Hickman Legacy Project

Hickman, Buddhism, and Algorithmic Technology

Jim Garrison, Virginia Tech

This paper provides further reflections on my dialogue with Larry Hickman, director emeritus of the Center for Dewey Studies, and Daisaku Ikeda, president of the lay Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai International (SGI). The most surprising outcome of this dialogue is how similar Deweyan pragmatism is to many forms of Mahayana Buddhism including Nichiren Buddhism the source of SGI. I have explored some of these similarities elsewhere. Here I survey additional similarities in terms of Hickman’s philosophy of technology by emphasizing value creation and criticism. (Soka Gakkai means value creating society.) I explore Peter D. Herschock’s, Buddhism and Intelligent Technology relying on Hickman to rectify Herschock’s philosophy of technology before discussing Herschock’s insightful application of Buddhist ethics to AI and the internet. I conclude by identifying many of Herschock’s Buddhist principles in Dewey’s theory of inquiry and thereby showing how they reside implicitly within Hickman’s philosophy of technology.

Hickman, after 32 Years

Don Ihde

Early convinced that the Praxis philosophies led philosophy to technology, I asked Larry Hickman to do a book on Dewey for the first series on philosophy of technology with Indiana University Press. He did, and thus John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology (1990) was published along with Michael Zimmerman’s Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity (1990) and my own Technology and the Lifeworld (1990), a systematic redoing of my earlier Technics and Praxis (1979). By 2001, Larry had also published Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture with the Indiana series, thus making him part of this early American philosophy of technology generation. I have followed Larry’s work all along, now 32 years. In the pragmatism of Dewey and Rorty, I recognized compatibility with the European phenomenologies of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. All held in common an anti-reductionistic praxis, anti-early-modern body-mind epistemologies, and were pro-experiential and pro-perception in their outlooks (via animal models, not Cartesian-Lockean ones). So, what I admired early in Dewey was his Darwinian approach to experience–the animal-organism/environment model of testing for problems, which I saw echoed in phenomenology. This led, as we today know, to my post-phenomenological approach which began in l988 with my Rorty-inspired Gothenburg lectures. I have always owed Pragmatism its debts and have regarded Hickman as an inspiration.

Technologies and Sustainability – Challenges for Democracy and Education in Our Time

Kersten Reich, University of Cologne

In this essay, we will discuss some urgent challenges for democracy and education in the Deweyan sense in connection with current developments of technologies and questions of sustainability. After a short introduction, we will proceed in four major parts. In doing so, we follow the systematic distinction of four mutually interrelated levels of technologies in culture found in the late work of Michel Foucault. In part 1 of our essay, we focus on the technologies of production. We connect Foucault’s perspective with more recent research on questions of social inequality and the production and distribution of wealth, e.g., the great divide between rich and poor that Joseph Stiglitz has examined in much of his recent work. We discuss implications for questions of sustainability in the world of today and draw conclusions as to urgent democratic and educational challenges in our time. In part 2, we address the level of technologies of sign systems. Proceeding in a similar way as in the first part, we connect Foucault’s perspective with a more recent critical approach, namely the theory of surveillance capitalism launched by Shoshana Zuboff. We consider implications for sustainability and draw conclusions for democracy and education. In part 3, we turn to the level of technologies of power and domination. We use Colin Crouch’s critical approach to post-democracy in order to examine some crucial dangers for democracy involved in prevailing economic and political relations, practices and structures that tend to undermine the effectiveness of democratic institutions and procedures. Again, we consider implications for sustainability and draw conclusions for democracy and education. In part 4, we look at the level of technologies of the self. We consider connections with contemporary constructivist as well as Deweyan perspectives in education that emphasize the role of relationships and processes of social self-creation. Once more, we elaborate on some crucial implications for sustainability and draw conclusions for democracy and education. The essay closes with a summary of the most important conclusions of our discussion.

Technologies for Educating Brains, Without Reducing Smarts to Neurons

John Shook

Neuroscience and neurotechnology has the potential to improve views of cognitive functioning and learning processes, and help refine learning techniques contributing to educational attainment. Optimism about productive dialogue and collaboration between neurotech and education is highly recommendable. Some skepticism, if not cynicism, is also urged in the short term. Overhyped claims about potential “cognitive enhancers” through brain stimulation, in the wake of pharmacological “smart pills”, have arrived. It has already been popularly imagined that neurotech for improving mental abilities won’t necessitate any tough learning or formal education, or much conscious effort at all. Little about developmental psychology, cognitive science, or neurology supports this fantasy, but the fundamental problem is a collective forgetfulness that education itself is already a technology, among the oldest wielded by humanity. By keeping Hickman’s pragmatic philosophy of technology in mind, we can avoid reductionist fallacies about the psychology of learning, and cautiously evaluate how neurotech may best serve genuine education. Tools should improve persons, without making persons into tools.

