Human Studies 27: 361376, 2004. C 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines

DON IHDE1 and EVAN SELINGER2
of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, 11794, USA (E-mail: dihde@notes.cc.sunysb.edu); 2 Department of Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology, 92 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, NY 14623, USA (E-mail: eselinger@mail.rit.edu)
1 Department

Abstract. One of us coined the notion of an epistemology engine. The idea is that some particular technology in its workings and use is seen suggestively as a metaphor for the human subject and often for the production of knowledge itself. In this essay, we further develop the concept and claim that Merleau-Pontys phenomenological commitments, although suggestive, did not lead him to appreciate the epistemological value of materiality. We also take steps towards establishing how an understanding of this topic can provide the basis for reinterpreting the history of phenomenology. Key words: camera obscura, embodiment, epistemology, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, perception, technoscience

Introduction One of us coined the notion of an epistemology engine.1 The idea is that some particular technology in its workings and use is seen suggestively as a metaphor for the human subject and often for the production of knowledge itself. In this essay, we further develop the concept, beginning with two provocative questions. Could Maurice Merleau-Ponty have invented the concept of epistemology engine? The short answer is that he did not. Is it methodologically signicant that Merleau-Pontys phenomenological commitments would have prevented him from doing so? The short answer is a qualied, yes. In what follows we will defend these answers, proceeding by: (1) dening epistemology engine; (2) demonstrating how an analysis of a dominant epistemology engine, the camera obscura, reveals the material origins of modern epistemology; and (3) defending our two principal claims concerning Merleau-Ponty. It should be noted from the outset that although our analysis focuses upon the limits of Merleau-Pontys treatment of materiality, our overall appraisal of his philosophy of lived experience as embodied experience remains positive. In order to present a cogent historical treatment of Merleau-Ponty, namely one that is steeped explicitly within the context of the emerging technoscience

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literature, we became obliged to focus upon his conceptual limitations instead of rhetorically highlighting what, in Merleau-Ponty, might contribute to the argument we are developing. Thus, while our primary goal is to enrich previous discussions of the notion of an epistemology engine, we also aim to establish how an understanding of this topic can provide the basis for reinterpreting the history of phenomenology. Finally, we hope that by the end of the essay the reader will also be clear on three additional points. First, it should be clear how our overall discussion relates to the more familiar topic of sciences deep metaphors such as the theme of the clockwork universe that was prevalent in early modernity, and the more recent motif of returning to the book of life through codes in contemporary genetic biology. Second, it should be clear why the task of situating the production of knowledge in the lifeworld vis-` -vis an epistea mology engine differs from other endeavors, notably the Marxist project of constructing a materialist account of history, and Karl Poppers (1962) theory of myth as the origin of scientic theory. Third, it should be clear why the concept of epistemology engine belongs to a post-subjectivist epistemology, but not a post-human philosophy.2 Dening Epistemology Engine An epistemology engine is a technology or a set of technologies that through use frequently become explicit models for describing how knowledge is produced. The most dramatic examples of epistemology engines inuence our notions of subjectivity, directly affecting how we understand what it means to be human and to perceive things from a human perspective.3 They enable us to draw connections between the knowledge producing capacity of the human mind and technologies that putatively function according to similar mechanical processes. The philosophy of mind is replete with theorists modeling the brain, which even today is poorly understood, on technologies whose design is better understood. An epistemology engine is thus a special case of a more general phenomenological notion that entails the ways in which lifeworld practices form the basis for what often become scientic theories. But it is also a case in which the practices are engaged with technologies, which in turn, suggest what can be models for knowledge. In antiquity, catapults worked this way for the ancient Greeks. Later on, the mill served this function for G.W. Leibniz, as did the telegraph system for Sir Charles Sherrington, and hydraulic and electro-magnetic systems for Sigmund Freud (Searle, 1986: 44). The digital computer is currently functioning as an epistemology engine for many, and as a result, possibly even endangering our appreciation for the intuitive basis of expertise (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1986). Similarly, cyborg fantasies engender and feed postmodern ideas about identities (Ihde, 2002: 6787). We will present our own study of a specic epistemology

