Teaching and Learning with Wittgenstein and Turing: Sailing the Seas of Social Media

Abstract

Results of the Boston University Mellon Sawyer seminar 2016–2019 (http://www.mellophilemerge.com) reveal that social and philosophical drives are increasingly central to our uses of technology, including AI. This raises critical challenges for democracy, especially in a hyper‐connected world where social media shapes human conduct in ways we are only beginning to appreciate. A history of the mutual impact of Turing and Wittgenstein on one another points to the contemporary foundational significance of our artful capacity to embed everyday words in forms of life. Wittgenstein's mature focus on forms of life, interlocutory drift, and rule‐following, with its play between the ‘I’ and the ‘we’, was an informed critical response to Turing's idea of a ‘Turing machine’, his analysis of the very idea of taking a ‘step’ in a formal system. Wittgenstein's characterisations of our drive to evade a responsibility in speech, especially by appealing to ‘machines’ or ‘algorithms’ as pure mathematical objects, are invaluable warnings for us. The enduring importance of mutually‐attuned ‘phraseology’ to education may be formulated as a humanistic challenge to the very ideas of ‘computational foundations’ and ‘Big Data’ in our hyper‐connected world.

Seeing One Another Anew with Godfrey Reggio’s Visitors

“…"Technology for me is probably the most misunderstood subject on the planet," said Reggio in an interview; "We keep thinking of it as another category, like the economy, like religion, like war, but it is [as] ubiquitous as the air we breathe and we're strapped in and on the ride" (The Creators Project, 2014). And so, we tend to forget the social world and our own embedded, embodied plasticities, as we place significance in the wrong place, in the wrong way (Floyd, 2019). This is where Visitors intervenes: in the end-user's conversation.…”