ORIGINAL ARTICLE Language and technology: maps, bridges, and pathways Mark Coeckelbergh 1 Received: 13 February 2015 / Accepted: 27 July 2015 Ó Springer-Verlag London 2015 Abstract Contemporary philosophy of technology after the empirical turn has surprisingly little to say on the relation between language and technology. This essay describes this gap, offers a preliminary discussion of how language and technology may be related to show that there is a rich conceptual space to be gained, and begins to explore some ways in which the gap could be bridged by starting from within specific philosophical subfields and traditions. One route starts from philosophy of language (both ‘‘analytic’’ and ‘‘continental’’: Searle and Heidegger) and discusses some potential implications for thinking about technology; another starts from artefact-oriented approaches in philosophy of technology and STS and shows that these approaches might helpfully be extended by theorizing relationships between language and techno- logical artefacts. The essay concludes by suggesting a research agenda, which invites more work on the relation between language and technology. Keywords Language Á Technology Á Social ontology Á Phenomenology Á Hermeneutics Á Mediation Á Heidegger Á Searle Á Ihde Á Latour 1 Introduction: The gap The reader of contemporary philosophy of technology encounters mainly artefacts, things, devices, and machines as objects of philosophical reflection, much less words, symbols, discourse, and texts. This is understandable: since the end of the past century, much philosophy of technology has taken an ‘‘empirical turn’’ (Achterhuis 2001). More precisely: some people writing about technology never needed an empirical turn because they have always been working within the framework of naturalist and positivist science (consider, for example, contemporary AI theory and empirical psychology) or because they have always been practicing what Mitcham called an ‘‘engineering’’ philosophy of technology: an approach which does not start with trying to understand the human, as ‘‘humanities’’ philosophy of technologies does, but with ‘‘an analysis of the nature of technology itself’’, aiming ‘‘to explain both the nonhuman and the human worlds in technological terms’’ (Mitcham 1994, p. 62). Others were influenced by the humanities and in particular hermeneutics’s interest in ‘‘the meaning of technology’’ (p. 62), but turned away from Heidegger, Ellul, and other classic philosophy of technol- ogy which they felt was ‘‘retreating’’ into the linguistic terrain (Achterhuis 2001, p. 4–5) and too distant from concrete, material technological artefacts and tools. They rejected Heidegger’s discourse about the essence and danger of modern ‘‘technology’’ and argued that this failed to address ‘‘concrete technological practices and develop- ments’’ (p. 5), including much about our everyday use of artefacts. On the way they also rejected, though perhaps less explicitly, the entire post-structuralist and postmodern current of thinking which, influenced by Heidegger, focu- ses on discourse and text, thereby rendering philosophy so abstract and linguistic that technology disappeared. (Inci- dentally, its relation to postmodernism is a dimension of the empirical turn which remains until today severely undertheorized; perhaps one could even say that it has never received much attention at all from the core fig- ures of the empirical turn mentioned here.) When & Mark Coeckelbergh mark.coeckelbergh@dmu.ac.uk 1 Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK 123 AI & Soc DOI 10.1007/s00146-015-0604-9 Author's personal copy