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engine in the next section, when we analyze the legacy of the camera obscura. In light of the above examples, it should be clear that epistemology engine is a phrase that designates a material-semiotic link between embodied practice and technology.4 A more specic denition is as follows: With episteme and logos as its etymological roots, we use epistemology in the traditional sense; it refers to the study of the dening features of knowledge and justication, including their limits. In everyday language, engine refers to a machine, one that converts energy into mechanical force or motion. In the context of epistemology engine, we use the word to designate the genesis of conceptual ideas from praxis, specically the emergence of theory from activity embedded in human-technology-world relations.5 Engine designates how praxis, far from being inherently antithetical to theory, is capable of inspiring the shape that theoretical concepts will come to assume. Praxis can start the engine of theory, converting if we stretch the metaphor the energy of practical coping into theoretical force. Along with philosophical phenomenologists and pragmatists, some historians of technology have long been aware of how practical involvement which intellectualist history has denigrated when compared with the more revered terms of divine inspiration and extraordinary mental cogitation can be a fundamental source of insight.6 Consider the well-known phrase: Science owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to science. This phrase suggests a radical inversion between the traditional priority of theory over practice. Traditionally, just as engineering is depicted as applied physics, technological innovation is characterized as scientic spin-off. But in the case of the steam engine, technological innovation inaugurated revolutionary changes in theoretical understanding. It paved the way for advances in caloric theory that in turn led to the development of thermodynamics. In this sense: The machine, not raw nature, suggested the phenomena (Ihde, 2000: 21). In sum, the concept of epistemology engine appears to be a theoretical extension of the phenomenological insight that practical coping tends to precede theoretical reection.7 Since this concept resonates with the basic tenets of phenomenology, the question before us is: Why is it that Merleau-Ponty failed to invent it? Before thoroughly answering this, we need to further explicate how an epistemology engine functions and this is best accomplished by way of analyzing a concrete example. Camera Obscura and Epistemology Historically, both John Locke and Rene Descartes explicitly used the camera obscura as a model for both the subject and the production of knowledge. As is well known, optical devices were the rst and most important instruments of much early modern science. And while telescopes (Galileo) and microscopes

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(Leewenhoek) are most often mentioned, the camera obscura was a favorite toy of the Renaissance. The recent publication by David Hockney (2001) of the popular and controversial book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, has re-opened the question of the use of such devices for the production of art. His claim, that many Renaissance through eighteenth century artists used the camera obscura to construct realistic paintings, has drawn re from many historians and critics. Yet, while this rediscovery is anything but new to historians of technology, and while he clearly overextends his point, there can be little doubt that the camera obscura was so used. Its use in science, or here, epistemology, is perhaps less known. Yet, both Locke and Descartes deliberately draw upon this optical device to construct their notion of how knowledge is obtained. In a sense, we can credit them with making the camera obscura into an epistemology engine. Although, to

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be historically accurate, we should note that the optical effect of the camera obscura, the casting of an inverted image on a surface by means of a pinhole or small opening, probably goes back to antiquity. Its explicit structure and its possible uses were clearly described by Al Hazen in his Optics (1038). He also made the camera obscura and its effects an analog to the eye. Much later, Leonardo da Vinci used a camera obscura and noted the same analogy: when the images of the illuminated bodies pass through a small hole into a dark room. . . they will appear upside down and smaller. . . the same happens inside the pupil (1970: 133). The move that makes this camera-eye analog into what we are calling an epistemology engine, is the added analog to the subject or ego, thus making the camera into an analog for making knowledge itself. Lockes description is quite explicit: . . . external and internal sensation area the only passages I can nd of knowledge to the understanding. . . the windows by which light is let into this dark room: for methinks the understanding is not much unlike a closet shut from light, with only some little opening left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without. . . [these] resemble the understanding of a man, in reference to all the objects of sight and the ideas of them (1976: 11, 17). The camera becomes the model for knowledge, and we shall illustrate how this quite well describes early modern epistemology by presenting Descartes version of the camera: We shall here generalize from this illustration of the camera and show how every important feature of early modern epistemology relates to the features of this epistemology engine: First, the sun (a), or external reality is outside the camera box and is not directly known to the subject (b), who is inside the box. Note that this distinction invents both the subject/object split and the notions of external and internal or subjective reality. Second, the subject inside the box knows only his or her ideas or impressions, that is, the image or representation on the screen or tabula rasa. Because this is the case, the subject must (c) infer via the geometrical method which is the only relation between external and internal reality what is the case. This, then, poses a major problem for early modern epistemology: How can the subject know that (c) there is a correspondence between external and internal reality? Descartes answer lies in (d), his notion of a philosophical God or an ideal observer. The elaborate arguments about God, who would not, if perfect, deceive human subjects is supposed to guarantee the correspondence. But, as the camera model shows, the reason this is really possible is because the ideal observer can simultaneously see both inside and outside the box. One of us has argued that this ideal observer is not God, but Descartes himself who employs a cheat code because he is describing both the inside and the outside

