technology.

  9. See, for instance, the title page of a XVIth century manuscript of Llull’s Tree of Science: https://www.historyofinformation.com/image.php?id=859. Accessed May 1, 2020.

  10. It would be interesting to investigate how the older imaginary of space exploration is currently revitalized through the new big data and artificial intelligence imaginary. Among the many non-academic articles available online, see https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/10/19/why-space-data-is-the-new-big-data/#7b0b381c69a1. Accessed 1 May 2020. On the consequences of “data centrism” in science, see Lionelli (2016). On the consequences of the understanding of the self, and one’s own body, in terms of data, see Ruckenstein and Pantzar (2017).

  11. There is no room in this context to discuss the notions of information, data, algorithm, and eventually software. We content to say that data are “differences that make the difference”, information is data + a meaningful structure, and what characterizes algorithms is recursivity, which is an elementary capacity of self-reference. I thank again Luca Possati for this remark.

  12. See Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyvev Center in Baku: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Heydar_Aliyev_Cultural_Center#/media/File:Haydar_Aliyev_Culture_Center.jpg. Accessed May 1, 2020.

  13. https://www.centrepompidou.fr/cpv/resource/cdLqjpr/rynRjEj. Accessed May 1, 2020.

  14. See for instance the data visualizations created with UMAP algorithm (McInnes et al. 2018). For a theoretical reflection on these visualizations, see Rodighiero and Romele (forthcoming).

  15. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0201879. Accessed May 1, 2020.

References

  • Bourdieu P (2005) Postface to Erwin Panofsky, “Gothic architecture and scholasticism”. In: Holsinger B (ed) The premodern condition: Medievalism and the making of theory. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp 221–242

    Google Scholar 

  • Brey P (2010) Philosophy of technology after the empirical turn. Techné 14(1):36–48

    Google Scholar 

  • Bucher T (2017) The algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of facebook algorithms. Inf Comm Soc 20(1):30–44

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carpo M (2017) The second digital turn: design beyond intelligence. The MIT Press, Cambridge

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • De Mul J (1999) The informatization of the worldview. Inf Comm Soc 2(1):69–94

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Deleuze G (1992) The fold. Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis

    Google Scholar 

  • Dijksterhuis EJ (1961) The mechanization of the world picture. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Eco U (2012) Antiporphyry. In: Vattimo G, Rovatti PA (eds) Weak thought. SUNY Press, New York, pp 75–100

    Google Scholar 

  • Gaumont N, Panhai M, Chavalarias D (2018) Reconstruction of the socio-semantic dynamics of political activist twitter networks—method and application to the 2017 French presidential election. Plos One. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0201879. Accessed 25 July 2019

  • Gray J (2018) Three aspects of data worlds. Krisis 1. https://krisis.eu/three-aspects-of-data-worlds/. Accessed 25 July 2019

  • Hart J (1993) Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim: a dialogue on interpretation. Crit Inq 19(3):534–566

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Heiwood I, Sandywell B (2005) Interpreting visual culture: explorations in the hermeneutics of the visual. Routledge, London

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Higuera J (2019) The evolution of relational tree-diagrams from 12th to 14th century: visual devices and models of knowledge. Draft paper Presented on June 13, 2019 at the Max Planck Institute of History of Science, Berlin

  • Ihde D (1990) Technology and the lifeworld: from Garden to Earth. Indiana University Press, Bloomington

    Google Scholar 

  • Ihde D (1998) Expanding hermeneutics: visualism in science. Northwestern University Press, Evanston

    Google Scholar 

  • Lima M (2014) The book of trees: visualizing branches of knowledge. Princeton Architectural Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Lionelli S (2016) Data-centric Biology: a philosophical study. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • McInnes L, Healy J, Melville J (2018) UMAP: uniform manifold approximation and projection for dimension reduction. https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.03426. Accessed July 25, 2019.

  • Panofsky E (1955) Meaning in the visual arts. Anchor Books, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Panofsky E (1976) Gothic architecture and scholasticism. Meridian Books, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Rodighiero D, Romele A (forthcoming) Digital habitus; or personalization without individualization. Humana. Mente

  • Romele A (2020a) Digital hermeneutics: philosophical investigations in new media and technologies. Routledge, Abingdon

    Google Scholar 

  • Romele A (2020b) Technological capital: Bourdieu, postphenomenology, and the philosophy of technology beyond the empirical turn. Philos Technol. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00398-4

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rosenberger R (2017) Callous objects: designs against the homeless. Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, Manifold, https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/callous-objects. Accessed 25 July 2019

  • Ruckenstein M, Pantzar M (2017) Beyond the quantified self: thematic exploration of a dataistic paradigm. New Media Soc 19(3):401–418

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sparrow T, Hutchinson A (eds) (2013) A history of habit: from Aristotle to Bourdieu. Lexington Books, Lanham

    Google Scholar 

  • Thouard D (2013) Herméneutique critique: Bollack, Szondi Celan. Septentrion, Lille

    Google Scholar 

  • Tripathi AK (2016) The significance of digital hermeneutics for the philosophy of technology. In: Kelly M, Bielby J (eds) Information cultures in the digital age: a Festschrift in honor of Rafael Capurro. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 143–157

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Tripathi AK (2017) Hermeneutics of technological culture. AI & Soc 32:137–148. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-017-0717-4

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Verbeek PP (2003) Material hermeneutics. Techné 6(3):91–96

    Google Scholar 

  • Wittgenstein L (1991) On certainty. Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lille Catholic University, Lille, France

    Alberto Romele

Authors
  1. Alberto Romele
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alberto Romele.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Romele, A. The datafication of the worldview. AI & Soc 38, 2197–2206 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-00989-x

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-00989-x

Keywords

Search

Navigation