Bas de Boer

The concept of intelligence is deeply ambiguous and entangled with historical narratives of colonialism and eugenics. The contemporary understanding of intelligence still reflects such narratives: it is understood in human-centric terms, as a property defined by goal-oriented cognitive capacities. This leads to what we term a politics of control, which relies on historically established patterns of exclusion to establish political structures with colonial connotations. In response, this paper proposes an alternative framework called the Assemblage Theory of Intelligence (ATOI). ATOI understands intelligence in terms of the dynamic relationships and activities within an assemblage and moves us from a politics of control to a politics of configuration. We illustrate ATOI through a discussion of the human-in-the-loop (HITL) methodology in AI development. Contrary to the dominant narrative, where humans are seen as controlling the loop, we reconceive HITL as an assemblage where human and machine elements configure and mutually shape each other.

An important development within cognitive neuroscience is the use of Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation (NIBS), a technique which holds the promise of establishing causal relationships between brain processes and cognitive processes. However, NIBS does not allow researchers to observe neurophysiological processes, and must be coupled with imaging technologies such as Electroencephalography (EEG) for the visualization of neurophysiological change. Technologies such as NIBS and EEG are not neutral intermediaries between scientists and the world, but actively mediate the reality that scientists investigate. How these technologies shape the objects of neuroscientific study becomes clear when analyzing real-life conversations between neuroscientists researching visual attention. During the constitution of visual attention, neuroscientists need to manage a tension between the epistemic norms of ‘causality’ and ‘reality’, and how this tension is managed differs when different technologies are used. In the case of NIBS, the tension between reality and causality is managed in terms of the relation between experimental results obtained within the laboratory and the ‘real’ world outside of the laboratory. When NIBS and EEG are combined, neuroscientist orient to the norms of causality and reality in a different way: now, the reality of the causality obtained within scientific experiments needs to managed. This indicates that neuroscientists cannot straightforwardly assume the causal efficacy of the brain on human behavior. Instead, the coming into being of neuroscientific objects such as visual attention is both dependent on technological mediations and on how the tension between the norms of ‘causality’ and ‘reality’ is managed.

This article explores the concept of animal technics, building on the work of Don Ihde to examine the intricate relationships between technology, animals, and human experiences. Drawing from postphenomenology, philosophy of technology and posthumanist thought, the discussion challenges anthropocentric perspectives that frame technology as a purely human domain. Instead, it argues that animals actively shape and are shaped by technics, engaging with tools, environments, and human-mediated technological systems in complex ways. Through a critical engagement with Ihde’s postphenomenology, the article interrogates the co-constitutive interactions between animal life and technology, revealing how nonhuman agency disrupts traditional boundaries between nature and artifact. Case studies illustrate the diverse ways animals participate in technics, from bioengineered species to digital interfaces designed for nonhuman cognition. This analysis highlights the ethical and epistemological stakes of recognizing animals as technological actors, calling for an expanded framework that accounts for their role in shaping technoscientific realities. By situating animal technics within broader debates in philosophy of technology, this article contributes to ongoing discussions about agency, materiality, ecology, and the limits of human-centered technological narratives. It concludes by advocating for a more inclusive and responsive technological ethics—one that acknowledges the entangled futures of humans, animals, and machines.

In psychological research, online body shaming is typically linked to objectification, where objectification is considered something to be avoided and fought. In this paper, we take a somewhat different perspective: while agreeing that objectification is indeed a key element to understand online body shaming, our starting point is that objectification cannot be avoided. We argue that online body shaming is grounded in a mismatch between the way one self-objectifies and the way in which one is objectified by another. Drawing on Sartre, we argue that objectification enables a meaningful experience of self and world, particularly through its link to shame. We then turn to Lacan, whose account of objectification—via the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic—sharpens our understanding of bodily shame and its conditions of emergence. Finally, we use this framework to explain key differences between online body shaming and other forms of body shaming.

In coming to grips with the advent of the Anthropocene, contemporary philosophers have recently pushed beyond its many physical implications (e.g., global warming, reduced biodiversity) and social significance (e.g., climate justice, economics, migration) to interpret the Anthropocene metaphysically. According to such interpretations, the Anthropocene imposes nothing less than a wholly new understanding of the world. This raises the question regarding the character of such an imposition. To develop this question, this article discusses three metaphysical interpretations of the Anthropocene: Clive Hamilton's, Timothy Morton's, and Bruno Latour's. Among many voices today, these authors are specifically relevant because they predominantly correlate the imposition of a new, nonmodern world with the scientific object "Earth"as it is developed in Earth system science. The purpose here is to elucidate the ways in which this correlation is made, and to inquire after the role of science-a modern activity par excellence-in the advent of the world of the Anthropocene. The critical question is how this role could be legitimated in the proclaimed absence of a modern framework ensuring science's status as a beacon of certainty and truth.

