Professor of Philosophy
The Cultural Search
Inspired by Wittgenstein, Turing, Langer and interdisciplinary research gleaned at the interdisciplinary BU Mellon Sawyer Seminar 2017-2019 on the human significance of emerging computational technologies in our everyday lives, I will draft a manuscript, The Cultural Search, drawing the phrase from Alan Turing (1948). I argue that philosophy in particular, and the humanities more generally, are and should be foundational in our emerging computationally-driven lives, which are characterized by a variety of forms of searching, expression, and representation of forms of life.
We face new “field-to-ground” issues in comparing and contrasting issues of value, precision, and uncertainty both in computational thinking and in issues addressed traditionally by ordinary language philosophy. Renewed attention to the conditions of democratic participation, privacy, pluralism, care, doubt and dissent is a hallmark of today, when the power of what Granovetter (1973) called “weak ties” is managed through mobile technology with all its promise and perils. Philosophy should rise to the occasion at a global level. Armed with empirical study of the social causes and effects of emerging technology, it should aim to characterize the broad sense in which reason-giving, commitment to words. Truth, searching, and a sense of self-realization and flourishing through expression matter and may be developed, understood, and represented in our world.
A Cartesian/behavioristic reading of the “Turing Test” (1950) for over 50 years focused on the individual mind at the expense of the social, despite the fact that for Turing it was the delicate, meaning-saturated human-to-human relations in the presence of machines that was fundamental to the test, not human-machine interfacing per se. Turing himself (1948) regarded “intelligence” as an “emotional” concept, one that is irreducible, response-dependent, socially embedded and driven by what he called “the cultural search”. He learned from Wittgenstein that the evolution of our symbolic “phraseology”, individual and collective, lies at the foundation the forms of life and contingencies of contexts in which words are repeatedly embedded. In turn, he helped Wittgenstein get past a misbegotten, nostalgic focus on a too-linear, monolithic Spenglerian theory of cultural forms locked into a pattern of rise and decline. The result was Wittgenstein’s insistence on the importance of embodied, interwoven, biologically rooted forms of life, as opposed to an already meaningful Lebenswelt or given conception of Kultur. I will develop these ideas into a philosophical response for our time.