Technologies at the limits of language – Symposium on conceptuality, metaphorisation & narration
Chair(s): Leonie Möck (University of Vienna), Wenzel Mehnert (Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria & TU Berlin), Bruno Gransche (Karlsruher Institue of Technology), Nele Fischer (Technical University Berlin), Nils Neuhaus (Technical University Berlin)
Emerging technologies move at the limits of language. People (in the end usually a small group of them) struggle to find appropriate ways for referring to them, search for the right concepts and often use metaphors to catch the supposedly right meaning and evokeing the desired associations, initiating processes that are barely under our control.
From a more comprehensive perspective, the limits of language are an omnipresent phenomenon we have to face at any given time and in any given context. Language is an important tool for human engagement with the world while at the same time a source for confusion, we often end up as flies in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s iconic fly bottle.
How do technologies stress or overload our thinking and talking about them? And what expectations and imaginaries are caused/invited by certain linguistic expressions? Taking the linguistic and discursive crystallizations of our engagements with socio-technical systems – the narratives, metaphors, or clusters of conceptuality – as entry points to our struggles in reference, we learn about the frames of thinking that get imprinted oninto our engagements with technologies and techno-imaginaries.
Scratching at the boundaries of language then is also a way to initiate a process for reimagining technologies in better ways, in the sense of a constant practice of revising patterns and images of thought, while putting them under ethical evaluation. How can we (if we should decide to do so and find it legitimate) use linguistic techniques to influence discourse and subsequently awareness and behaviour (green IT, responsible innovation, etc.)?
Lastly, supposedly familiar concepts such as intelligence get reshaped in the light of our artifacts and techniques and postphenomenology has shown that technologies shape our hermeneutic relations. So, addressing the material hermeneutics of technologies can help to avoid linguistic monism, taking account of the limits of language as an epistemic source of explanation and worldmaking. As Karen Barad, Donna Haraway and others have argued, there has to be an account of the world that is not falling back on language only, while at the same time we have to acknowledge that there is no world ‘for us’ apart from construction, no direct access to a pure reality. So how do we productively stay with the trouble of recognizing both the limits of linguistic language and the agency of the world?
This panel will be organized by the Special Interest Group (SIG) on “Languages of Technology: Prompts, Scripts, Narratives, and Grammars of Composition”. There will be short inputs by the discussants followed by a moderated discussion between all panelists. The main findings of the discussion will simultaneously be documented.
Presentations of the Symposium
List of discussants
Wenzel Mehnert1, Leonie Möck2, Maximillian Roßmann3, Mark Coeckelbergh4, Kanta Dihal5, Galit Wellner6, Yu Xue4, Alexandra Kazakova7
1Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria & TU Berlin, 2University of Vienna, 3Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
, 4University of Vienna, Austria, 5Imperial College London, UK, 6Holon Institute of Technology (HIT), Israel, 7University of Washington, USA
Biographies
Alexandra Kazakova
(tbd)
Prof. Galit Wellner, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at Holon Institute of Technology (HIT) and an adjunct professor at Tel Aviv University. Galit studies digital technologies and their interrelations with humans. She is an active member of the Postphenomenology Community. She published peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, and edited special issues of Techne and some collections. Her book A Postphenomenological Inquiry of Cellphones: Genealogies, Meanings and Becoming was published in 2015 by Lexington Books. She translated to Hebrew Don Ihde’s book Postphenomenology and Technoscience (Resling 2016). She coedited Postphenomenology and Media: Essays on Human–Media–World Relations (Lexington Books, 2017) and The Philosophy of Imagination: Technology, Art, Ethics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). Her research on AI led her to become the academic advisor of the AI Regulation Forum of the Israeli Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology and before that to become a member of the stakeholder board of SHERPA, an EU Horizon project for the shaping of the ethical dimensions of smart information systems (2020-1). In the past Galit was the vice-chair of Israeli UNESCO’s Information for All Program (IFAP) and a board member of the FTTH (Fiber-to-the-Home) Council Europe.
Dr. Kanta Dihal is Lecturer in Science Communication at Imperial College London, where she is Course Director of the MSc in Science Communication, and Associate Fellow of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on science narratives, particularly science fiction, and how they shape public perceptions and scientific development. She is co-editor of the books AI Narratives (2020) and Imagining AI (2023) and has advised international governmental organizations and NGOs. She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford on the communication of quantum physics.
Prof. Dr. Mark Coeckelbergh is Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology at the University of Vienna, ERA Chair at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, and Guest Professor at the University of Uppsala. He member of several advisory bodies including the federal Belgian Committee for Ethics of Data and AI, the advisory council of the Austrian UNESCO Commission, and previously the High Level Expert Group on AI of the European Commission. He is author of numerous books including AI Ethics, The Political Philosophy of AI, and Why AI Undermines Democracy. Previously he was the President of the Society for Philosophy and Technology (SPT).
Dr. Maximillian Roßmann is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the department of Environmental Economics of the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM). His research explores how citizen narratives shape the perception of the European Energy crisis. Before joining VU Amsterdam, Maximilian Roßmann was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Maastricht University in the ERC project “NanoBubbles”. He obtained his PhD at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and worked in TA projects on the Vision Assessment of microalgae nutrition, 3D printing, and nuclear waste management at the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS).
Yu Xue (Ph.D.) is an associated professor at the Department of Philosophy, Dalian University of Technology. She was a visiting fellow at Delft University of Technology (2015-2016) and University of Vienna (2024-2025). Her research interests are in ethics of technology and philosophy of technology, with a particular focus on robotics ethics and AI ethics.
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