Our contemporary world is undeniably intertwined with technology, influencing every aspect of human life. This edited volume delves into why modern philosophical approaches to technology closely align with phenomenology and explores the implications of this relationship. Over the past two decades, scholars have emphasized users' lived experiences and their interactions with technological practices, arguing that technologies gain meaning and shape within specific contexts, actively shaping those contexts in return. This book investigates the phenomenological roots of contemporary philosophy of technology, examining how phenomenology informs analyses of temporality, use, cognition, embodiment, and environmentality. Divided into three sections, the volume begins by exploring the role of phenomenological methods in the philosophy of technology, and further investigates the methodological implications of combining phenomenology with other philosophical schools. The second section examines technology as a phenomenon, debating whether it should be analysed as a whole or through individual artifacts. The final section addresses the practical applications of phenomenological insights in design practices and democratic engagement. By offering a systematic exploration of the connection between phenomenology and technology, this volume provides valuable insights for scholars, students, and researchers in related fields, highlighting the continued relevance of phenomenological perspectives in understanding our technologically mediated world.

This book provides a philosophical analysis of the experience of health and investigates how this experience is shaped by recent developments in medicine and public health. It shows how phenomenological and Foucauldian approaches to health can be systematically integrated into a general account of healthy embodiment. Many medical practitioners argue for a shift from curative to preventative medicine. Technoscientific developments now enable us to track our health and provide more effective ways to live healthily. This book argues that these developments shape how we experience the health of ourselves and others, as well as the way in which we distinguish between health and illness. Its starting point is that health is not so much an object with well-defined boundaries that can be scrutinized scientifically but is better understood as an embodied experience. The author uses phenomenology and the work of Foucault to develop a theory of healthy embodiment. He argues that experiencing oneself as a healthy subject requires being made present as a healthy object by someone or something else. He explores how the experience of health results from the interaction between being a subject and being an object and potentially involves challenging medical norms. Healthy Embodiment will be of interest to researchers and graduate students working in phenomenology, science and technology studies, medical humanities, bioethics, and sociology of medicine.

The goal of this paper is to outline how digital technologies can be understood as existential media by analyzing how they shape embodiment. This requires examining the relationship between three terms, namely “digital,” “technology,” and “embodiment.” My intent is to show how these three terms can be understood from a phenomenological perspective, as well as to flesh out the relationship(s) between them. The paper is structured as follows: First, I discuss the digital from both a hermeneutic and an ontological perspective. Second, I explain some key concepts in postphenomenology that guidemy analysis of embodiment in relation to the digital. Then, I show how digital technologies shape one’s experience of being embodied on two levels: the first level is that of active extension: digital technologies enable one to extend into the digital sphere through the development of particular novel habits. The second level is that of passive constitution: digital technologies create digital objects of people that others can observe and interact with, and these observations and interactions feed back into embodied experience. In conclusion, I suggest that understanding embodiment in relation to the digital implies to understand the interaction between the two levels identified above.

Our contemporary world is undeniably intertwined with technology, influencing every aspect of human life. This edited volume delves into why modern philosophical approaches to technology closely align with phenomenology and explores the implications of this relationship. Over the past two decades, scholars have emphasized users' lived experiences and their interactions with technological practices, arguing that technologies gain meaning and shape within specific contexts, actively shaping those contexts in return. This book investigates the phenomenological roots of contemporary philosophy of technology, examining how phenomenology informs analyses of temporality, use, cognition, embodiment, and environmentality. Divided into three sections, the volume begins by exploring the role of phenomenological methods in the philosophy of technology, and further investigates the methodological implications of combining phenomenology with other philosophical schools. The second section examines technology as a phenomenon, debating whether it should be analysed as a whole or through individual artifacts. The final section addresses the practical applications of phenomenological insights in design practices and democratic engagement. By offering a systematic exploration of the connection between phenomenology and technology, this volume provides valuable insights for scholars, students, and researchers in related fields, highlighting the continued relevance of phenomenological perspectives in understanding our technologically mediated world.

