The Concept of Property Between Technology, Anthropology and Ontology

Philosophy & Technology (2024) 37:11 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-024-00699-y COMMENTARY The Concept of Property Between Technology, Anthropology and Ontology Giacomo Pezzano1 Received: 19 December 2023 / Accepted: 3 January 2024 / Published online: 15 January 2024 © The Author(s) 2024 Abstract The article Anthropological crisis or crisis in moral status: a philosophy of technology approach to the moral consideration of artificial intelligence questions the anthropology of properties commonly assumed in philosophical discussions about the relationship between humans and technologies and the attribution of moral status. By beginning to develop the possible link between the ontology of properties and the anthropological question aptly outlined by that contribution, this short commentary suggests that the adoption of a truly relational or non-proprietary approach in the philosophy of technology seems at once necessary and challenging. For, on the one hand, it represents a response to the demands posed by information technologies; on the other it seems to call into question some of our deeply ingrained habits of thought. Keywords Properties · Dispositionalism · Structuralism · Anthropological models · Philosophical Anthropology This text is a commentary of the article Anthropological crisis or crisis in moral status: a philosophy of technology approach to the moral consideration of artificial intelligence. As a starting point, I summarise the ‘relational turn’ at its core in three main claims: – C1. The traditional, proprietary conceptions of human being as defined by the exclusive possession of a given X, which also justifies its exceptional moral status, should be questioned. – C2. Human beings and technologies are to be understood relationally, not as two separate entities with predetermined properties. – C3. Moral status should be reconsidered both as relational and as grounded in the properties of human being/technologies. * Giacomo Pezzano 1 University of Turin – Department of Philosophy and Education Sciences, Turin, Italy 13 Vol.:(0123456789) 11 Page 2 of 7 G. Pezzano These claims are relevant not only because of their contents, but also, and perhaps especially, because they are supported in an original way, combining several approaches from the philosophy of technology and considering the influence of the concrete socio-technical context on how we conceptualise our relationship with technologies. In this way, Anthropological crisis or crisis in moral status’s arguments give a new and more solid foundation to what has also been highlighted by authors such as Gilbert Simondon, Gotthard Günther and Paul Watzlawick: the latter argued, for example, that thanks to cybernetic technoscience we can begin to insist not on the characteristics of separated elements, but rather on their interactions, promoting a shift “from the individual to the relationship between individuals as a phenomenon sui generis” that even challenges “the tradition of occidental thinking”, based on the “monadic concept” of subjects/objects, which is reflected “in the structure of Indo-European languages” and constitutes “the foundation of classical logic” (Watzlawick, 1990, pp. 12, 14–15). Yet, this is exactly where things get rough: to what extent can C1-C3 actually be supported and developed if they challenge the same ground of our Western thinking? Such a problem can be further clarified by insisting on the promising approach outlined in the last section of Anthropological crisis or crisis in moral status, whose merit is to show how considering (a) the ontology of properties can help in mapping and elaborating (b) the anthropological question. I thus present some general aspects of (a) in § 1 and their possible applications to (b) in § 2, before returning to C1-C3 in § 3. 1 Ontology and Properties Assuming that the world consists of objects that have certain properties, one of the most important classifications of fundamental properties distinguishes between categorical properties [Cp] and dispositional properties [Dp]. Cp are intrinsic, referring to what something is like, the essential qualities of its being; Dp are powers, expressing a certain kind of behaviour: a sheet of paper is rectangular (Cp) and tearable (Dp). In particular, Dp are less than necessity and more than contingency as they tend towards their manifestation: a disposition is a given capacity, a kind of readiness that an entity has to perform specific kinds of behaviour under specific kinds of conditions (if I am angry, then the tearable sheet can actually be torn). In this framework, the debate is about: • Do we have Cp + Dp, or just Cp/Dp? • Do we have bearers + Cp/Dp, or just properties? According to Vetter, (2015, pp. 23–24, 11), for example, the world is ordered by a relation of “objective grounding” in which “the more fundamental grounds the less fundamental”; objects thus ground properties: the world consists of individual things that have properties, so that Dp – as well as Cp – are anchored to objects, “realistically respectable bits of the world”. It is the traditional idea that properties cannot float freely, but need some-thing to bear them, i.e. an entity 13 The Concept of Property Between Technology, Anthropology… Page 3 of 7 11 to which they can belong: every predicate needs a subject, according to the ‘S is P/P belongs to S’ model that structures our logic, ontology and metaphysics. Significantly, even the pandispositionalists who claim that we only have Dp, emphasise that this does not necessarily mean that everything is a power: properties are all powerful, but they are carried by some kind of bearer (Anjum & Mumford, 2018, p. 8). We need a substratum, to explain both the ‘change + permanence’ of an object and the numerical distinction between two particulars with the same properties. In short, no accidents without substances. Nevertheless, not everyone agrees with such a view. On the one hand, the idea of the extrinsicity and dependence of Dp, i.e., their context sensitivity and openness, can be taken so far as not only to reduce all properties to relations [Rp], but also to claim that there is no such thing as a thing, i.e. a substance-bearer: there are no self-subsistent individuals with properties, but only structures, i.e. we have Rp all the way down (Ladyman & Ross, 2007, pp. 130, 228–229, 242–243). Strictly speaking, if there are only Rp, then we have no properties, since their existence makes one with that of the bearer: we are “constrained logico-linguistically” (French, 2014, p. 97) to speak of substantival individuals acting as property-bearers, but they are a mere illusion. On the other hand, the problem is that a bearer by itself, without all its properties, seems to be a nothing, as Russell, (1995, p. 120) had already pointed out: a bare particular conceived as a subject in which qualities inhere runs the risk of becoming “a mere unknowable substratum, or an invisible peg from (...truncated)