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of the box in describing the epistemological situation (Ihde, 2002: 7273). The related and limited points here, however, are to show how the camera is indeed the model, which both poses and generates the outlines of early modern epistemology, and thus is the engine through which knowledge production is understood. Knowledge production is modeled upon a specic technology and both its strengths and problems relate to the limitations of that specic model. Merleau-Ponty: Science, Technology, and Knowledge Having detailed what an epistemology engine is, we can now explain why Merleau-Ponty did not invent it. Our rst reason is that Merleau-Pontys limitations upon technoscientic thinking leads to a limitation concerning science within a lifeworld. Merleau-Ponty was highly sensitive about the limits of technoscientic thinking as is shown in his revealing comments made in the 1960 essay Eye and Mind. Although the primary motif running through Eye and Mind is a contrast between the arts and sciences, Merleau-Ponty nevertheless characterizes the revealing aspects of the visual arts as a secret science, a silent science, and a pictorial science (1964: 161, 186). Additionally, when Merleau-Ponty discusses how painters use the technology of the mirror as a technique of the body, he praises the way in which a mirror can be used as . . . the instrument of universal magic that changes things into a spectacle, spectacles into things, myself into another, and another into myself (1964: 168). The kinship to phenomenology, in the case of the mirror, is obvious. The mirror shifts perspectives with respect to what is subject and what is object. But, note, that in this description of mirrors and artists, the relationship is not mechanical as such. The existence of these positive comments about science and technology is not surprising.8 Merleau-Pontys version of phenomenology was based on clarifying the distance between the lifeworld and the world of science, thus assigning science its proper place in the whole of truth. He never intended to be polemical, to try to refute scientic claims because they were scientic.9 And yet, no matter how much he appreciated aspects of science and technology, Merleau-Ponty, like Edmund Husserl before him, was concerned that the sciences of his day, and the techniques of analysis and transformation that depend on them, seem to operate effectively only when practitioners lose sight of how scientic culture is ultimately dependent on the lifeworld. MerleauPonty contends that scientists too easily forget that all knowledge, including scientic knowledge, emerges from a situated perceiver; they obscure the phenomenological insight that knowledge is always constituted from a particular point of view, that scientic symbols are only endowed with meaning as second-order expressions of the world as perceived. In short, Merleau-Ponty

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contends that science in general only succeeds by virtue of its reductionism: Science manipulates things and gives up living in them (1964: 159). In the light of this attitude towards science, it is not surprising that Merleau-Ponty refers to the trajectory of contemporary scientic research as sensitive to intellectual fads and fashions (1964: 160). In this context, he evokes the political term ideology to pejoratively characterize the attempt to model the human mind on advances in cybernetics:10 Thinking operationally has become a sort of absolute articialism, such as we see in the ideology of cybernetics, where human creations are derived from a natural information process, itself conceived on the model of human machines. If this kind of thinking were to extend its reign to man and history; if, pretending to ignore what we know of them through our own situations, it were to set out to construct man and history on the basis of a few abstract indices. . . we enter into a cultural regimen where there is neither truth nor falsity concerning man and history, into a sleep, or a nightmare, from which there is no awakening (1964: 160). Since Merleau-Ponty normally is not a hyperbolic writer, one may wonder why he uses strong dystopian rhetoric notably apocalyptic imagery that signals the end of history to sensitize us to how the representational bias expressed by operational thinking dissociates human beings from the world of experience. Indeed, this style of dystopian rhetoric left an indelible impression on some of Merleau-Pontys most prominent phenomenological disciples, including Hubert Dreyfus. Twenty-six years after Merleau-Ponty wrote Eye and Mind, in the context of critiquing the operational thinking underlying so-called expert computer systems, Dreyfus and his brother Stuart lament the possibility that humans may soon become slaves to computers. They ominously write: The chips are down, the choice is being made right now. And at all levels of society computer-type rationality is winning out. Experts are becoming an endangered species. If we fail to put logic machines in their proper place, as aids to human beings with expert intuition, then we shall end up servants supplying data to our competent machines. Should calculative rationality triumph, no one will notice that something is missing, but now, while we still know what expert judgment is, let us use that expert judgment to preserve it (1986: 195). Simply put, both Dreyfus and Merleau-Ponty are concerned about the epistemological and normative peril of modeling human perception and thought on a technoscientic paradigm. And if we restrict our focus to Merleau-Ponty, we can say that the main reason why he is troubled by the technoscientic construction of the model of human machines is because such a model represents the human body as an information machine. It treats the human