Conversational agents (CA) are thought to be promising for psychotherapy because they give the impression of being able to engage in conversations with human users. However, given the high risk for therapy patients who are already in a vulnerable situation, there is a need to investigate the extent to which CA are able to contribute to therapy goals and to discuss CA’s limitations, especially in complex cases. In this paper, we understand psychotherapy as a way of dealing with existential situations and position CAs in the context of the therapeutic experience of patients. This experience is determined by the patient’s unique personal context and specific therapy goals. We suggest that psychotherapy is a fundamentally dialogical activity, because it crucially involves work on the self and one’s self-narrative. This brings us to our central question: is it possible for CAs to engage in a productive therapeutic dialogue, given their limitations as epistemic agents? We will discuss several of those limitations, show how these undermine the possibility of engaging in a therapeutic dialogue, and illustrate those limitations through discussions of the cases of grief and abuse.

Large language models (LLMs) structure the linguistic landscape by reflecting certain beliefs and assumptions. In this paper, we address the risk of people unthinkingly adopting and being determined by the values or worldviews embedded in LLMs. We provide a Nietzschean critique of LLMs and, based on the concept of will to power, consider LLMs as will-to-power organisations. This allows us to conceptualise the interaction between self and LLMs as power struggles, which we understand as negotiation. Currently, the invisibility and incomprehensibility of LLMs make it difficult, if not impossible, to engage in such negotiations. This bears the danger that LLMs make reality increasingly homogeneous by recycling beliefs and creating feedback loops that ultimately freeze power struggles and thus consolidate the status quo. In view of this, LLMs constrain self-formation. Based on our critique, we provide some recommendations on how to develop interactions with LLMs that enable negotiations that allow for different ways of being.

Brain imaging technologies are increasingly used to find networks and brain regions that are specific to the functional realization of particular aspects of the self. In this paper, we aim to show how neuroscientific research and techniques could be used in the context of self-formation without treating them as representations of an inner realm. To do so, we show first how a Cartesian framework underlies the interpretation and usage of brain imaging technologies as functional evidence. To illustrate how material-technological inventions and developments can have a significant and lasting impact on views of the self, we show how this framework was influenced by another technology: the camera obscura. Subsequently, we show that brain imaging technologies challenge the idea that privileged access to the self can be obtained merely through introspection, indicating a strong discontinuity between the Cartesian and the current neuroscientific framework. Building on these insights, we reframe the self in terms of self-formation. This view neither regards the brain as an independent realizer of aspects of the self, nor assumes that self-knowledge can be obtained through introspection. From this perspective, self-formation is realized throughcritical self-identification: instead of offering representational knowledge of an ‘inner self,’ the potential use of brain imaging technologies within this framework lies in their capacity to offer what we call ‘extrospective knowledge’ that pragmatically can contribute to self-formation. Brain imaging technologies contribute to this process because they foreground our neurophysiology, which helps to critically integrate biological aspects into self-formation.

In coming to grips with the advent of the Anthropocene, contemporary philosophers have recently pushed beyond its many physical implications (e.g., global warming, reduced biodiversity) and social significance (e.g., climate justice, economics, migration) to interpret the Anthropocene metaphysically. According to such interpretations, the Anthropocene imposes nothing less than a wholly new understanding of the world. This raises the question regarding the character of such an imposition. To develop this question, this article discusses three metaphysical interpretations of the Anthropocene: Clive Hamilton's, Timothy Morton's, and Bruno Latour's. Among many voices today, these authors are specifically relevant because they predominantly correlate the imposition of a new, nonmodern world with the scientific object "Earth"as it is developed in Earth system science. The purpose here is to elucidate the ways in which this correlation is made, and to inquire after the role of science-a modern activity par excellence-in the advent of the world of the Anthropocene. The critical question is how this role could be legitimated in the proclaimed absence of a modern framework ensuring science's status as a beacon of certainty and truth.

