Barbara Gabriella Renzi

Healthcare digital twins are increasingly framed as AI-enabled systems that integrate clinical, behavioral, and contextual data to predict and optimize individual health trajectories. While existing research emphasizes technical performance and clinical potential, less attention has been paid to how these systems reshape self-understanding, agency, and ethical responsibility in everyday life. This conceptual position paper examines healthcare digital twins through a Jungian technoscene perspective, using archetypal analysis to interrogate the social, affective, and governance dimensions of AI-driven health systems. We introduce a set of neo-archetypes, the Self and the Shadow, the Data Shepherd, the Cyber Mother, the Binary Bard, and the Neural Network Nomad, as analytic rather than design personae that surface tensions between data-driven objectification and lived experience, care and control, and personalization and power. Rather than treating digital twins as neutral or universally desirable technologies, the analysis foregrounds their role in producing norms, hierarchies, and forms of surveillance and self-surveillance through machine learning and continuous data feedback loops. By articulating alternative imaginaries beyond optimization-centric narratives, the paper positions archetypal analysis as a critical framework for understanding how AI-mediated healthcare reorganizes lived experience, symbolic meaning, and power within longitudinal socio-technical care environments.

This article explores the philosophical parallels between Plato’s theory of Perfect Forms and the modern concept of digital twins—virtual replicas of physical objects, systems, or processes. In Plato’s philosophy, the physical world is seen as an imperfect reflection of a higher realm of ideal, immutable Forms. Similarly, digital twins offer a dynamic, data-driven representation that often surpasses the accuracy and functionality of their physical counterparts. By continuously updating with real-time information, digital twins aim to create a “more perfect” version of reality, challenging our traditional understanding of physical and virtual worlds. This article investigates whether digital twins achieve Plato’s vision of idealized perfection or represent a new, evolving form of idealism in the digital age, raising important questions about the nature of reality, truth, and the ongoing pursuit of optimization in both the physical and virtual realms.

Kuhn made two attempts at providing an evolutionary analogy for scientific change. The first attempt, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , is very brief and unstructured; in this article I discuss some of its weaknesses. Alexander Bird takes this attempt more seriously and provides a criticism based on oversimplified evolutionary assumptions. These assumptions prove to be inadequate for the second, more articulate, evolutionary analogy suggested by Kuhn in “The Road since Structure.” I argue, however, that this second Kuhnian attempt is undermined by his inadequate view of biological progress and by his misunderstanding of the concept of ecological niche. *Received April 2008. †To contact the author, please write to: School of Politics, International Studies, and Philosophy, Queen’s University Belfast, 21 University Square, Belfast, BT7 1PA Northern Ireland; e‐mail: [email protected].

"Advocates of the evolutionary analogy claim that mechanisms governing scientific change are analogous to those at work in organic evolution - above all, natural selection. By referring to the works of the most influential proponents of evolutionary analogies (Toulmin, Campbell, Hull and, most notably, Kuhn) the authors discuss whether and to what extent their use of the analogy is appropriate. A careful and often illuminating perusal of the theoretical scope of the terms employed, as well as of the varying contexts within which the analogy is appealed to in contemporary debates, leads to the conclusion that such general theories of selective processes are either too sketchy or eventually not persuasive, if not altogether based on flawed views of evolutionary biology. By clarifying what is at stake, the analysis carried out in the book sheds new light on one of the dominant theories of scientific progress. It also invites criticism, of course - but that is the very fuel of philosophical confrontation." - Stefano Gattei, IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca "This book presents a serious challenge to those, like David Hull, who seek to model scientific change as an evolutionary process. The authors point out that although there are similarities between the processes of scientific change and organic evolution, the dissimilarities present formidable difficulties to construing the relation as anything more than a weak analogy. Their argument employs what they call a 'type hierarchical' approach that promises to be a powerful tool for the classification of similarities between theories in all fields." - Michael Bradie, Department of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University "This is a most interesting discussion of the analogy between biological and scientific change. Particularly commendable is the close attention paid to the thinking of the late David Hull and his pathbreaking work on this issue." - Michael Ruse, History and Philosophy of Science, Florida State University

In this paper I propose a type-hierarchy approach to provide an intersubjective framework for the evaluation of evolutionary analogies. This approach develops David Hull’s and others’ attempts to provide full generalisation for selection processes, in order to show that sociocultural development and, particularly, scientific change can be considered as an instance of Darwinian selection. I argue that the recent work by Eileen Cornell Way on type hierarchies can offer the kind of generalisation needed to solve the main problems that still affect Hull’s theory and to show that the evolutionary analogy is, after all, only a particular way of grouping phenomena together. If Hull’s main objective is a unified theory of selection, which supports the idea that science selection and natural selection obey the same laws, I also argue that the type hierarchy approach to models shows that this objective is unsustainable as it stands, and is in need of further development. I will firstly introduce the general outline of the type hierarchy approach to models. Then, after a brief recapitulation of Hull’s main points and difficulties, I will try and construct a hierarchy for a general abstraction of selection processes. Finally I will introduce the main criticisms that Hull’s work has faced from philosophers and scientists, and show how they compare with my proposal.