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body hypothetically as a possible body and misses the concrete carnality of the actual lived body: Scientic thinking, a thinking which looks on from above, and thinks of the object-in-general, must return to the there is which underlies it; to the site, the soil of the sensible and opened world such as it is in our life and for our body not that possible body which we may think of as an information machine but that actual body I call mine, this sentinel standing quietly at the command of my words and acts (1964: 160161). By depicting scientic thinking as looking on from above, Merleau-Ponty alerts the reader that he sets the tone for his distressful commentary on cybernetics in his early attempt to ground perception in incarnate subjectivity in the Phenomenology of Perception. In this text he provides a philosophical alternative to the inherent Cartesianism found in nave realism (empiricism) and transcendental philosophy (intellectualism), beginning by criticizing theoretical attempts to construct the body as a mechanical device. In the rst section of the Introduction, Sensation, he claims that when behavioral psychologists appeal to physiology they distort our lived experience of perception, an experience that is structured not only by vision, but by the synesthetic interplay of all of the senses expressed as a plenary gestalt in relation to an environments affordances.11 Due to the sedimentation of common-sense realism, neither the physiologist nor the behaviorist begins analysis with phenomenological description. Instead, they both investigate perception by trying to locate a naturalized explanation that reveals the objective origins of sensation and its causal power. Specically, the behaviorist turns to physiology in order to reduce perceptual behavior to the elaboration and patterning of stimuli, by a longitudinal theory of nervous functioning, which establishes a theoretical correlation between each element of the situation and an element of the reaction (1962: 7). Citing Koehler, Merleau-Ponty refers to this correlation between situation and response as the constancy hypothesis. In principle, the constancy hypothesis sets up a point-by-point correspondence and constant connection between a stimulus and any elementary perception, treating each stimulus as corresponding to one sensation and one only (1962: 7, 228). To clarify what this means, lets consider how the constancy hypothesis treats vision. First, because each stimulus is correlated with a specic sensory response, the visual stimulus is limited to its own visual sphere and is considered analytically separable from the other senses, such as the auditory stimulus, which is deemed to be limited to its own acoustic sphere. For each point on the surface of the visual stimulus, there is a point of stimulation on the retina; hence the same stimuli will always produces the same sensation. If the constancy hypothesis is correct, then when a human perceiver approaches an object, the size of the image that the object projects on the retina will vary accordingly. The object will project a

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large image on the retina when one moves closer, and a smaller image on the retina when one moves further away. In short, the constancy hypothesis species that the normal act of perception consists of subjects blindly registering sensations without these subjects taking an active role in how those sensations are organized; this means that sense data are not modied or qualied by higher order operations. Perceptual anomalies are explained by reference to the intervention of facts usually conceived as belonging to a higher level such as judgment. These anomalies originate, not in the elementary data themselves, but rather in the interpretation, which these data are given (Gurwitsch, 1966: 5). Merleau-Ponty therefore claims that adherents of the constancy hypothesis are obliged to insist that the subject displays insufcient attention to normal sensations during the experience of perceptual anomalies. If Merleau-Ponty only used the testimony of consciousness as bodily phenomena to point out the aspects of perception that the constancy hypothesis distorts, then we would have little reason to question the possibility for an invention of the concept of epistemology engine. The crucial point is that Merleau-Ponty recognizes that the manner in which theorists look at the world is existentially related to their dispositions towards the world. He argues that the constancy hypothesis is based on a value-laden technological fantasy that functions as a cryptomechanism (i.e., a machine that buries the lived experience of perception) (1962: 58). This fantasy is so deeply sedimented in our beliefs that it is experienced as a natural intuition, one that sanctions the behaviorist in: (1) viewing the external world as objective in-itself and (2) analytically reducing the perceptual eld vis-` a vis second-order abstractions into atomistic units. In other words, the analyst who endorses the constancy hypothesis is forced to theoretically construct a mechanized account of human embodiment in order to generate explanatory power. The analyst is forced to depict our bodies as an amalgamation of separate parts that work together like a machine. By depicting perception mechanically and making it resemble an apparatus in which the senses are the instrument with which or by which representations of the objective world are passed on to the perceiver, perception becomes abstracted from its lived openness towards the ambiguity of the world. What the constancy hypothesis essentially does, therefore, is use copy-theory to depict humans as translation machines: As in the case of the reex arc theory, physiology of perception begins by recognizing an anatomical path leading from a receiver through a denite transmitter to a recording station equally specialized. The objective world being given it is assumed that it passes on to the sense-organs messages which must be registered, then deciphered in such a way as to reproduce in us the original text (1962: 7).