Empowerment is a prominent ideal in health promotion. However, the exact meaning of this ideal is often not made explicit. In this paper, we outline an account of empowerment grounded in the human capacity to adapt and adjust to environmental and societal norms without being completely determined by those norms. Our account reveals a tension at the heart of empowerment between (a) the ability of self-governance and (b) the need to adapt and adjust to environmental and societal norms. We address this tension by drawing from the work of Freud, Canguilhem, and Lacan. First, we clarify through a discussion of Freud’s notion of sublimation that it is difficult to assess empowerment independent of any social valuations, but also that it is no less problematic to make it dependent on social valuations alone. Second, we draw from the work of Canguilhem to show how empowerment can be understood in terms of the individual’s capacity to tolerate the aggressions of a multiplicity of environments. Third, using Lacan, we show how empowerment requires incorporation of social and symbolic norms, without necessarily rendering ourselves a mere product of these norms. Finally, we demonstrate how the views of these authors can complement one another, resulting in a more sophisticated understanding of empowerment.

An important development within cognitive neuroscience is the use of Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation (NIBS), a technique which holds the promise of establishing causal relationships between brain processes and cognitive processes. However, NIBS does not allow researchers to observe neurophysiological processes, and must be coupled with imaging technologies such as Electroencephalography (EEG) for the visualization of neurophysiological change. Technologies such as NIBS and EEG are not neutral intermediaries between scientists and the world, but actively mediate the reality that scientists investigate. How these technologies shape the objects of neuroscientific study becomes clear when analyzing real-life conversations between neuroscientists researching visual attention. During the constitution of visual attention, neuroscientists need to manage a tension between the epistemic norms of ‘causality’ and ‘reality’, and how this tension is managed differs when different technologies are used. In the case of NIBS, the tension between reality and causality is managed in terms of the relation between experimental results obtained within the laboratory and the ‘real’ world outside of the laboratory. When NIBS and EEG are combined, neuroscientist orient to the norms of causality and reality in a different way: now, the reality of the causality obtained within scientific experiments needs to managed. This indicates that neuroscientists cannot straightforwardly assume the causal efficacy of the brain on human behavior. Instead, the coming into being of neuroscientific objects such as visual attention is both dependent on technological mediations and on how the tension between the norms of ‘causality’ and ‘reality’ is managed.

During the Corona pandemic, it became clear that people are vulnerable to potentially harmful nonhuman agents, as well as that our own biological existence potentially poses a threat to others, and vice versa. This suggests a certain reciprocity in our relations with both humans and nonhumans. In his The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty introduces the notion of the flesh to capture this reciprocity. Building on this idea, he proposes to understand our relationships with other humans, as well as those with nonhuman beings as having a chiasmic structure: to sense, or perceive another entity in a particular way simultaneously implies to be sensed or perceived in a particular way by this other entity. In this paper, we show how a postphenomenological perspective expands on Merleau-Ponty: first, it more radically interprets Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh by not only considering it to be a medium that is the condition of possibility for vision but as pointing to the constitution of an intercorporeal field in which entities—both human and nonhuman—mutually sense one another. Second, it augments Merleau-Ponty’s thought by drawing attention to how technologies mediate chiasmic relations. This is clarified through the example of the facemask, which reveals the chiasmic structure of our relation with nonhuman entities, and shows that technologies co-constitute interpersonal relationships by making humans present to one another in a particular way. We suggest that these aspects are not unique to the facemask, but point to a general technologically mediated chiasmic structure of human-world relations.

This chapter intends to develop a phenomenological analysis of how self-tracking technologies structure attention. The goal of this analysis is to highlight how the use of such technologies - ones that are already used frequently, and will likely become part of the lives of many more individuals in the future - turn our body and habits into objects of relevance. The outline is as follows: First, I discuss some technological developments that intend to promote a healthy lifestyle (1). Second, I suggest, elaborating on insights from postphenomenology, that technologies mediate what appears as relevant by shaping the relation between human beings and the world (2). Third, I further unpack the implications of this idea by connecting it to Alfred Schütz’s theory of relevance. I suggest how self-tracking technologies shape systems of topical, interpretational, and motivational relevances (3). Fourth, I argue that what stands out as relevant is constituted through sedimented habits, as well as the projects in which people engage (4). Fifth, I suggest that technologies that are designed to help people pursue a healthy lifestyle turn the attention of users towards their own body in ways that often remain unnoticed, such that it might become increasingly difficult to turn attention towards other objects and projects that might be equally relevant (5). In conclusion, I suggest that such technologies privilege a particular view of health that might become an unquestionable element of the lifeworld, and that this view might remain unnoticed when not being subject to careful analysis (6).