Philosophical Tools for Educational Culture: Reconstructing Data and Assessment Practices

Mark Tschaepe, Prairie View A&M University

Assessment practices have come to dominate much of formalized education, especially within the United States. Currently, learning analytics (LA) and educational data mining (EDM) are purported by many educational companies and institutions to successfully improve learning through what are often considered as objective collection, classification, and analysis of educational data. Enthusiasm about big data in education has contributed to the naturalization of datafication within the field. Educational data is regarded as a natural resource that exists “out there” to be mined by EDM and refined by LA. Once refined, it is thought to bear the truth of educational assessment that leads to successful learning outcomes.

Here I use Larry Hickman’s work on pragmatism and technology to interrogate this trend in formal education. I begin with an explanation of the key concepts and practices used in my argument, including Hickman’s definition of technology, big data, datafication, naturalization, learning analytics, and educational data mining. Next, I provide a brief overview of the rhetoric of assessment within education. I then discuss how enthusiasm born from such rhetoric, especially for LA and EDM, has contributed to a form of reductionism within formalized education that denies that values are concealed and smuggled into assessment practices. By applying Hickman’s pragmatic philosophy of technology to educational assessment, I suggest ways in which LA and EDM may be useful for learning when values and their relation to data are consistently acknowledged and critically examined. I argue that this pragmatic approach provides a transactional framework that dismantles the naturalization of datafication and focuses instead on education as embodied experience that is critically reflective.

The ‘Eclipse’ of Pragmatism:
Using Text-Analysis to Understand
the Recent History of American Philosophy

John Capps, Rochester Institute of Technology

he “eclipse” of pragmatism has been a consistent issue in the history of recent American philosophy. Broadly speaking, the view is that American pragmatism—-the philosophical approach historically associated with Peirce, James, and Dewey-—was overshadowed by other approaches during the mid-20th century. Typically, the view is that pragmatism was displaced by logical positivism or by analytic philosophy in general. Some are inclined to view this as an unfortunate turn of events: a native, homegrown philosophy crowded out by exotic invasive species. This, in turn, raises a number of thorny issues, including how to define both “pragmatic” and “analytic” philosophy, their relationship to each other, and how contemporary philosophers define, and identify with, their own tools, methods, and history. Here we will address this question from a new direction by using a data set of several thousand journal articles published in 10 prominent philosophy journals between 1900 and 2016. This will help us determine how, whether, and in what sense pragmatism was eclipsed. Besides shedding light on the recent history of American philosophy, this bibliometric method is itself a pragmatic approach to settling questions in the history of philosophy.

The Measurement Problem in the Academy: Algorithms, Bibliometrics, and Successful Career

Eli Cramer

University of Wroclaw, Institute of Philosophy

In this presentation, we offer a Deweyan assessment of the problematic situation surrounding how to assess successful scholarly work toward career advancement. Bibliometric assessment of the reach of academic essays poses a new method of assessing academic work. Yet this system poses new problems, focusing on surface popularity of research, increasingly designed to pop-up in Google Scholar, Academia, and other algorithmic search engines. When careers are assessed on such popularity, content is largely overlooked and is replaced by reach, without questioning the value of such audiences and their responses to this work. We survey different global attempts to utilize such assessment schemes, from the Netherlands to China, and suggest potential ameliorative paths forward.

The Inclusive School and Digital Applications: An Open Question

Teodora Pezanno, University of Calabria

During the pandemic the problem of the contemporary school is to search for a new model of inclusive schooling linked to digital applications. This school model ought to be drawn from John Dewey’s Laboratory School in Chicago. Larry Hickman’s interpretation of John Dewey’s philosophy, based on the centrality of the concept of pragmatic technology, is fundamental for understanding the meaning of this inclusive school based on digital applications, in the philosophy of education.

The Productive Professor

Maura Striano, University of Naples

This essay will discuss if research activities can be seen as generating “products”, as well as what are the consequences of inspecting and evaluating them as such, instead of evaluating their contribution as ideas, thinking, research data, and materials for a collective process of inquiry.

Philosophical Tools for Educational Culture: Reconstructing Data and Assessment Practices

Mark Tschaepe, Prairie View A&M University

Assessment practices have come to dominate much of formalized education, especially within the United States. Currently, learning analytics (LA) and educational data mining (EDM) are purported by many educational companies and institutions to successfully improve learning through what are often considered as objective collection, classification, and analysis of educational data. Enthusiasm about big data in education has contributed to the naturalization of datafication within the field. Educational data is regarded as a natural resource that exists “out there” to be mined by EDM and refined by LA. Once refined, it is thought to bear the truth of educational assessment that leads to successful learning outcomes.

Here I use Larry Hickman’s work on pragmatism and technology to interrogate this trend in formal education. I begin with an explanation of the key concepts and practices used in my argument, including Hickman’s definition of technology, big data, datafication, naturalization, learning analytics, and educational data mining. Next, I provide a brief overview of the rhetoric of assessment within education. I then discuss how enthusiasm born from such rhetoric, especially for LA and EDM, has contributed to a form of reductionism within formalized education that denies that values are concealed and smuggled into assessment practices. By applying Hickman’s pragmatic philosophy of technology to educational assessment, I suggest ways in which LA and EDM may be useful for learning when values and their relation to data are consistently acknowledged and critically examined. I argue that this pragmatic approach provides a transactional framework that dismantles the naturalization of datafication and focuses instead on education as embodied experience that is critically reflective.