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Like the sign-concept distinction, which, for Merleau-Ponty, is a relation of separation, the relation of message-translation (or receiver-transmitterrecording station) in the constancy hypothesis is one of externality; messages from the external world are depicted as transmitted to the inside of us, and the body is viewed as a screen between myself and the world.12 Contrary to their explicit goal of rejecting Cartesianism, adherents of the constancy hypothesis allow the distance between the world and the subject to remain in all of its skepticism-producing glory. The persistence of this view retains such a powerful hold over the imagination that even in Eye and Mind Merleau-Ponty nds it necessary to write: The bodys animation is not the assemblage or juxtaposition of its parts (1964: 163). Clearly, this recognition of an implicit technologization within the constancy hypothesis is pointing in the direction of our epistemology engine notion. Since Merleau-Ponty was able to recognize how a technological fantasy rooted in copy-theory underlies the constancy hypothesis, why do we refrain from crediting him with inventing the concept of epistemology engine? Merleau-Ponty and Epistemology Engines There does seem to be some parallel between Merleau-Pontys critique of modern epistemology by way of the mechanization of the body and the problems that arise from taking the camera obscura as a model for knowledge production. There are, however, certain important differences as well. The simple answer to our guiding question is that Merleau-Ponty rarely addresses questions of technology at all; when he does, as in the cases above, it is an indirect examination. Indeed, to make a move from an objectivist or view-from-above perspective to his criticism would, in a certain sense, be to inaugurate a second move. From Merleau-Pontys perspective, however, this second move would make the issue more complex than it needs to be. Merleau-Ponty simply showed little interest in technologies as such, and with a different twist that we address below did not show sensitivity to dealing with human-technology relations. If technologies provide the models for knowledge, such as that which constructs the object body as both mechanical and distinct from experience, they remain implicit and in the background for Merleau-Ponty. Then, too, when Merleau-Ponty did forefront technologies or technological processes, as in the case of cybernetics above, he seems to have simply taken for granted a prominent early twentieth century attitude associated with many of the great European philosophers who saw modern technologies as threats to traditional culture, thereby giving a prevailing dystopian tone to the analysis. But, and this is a deeper issue, these technologies were also usually viewed as simply external entities. In Merleau-Pontys case, it is as if cybernetic