In this paper, we examine the qualitative moral impact of machine learning-based clinical decision support systems in the process of medical diagnosis. To date, discussions about machine learning in this context have focused on problems that can be measured and assessed quantitatively, such as by estimating the extent of potential harm or calculating incurred risks. We maintain that such discussions neglect the qualitative moral impact of these technologies. Drawing on the philosophical approaches of technomoral change and technological mediation theory, which explore the interplay between technologies and morality, we present an analysis of concerns related to the adoption of machine learning-aided medical diagnosis. We analyze anticipated moral issues that machine learning systems pose for different stakeholders, such as bias and opacity in the way that models are trained to produce diagnoses, changes to how health care providers, patients, and developers understand their roles and professions, and challenges to existing forms of medical legislation. Albeit preliminary in nature, the insights offered by the technomoral change and the technological mediation approaches expand and enrich the current discussion about machine learning in diagnostic practices, bringing distinct and currently underexplored areas of concern to the forefront. These insights can contribute to a more encompassing and better informed decision-making process when adapting machine learning techniques to medical diagnosis, while acknowledging the interests of multiple stakeholders and the active role that technologies play in generating, perpetuating, and modifying ethical concerns in health care.

A central issue in postphenomenology is how to explain the multistability of technologies: how can it be that specific technologies can be used for a wide variety of purposes (the “multi”), while not for all purposes (the “stability”)? For example, a table can be used for the purpose of sleeping, having dinner at, or even for staging a fencing match, but not for baking a cake. One explanation offered in the literature is that the (material) design of a technology puts constraints on the purposes for which technologies can be used. In this paper, I argue that such an explanation—while partly correct—fails to address the role of the environment in which human beings operate in putting constraints on technology use. I suggest that James Gibson’s affordance theory helps highlighting how stabilities in technology use arise in the interaction between human being and environment. Building on more recent approaches in affordance theory, I suggest that the environment can be conceptualized as a “rich landscape of affordances” that solicits certain actions, which are not just cued by the environment’s material structure, but also by the normativity present in the form of life in which a human being participates. I briefly contrast the approach to affordances developed in this paper with how Klenk (2020) and Tollon (2021) have conceptualized the “affordance character” of technological artifacts, and highlight how a focus on the situated nature of affordances augments these earlier conceptualizations.

Obesity has been pointed out as one of the main current health risks leading to calls for a so-called “war on obesity”. As we show in this paper, activities that attempt to counter obesity by persuading people to adjust a specific behavior often employ a pedagogy of regret and disgust. Nowadays, however, public healthcare campaigns that aim to tackle obesity have often replaced or augmented the explicit negative depictions of obesity and/or excessive food intake with the positive promotion of healthy food items. In this paper, we draw on a phenomenological perspective on disgust to highlight that food-related disgust is connected to the character and behavior of a perceived individual even in the context of promoting healthy food items. We argue that the focus on “making the healthy food choice the easy choice” might be an important step towards the de-stigmatization of people that are affected by obesity. However, so we suggest, this focus threatens to bring back an image of individuals affected by obesity as disgusting “through the backdoor”. It does so not by portraying bodies with overweight as disgusting, but instead by implying that lifestyle choices, character and habits of people that are affected by obesity are markers of a lack of control. We argue that the close relationship between disgust and the perception of self-control in the context of obesity should be taken into consideration in the context of assessing the implications of new health promotion strategies to minimize the risk of stigmatizing people.

In this commentary, I scrutinize Coeckelbergh’s criticism of postphenomenology, and question whether postphenomenology indeed tends to neglect the social dimension of technology use (ontic), and must necessarily be conceived as being in opposition to transcendental philosophy (ontological). Second, I suggest that the Wittgensteinian concepts that Coeckelbergh introduces are interesting additions to the concepts used in postphenomenology, but that his use of the term “transcendental” seems up to now primarily to be a rhetorical means enabling him to distance himself from postphenomenology.

Critical Constructivism and postphenomenology are two possible ways of describing, analysing and evaluating the role and meaning of technology in contemporary society and world. Whereas Critical Constructivism looks at the way technologies are dealt with on a macro level considering systems and programs, then postphenomenology digs into the individual and personal appropriation and understanding of technology in everyday life. This means that there is a gap for what concerns levels, but also in relation to what they want to accomplish. The critical stance of Andrew Feenberg in conceiving societal and political problems as ripe for radical technological change is met by postphenomenology’s pragmatic focus on how to build appropriate and meaningful structures for handling of emergent and imminent problems together with and through technology. This paper tries to bridge this gap by introducing the concept of scaffolding, which is inspired by Heidegger’s “Gestell,” but re-read in a new and different way than the usual pessimistic and deterministic interpretation where exploitation and “enframing” is at hand. Scaffolding is read as a common enterprise where we stretch and reach out towards each other in order to create platforms for interventions and activism. The paper is an attempt to direct this common enterprise in specific directions, and this directedness is indicative for our aims and goals. It is the claim that Critical Constructivism and postphenomenology should meet, and perform a certain kind of Techno-Activism when confronted with problems in technological society.

