Abstract
This paper is going to focus on the problem of emotions in technology, in particular in reference to the case of algorithms developed to track early rehospitalizations. In this paper I am going to discuss how phenomenology can support the integration of emotions in technology and how this integration can improve our chances for that “decent survival” that the founder of bioethics, Potter, has envisioned as the main goal of this discipline (Natl Cancer Inst Monogr 13:111–116, 1964; Bioethics, bridge to the future. Prentice Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, p 24, 1971; Ann N Y Acad Sci 196(Art. 4):200–205, 1972; Cancer Res 35:2297–2306, 1975; Global bioethics. Michigan University, 1988). I believe that descriptive phenomenology can be a useful philosophical and psychological approach to improve the moral and emotional intelligence behind machine learning programming (Dreyfus, What computers can’t do: the limits of artificial intelligence. HarperCollins, 1978; The Socratic and platonic basis of cognitivism. AI & Society, Springer, Berlin, 1988) and overcome the risk of ethical opacity implied in programming (Casacuberta, Ethical and technical aspects of emotions to create empathy in medical machines. In Van Rysewik SP, Pontier M (eds) Machine in medical ethics. Springer, New York/Dordrecht, 2015). On the one hand, the ethical aspect of phenomenology would allow us to grasp the predicative and pre-predicative facie of the lived-experiences and their emotional contents. On the other hand, the phenomenological method of research applied in psychology would offer a way to transcribe and interpret data in a responsible and contextualized way.
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Notes
- 1.
See: Heidegger, M., 1977, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York: Harper Torchbooks; Heim, M., 1993, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, New York: Oxford University Press; Ihde, D., 1990, Technology and the Lifeworld: From garden to earth, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press; Don Ihde, 2002, Bodies in Technology, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Stiegler, B., 1998, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, Stanford: Stanford University Press; Dreyfus, H.L., 1999, “Anonymity versus commitment: The dangers of education on the internet,” Ethics and Information Technology, 1(1): 15–20, 1999.
- 2.
On this point, the French phenomenologist Stiegler (1998) in his trilogy, Technics and Time, states how the fast pace at which technology is advancing generates for the human being a big problem in terms of meaning and value making.
- 3.
More on the use of phenomenology in qualitative methods in Ferrarello, Zapien (2018, chapter I.1, p. 13): “Generally, textbooks mention the methods of Giorgi, Moustakas, Van Manen, Smith and Colaizzi as the most popular ones; the common denominator of these being the use of Husserl’s phenomenology as a guidance to read psychological data regarding a collective number of people. The goal is to grasp the essence of living phenomena as they are experienced by different participants (e.g., resilience as it is universally experienced) As van Manen wrote, the goal is to ‘grasp the very nature of the thing’ (van Manen, 1990, 177). According to Moustakas a phenomenological investigation describes how participants lived different experiences in relation to the same phenomenon (1994). The inquirer is in fact to collect data from participants that can relate to that phenomenon and unfold the description of what makes that experience as such for all of them. The actual description consists of ‘what’ they experienced and ‘how’ they experienced it (Moustakas, 1994). The same goal prevails in Giorgi’s and Colaizzi’s methods; what counts in the application of the phenomenological
method is the description of the meaningful essence that qualifies the phenomenon chosen as the object of the inquirer’s study. Giorgi’s descriptive phenomenological method (2009), whose school is represented today by Churchill, Wertz, Englander, Applebaum and others, articulates a method that is named ‘descriptive’, because it aims at a description of the phenomenon which is as free as possible from interpretation”.
- 4.
According to Chatterjee, there are at least four forms of presuppositions. First, the material presupposition assumes the veracity of an external world and considers its events as causally ordered. Second, the cognitive presupposition involves that it is possible for us to gather valid knowledge about the object of our investigation. Third, formal presupposition relates to the predicative idea according to which the subject, copula and predicate scheme of judgement will lead us to substance. The fourth presupposition consists in the acknowledgment of the authority of predecessors such as for example Descartes’ “cogito, existo” as rooted in St Augustine’s contention regarding the credibility of the existence of the ego. Chatterjee pointed out that Husserl rejects all these presuppositions, but the presuppositions of natural science. In fact, the departure point for any phenomenological investigation is the concreteness of life and the way in which this is experienced.
- 5.
