Philosophy of Technology
Faculty:
Duede’s work in the philosophy of technology focuses on questions concerned with how emerging technologies (principally AI) are transforming science and society. Through his appointment at Argonne National Laboratory, Duede’s works closely with computer scientists, natural scientists, and applied artificial intelligence researchers to actively develop and evaluate frontier computational systems (currently, LLMs and computational agents) for science that are sensitive to the disciplinary aims and values of distinct scientific fields.
"My work tackles the (in)adequacy of concepts in cognitive science, with an emphasis on those at the core of “central” cognition: reasoning, reflection, and imagination. I’ve argued that the psychological realizers of these processes—with an emphasis on working memory—can’t explain many of their desired features, and that less individualistically-oriented concepts will be required to make progress in cognitive science. Namely, new concepts rooted in our social, moral, and aesthetic worlds. This, in turn, requires that we better understand how we perceive and make sense of the social and normative bonds that innervate our lives. It’s that problem that motivates my longstanding collaborative and interdisciplinary research, the continuation of which lies at the heart of the Purdue Normativity and Cognitions (PuNCs) lab.
This lab continues a strain of work that I've developed in experimental philosophy (which many practitioners affectionately shorten to "x-phi"), that uses the tools of empirical social psychology to test philosophically rich theories about the role that moral values play in personal identity (Gomez-Lavin & Prinz 2019), our experiences of art and its role in informing identity (Fingerhut, Gomez-Lavin, Winklemayer & Prinz 2021), our perceptions of togetherness (Gomez-Lavin & Rachar 2019, 2022, 2023), and our judgements about the role of social norms—like those tied to gender—in developing future AI systems (Read, Gomez-Lavin, Beltrama & Miracchi 2022). Presently in the PuNCs Lab we're empirically cataloguing the norms that arise from different cases of working together with others and how this “normative fingerprint” might help us map various social relationships, with a specific focus on the norms that inform relationships of Solidarity. With the with the Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence (VRAI) lab, we are beginning work to uncover how these bonds might deform or extend as we enter into unprecedented collaborative and competitive relationships with artificial intelligence in both augmented and virtual reality. All in all, to make progress in cognitive science my bet is that we’ll need to move beyond our inherited cache of individualistically oriented concepts and make room for those that privilege our nature as socially embedded creatures."
Corey’s research is focused on foundational questions regarding the nature of computation, particularly how to incorporate analog and other forms of non-digital computation into a coherent conceptual framework alongside digital computation. Part of the aim of this research is to understand how to unify the cognitive and neural computations posited by scientists to explain the nature of mentality with computation as it is understood in computer science. For example, neuroscientists routinely claim that certain parts of the brain literally perform computations, while researchers in artificial intelligence and machine learning deploy computational systems to perform increasingly sophisticated cognitive tasks. However, it is unclear what unifies—and justifies—the idea that all of these are literal (and not just metaphorical) computations. This is where his research aims to shed some light.
Lynn Parrish is a philosopher with special interests in social and political theory, philosophy of technology, and philosophy of art and architecture. She teaches a wide variety of undergraduate courses in these areas.
Daniel Smith is the author of Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh 2012), the co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Deleuze (2012, with Henry Somers Hall), and has translated, from the French, books by Gilles Deleuze (Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Essays Critical and Clinical), Pierre Klossowski (Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle), Isabelle Stengers (The Invention of Modern Science), Michel Serres (Thumbelina), and Raymond Ruyer (Cybernetics and the Origin of Information). He is the co-director of “The Deleuze Seminars” project (deleuze.cla.purdue.edu), which is translating Deleuze’s seminar lectures and is supported by grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities. He is currently working on a book entitled "Technicity and Thought."