Death determination has long been a topic of intensive technoscientific and medical involvement. Due to advances in twentieth-century medical technology, the distinction between life and death has become less evident. Ambiguities appear when we start to use life-support technologies in order to save lives, bringing about “tragic artifacts” such as brain death and persistent vegetative state. In this paper we ask how this technoscientific and medical involvement shapes our understanding of death. We provide an overview of medical literature that has appeared on (brain) death determination, highlighting thereby the role that technologies played in its establishment. Subsequently, we develop three philosophical interpretations of technological death determination: With Agamben and Marcuse as the installation of political power; with Don Ihde as an existential choice for the inevitable; and with Jacques Derrida as an encounter with the ineradicable mystery of death. To conclude, we argue that technological death determination reveals an intrinsic, paradoxical connection between human’s technicity and its ignorance of death.

Two of the main approaches of what is often referred to as the ‘empirical philosophy of technology’ are postphenomenology and critical constructivism. Critical constructivists charge postphenomenologists for paying too little attention to the fact that our society is co-constituted not only by technologies, but also by forms of rationality exercised on a political level. Postphenomenologists, then, charge critical constructivism for insufficiently recognizing that the way technologies are appropriated in the lifeworld often evades forms of institutionalized rationality. The goal of this paper is to show how these different approaches should not be juxtaposed, but can better be seen as complementary in the development of a political philosophy of technology. This will be made clear through a discussion of the role of STS in the work of Peter-Paul Verbeek, and in the work of Andrew Feenberg. I suggest that developing an ‘empirically informed’ political philosophy of technology requires to both recognize how technologies constitute particular forms of subjectivity and to understand the rational processes through which particular technologies are designed. When combining both of these insights, it becomes possible to articulate a normative position with regard to technological developments.

In current phenomenology of medicine, health is often understood as a state of transparency in which our body refrains from being an object of explicit attention. In this paper, I argue that such an understanding of health unnecessarily presupposes an overly harmonious alignment between subjective and objective body, resulting in the idea that our health remains phenomenologically inaccessible. Alternatively, I suggest that there are many occasions in which one’s body in health does become an object of attention, and that technologies mediate how a relation with one’s body is formed. First, I show prominent accounts in current phenomenology of medicine understand health in terms of a harmonious alignment between objective and subjective body. Second, I argue that there are many occasions in which there is a disharmony between objective and subjective body, and suggest that also in health, we cannot escape being an object that we often relate to. Then, I draw on postphenomenology to show how technologies such as digital self-tracking applications and digital twins can be understood as mediating the relationship with one’s own body in a specific way. In conclusion, I argue that both technologies make present the objective body as a site for hermeneutic inquiry such that it can be interacted with in terms of health parameters. Furthermore, I point to some relevant differences in how different technologies make aspects of our own body phenomenologically present.

Numerous studies in the fields of Science and Technology Studies and philosophy of technology have repeatedly stressed that scientific practices are collective practices that crucially depend on the presence of scientific technologies. Postphenomenology is one of the movements that aims to draw philosophical conclusions from these observations through an analysis of human–technology interactions in scientific practice. Two other attempts that try to integrate these insights into philosophy of science are Ronald Giere’s Scientific Perspectivism and Davis Baird’s Thing Knowledge. In this paper, these two approaches will be critically discussed from the perspective of postphenomenology. We will argue that Giere and Baird problematically assume that scientific instruments have a determined function, and that all human members of a scientific collective have immediate access to this function. However, these assumptions also allow them to offer a clear answer to the question how scientists can collectively relate to scientific phenomena. Such an answer is not yet formulated within the postphenomenological perspective. By adding a postphenomenological touch to the semiotic approach in Actor-Network Theory, we offer an account of how different individual human–technology relations are integrated into larger scientific collectives. We do so by showing that scientific instruments not only help constitute scientific phenomena, but also the intersubjectivity within such collectives.