The reason why Husserl seems to reject presuppositions has not only theoretical but also historical roots according to Embree. After the First World War, in fact, a good number of universities were funded by the Catholics; this means that all professors had to take the Oath against Modernism and Affirmation to the Church in order to get funds. The church’s doctrines on Infallibility of the Pope, immaculate birth of Mary, and purgatory, were a part of Oath against Modernism and Affirmation to the Church. And the Church used to punish those who opposed them or criticised them. Husserl’s claim of presuppositionless came as a wise escamotage to free his philosophy and phenomenological method from this Zeitgeist while giving it the flexibility to be continuously questioned and proved. Hence, being presupposition-less does not mean to give up on the rigorousness of science. On the contrary it means to devote one’s knowledge to its truth without being trapped inside the fashion of the time or the biases of one’s own point of view. Phenomenological descriptions are presuppositionless in the sense that they do not allow a presupposition to remain a presupposition even when it is devoid of its meaning.
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Its origin can be traced back to Brentano’s “The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong” (1889) but it is with the development of Husserl’s phenomenological ethics (1908, 1914, 1920) that its themes started inspiring a long line of thinkers whose influence reached the fields of philosophy, psychology, theology, gender studies, bioethics, and political science. The main themes of phenomenological ethics focus on the one hand on the epistemological understanding of the highest practical good and its ethical demand (Husserl, Reiner, Pfänder, Sartre, Løgstrup, Levinas), on the other hand on the description of what we do when we behave in a moral way (Scheler, Hildebrand, Hartmann, Levinas, Simone De Beauvoir).
- 7.
- 8.
How each of these theorists understands and describes the method of applying Husserl’s ideas in the form of a research method, by addressing the relationship between researcher and the phenomenon and what is bracketed or included in the epoché, differs slightly. And these differences can amount to fairly important nuances of meaning in the findings of a phenomenological research endeavour. Van Manen (1990), for example, allows for interpretative or hermeneutic activity concurrent to descriptive activity within the epoché, as he sees no clear distinction between the act of describing and the act of meaning-making for the phenomenologist. While this seems sensible and consistent with the idea that realities are treated as phenomena, that which was to be bracketed and that which is to enter the epoché and therefore is available to be used to make meaning or interpretation is left unclear in van Manen’s method. Rigorous attention to this distinction is important in the use of van Manen’s approach, lest under the guise of hermeneutic meaning-making all that was to be bracketed is merely included and the entire point of the phenomenological inquiry, as a phenomenological one, is lost. His suggestion to researchers is that we guard against this by “…actively mak[ing] explicit our understandings, beliefs, biases, assumptions, presuppositions and theories so that we might hold them deliberately at bay and even to turn this knowledge against itself, thereby exposing its shallow or concealing character’.” (van Manen, 1990, 47). In many studies using van Manen’s method, then, it is customary for the researcher to consider and explicitly state up front, almost like a confession, the relevant positions that she holds so that they can be made conscious and used to consider if, in fact, they have bled into the descriptions without the researcher intending so. This then requires that one make all (or as many as one can muster) understandings, beliefs and assumptions clear at the outset. Phenomenologists’ critique of this approach includes that the focus is now on the researcher’s presuppositions and contents of her consciousness rather than the disciplined description of the phenomenon (Finlay, 2009). For this reason, for these inquiries, van Manen’s method was not used. The other three methodologists generally suggest researchers apply the epoché and reduction faithfully and aim to be as loyal as possible to a description of the phenomenon in question rather than provide an interpretation thereof. Moustakas (1994), however, in addition to the application of the epoché and reduction and a goal pure description, also considers the researcher’s intuitive self-discoveries as a source of coming to an understanding of the descriptive essence of a phenomenon (Friesen et al., 2012). What we call intuition is perhaps best understood as part of the consciousness of the researcher and may or may not be relevant to the description of the phenomenon in an essential manner. Moustakas is not entirely clear in his description of what exactly constitutes intuition and how one might distinguish intuition from other aspects of consciousness (e.g. projection, fantasies, ideas, interpretations, sensory information), making this allowance somewhat problematic.
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Ferrarello, S. (2023). Phenomenology of Emotions and Algorithms in Cases of Early Rehospitalizations. In: Boublil, E., Ferrarello, S. (eds) The Vulnerability of the Human World. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 148. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41824-2_13
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