Arthur Wei-Kang Liu

At least since the publication of Amato's infamous report “Nanotechnology: Shaping the World Atom by Atom” (1999), it has become clear that visions of so called emerging technologies and their implied promises for the future do, indeed, influence policy makers and public decisions. Newer examples are synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, or even Elon Musk's Neuralink. It seems as if the future is inseparably connected to the development of technology. In the context of nanoethics and human enhancement, Nordmann and Grunwald began discussing the usefulness of valuing technological visions but soon moved on to a critique of the notion of the future, which led to the call for a new mode of Technology Assessment (TA): hermeneutic TA. This chapter reconstructs this discussion by identifying the discussion's main arguments and proposals, while considering their origins as well as important impulses. It will also outline the possibilities of hermeneutic TA so far and provide a first outlook for possible future developments of hermeneutic TA.

Multilingualism as a (sub)-discipline of linguistics with special interest in language acquisition and didactics was established in the 1990s. As time moved on, the discipline of multilingualism evolved into an interdisciplinary field of research, but not yet including a philosophy of multilingualism. In this record of a conversation between linguist Britta Hufeisen and philosopher Alfred Nordmann, the concept of multilingualism is explored as well as its differences to monolingualism. This implies differences also between the philosophy of language and a philosophy of multilingualism. Upon closer scrutiny it becomes clear that multilingualism is not only about language acquisition anymore but about the ways in which individuals can make themselves understood and orient themselves in a multilingual environment which includes artificial languages. In this way, the notion of affordances comes to the fore as individuals are afforded by their environment the use different language skills in different situations. The same applies to technology: Technology always affords us to do something in a specific way, but at the same time, while using it, we discover other possible uses and thus assign new meanings to it. This is where the linguist and the philosophic view diverge: The former puts an emphasis on the use of language and the actual semantic meaning of words, whereas the latter analyzes language and technology primarily in terms of its use, therefore meaning becomes a product of use. Both stress, however, the importance of culture and context for meaning and use.

An explanation is a convincing, deductively valid argument that cites at least one law of nature. – This could be a definition of a scientific explanation that takes the notion of understanding seriously because explanation and understanding are intertwined concepts. To arrive at this conclusion, this analysis starts with the question of what makes an explanation an explanation. Philosophers of science have discussed this issue extensively since Carl G. Hempel presented his deductive-nomological model of explanation. It seems that the DN-model offers necessary but not sufficient conditions for explanation. Two prominent problems for sufficient conditions are the problem of irrelevance and the problem of symmetry. For the last seventy years philosophers of science tried to solve those problems, also proposing other possible conceptualizations of explanation, by invoking, for example, causality or contextuality. Those accounts can be brought together in order to solve the problems of the DN-model: By looking at understanding, a new combined account for explanation and understanding could be obtained. After highlighting the advantages and problems of some of the most prominent accounts of explanation, the concept of understanding is analyzed with respect to the notion of hermeneutics. Through Gadamer’s discussion of hermeneutics and understanding as well as Kuhn’s concept of paradigms, it can be shown that the natural sciences are also deeply rooted in hermeneutics and involve understanding. In the end, it can be demonstrated that understanding and explanation are two interwoven concepts. Understanding is the missing piece of the puzzle to solve the problems of explanation.