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processes, translation machines, and the like simply operate on their own. A deeper and more clearly analyzed human-technology set of relations is not examined. Thus, Merleau-Ponty would seem to occupy the same attitude and ground of his early phenomenology predecessors: Husserl with his accusation that science forgets the lifeworld; Heidegger with his notions of technology as enframing; Ortega y Gassett with technology leading to mass man; and the like. In this respect, our allusions to Hubert Dreyfus also become relevant. Dreyfus, too, seems to regard machines that have been claimed to be articially intelligent as autonomous entities somehow outside human-technology relations. This much should be clear from the very title of his books: What Computers Cant Do and Mind Over Machine. The famous embarrassment regarding computers and chess, one that is frequently cited as a critique of Dreyfus, is illustrative. Because Deep Blue, a programmed chess-playing computer, defeated a master player, Kasparov, in 1997, Dreyfus is often presumed to have been refuted on his articial intelligence claims. Deep Blue did not play chess intuitively, but instead relied on brute computational power that could only be modied for pruning in relation to a small subsection of moves: Deep Blue, the chess program that beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, ran on a state-of-the-art computer built especially for the purpose and could evaluate 200,000,000 board positions per second (sixty billion in the three minutes that each player has to pick the next move). However, even at this speed, Deep Blue could only search around seven moves into the future if it used this brute force technique. . . Garry Kasparov, in deciding which moves to pick, does a much more limited search. (At top speed, human grand masters can evaluate approximately three board positions per second.) (Litch, 2002: 91) The crucial thing to realize is that Dreyfus would be defeated with respect to the mind versus machine motif, if and only if a machine beat a human at a task that is considered paradigmatic of intelligent behavior.13 We, however, would argue that this version of the Deep BlueKasparov narrative is badly framed. There never has been simply a chess-programmed, autonomous computer. Instead, there are humans plus computers in relations. It is, of course, possible for humans to program computers and then set the computers to running the programs; in this case, the human-technology relation remains in place, albeit located in the background. The deistic computer designer and programmer has set off the toy to spin by itself until it runs down, crashes, or completes the run. The computer does not do anything on its own: it is not selfinvented; it does not program itself; and it runs only within the input given. Those who play chess with computers at home are in this situation. But in the context of the Deep BlueKasparov match, there was a much more intimate

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human-technology situation at work. The rst game was won by Kasparov but after that game, Deep Blue was re-programmed, i.e., its program was tweaked so as to take account of certain Kasparov moves, and this happened after each match until Kasparov resigned the sixth and nal match. Thus a better telling of the story would be: Yes, Kasparov lost the series, but it was not human versus machine; it was human versus humans-plus-machine, a rather unequal contest to say the least! In this version, Kasparovs claims that the computer played like a human, and that it was worthy of praise for understanding some very deep positions, should be understood as metaphorical allusions, claims made under the spell of a misleading epistemology engine.14 This retelling, however, moves the tale into todays technoscience style of analysis, an analysis which, were it told in terms used by Bruno Latour, takes accounts of both humans and non-humans in collectives; or told within the postphenomenological framework we follow, it is a tale of human-technology relations where the shifting positions of the human in the relation must be accounted for. The entire atmosphere within contemporary science or technoscience studies has shifted towards an appreciation of the material culture and instrumental materiality of technoscience practices. We do not believe this is either a style or perspective that would have been taken by Merleau-Ponty, given the characterization of technologies as objects as cited above. MerleauPonty did not forefront technologies and habitually did not forefront either social or human-technology relations. If Merleau-Ponty remained with his predecessors with respect to prevailing attitudes towards modern technologies, what he did with respect to early modern epistemology was indeed more radical. The Cartesian paradigm of subject-and-object (the subject in-the-box and the object external) retains whatever is experiential and reexively referential only for the thinking, mental subject. By rst making the subject an embodied subject, Merleau-Ponty is both replacing the Cartesian subject and substituting for it, the embodied corps vecu, or lived body. In Merleau-Pontys very framing of what can now be called a body/body problem, the object body the body conceived of in second order and implicitly mechanistic terms as an object for various sciences (neurology, physiology, anatomy, etc.) is made to strongly contrast with the lived or phenomenological body, a body that is not only experienced, but is modeled upon motile, kinesthetic actional and holistic experienced patterns. Indeed, one can argue that what this contrastive framing of a body/body problem accomplishes is an avoidance of a body/mind problem. Cartesian epistemology regards the body itself as reducible to the mechanical object body, with the subject but only as mental retaining the actional, holistic, and gestalt qualities which Merleau-Ponty wants to identify in the lived body. Rephrasing this reconception, one can say that the phenomenological body is neither mechanical, nor

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locatable either inside or outside a box. An embodied subject is not in its body but is its body in a world. Another way to put this is to say that MerleauPonty rejected a mechanical interpretation for both the body and the mind, but made mind embodied as a lived materiality. But this epistemological transformation, while returning some sense of materiality to the subject, who is now embodied subject, could be made without reference to technologies as such. We have hinted, however, that there is within Merleau-Pontys thinking another dimension to what one might call human-technology relations. We can call these his human-technology embodiment relations. Here, again, the role of a phenomenologically interpreted body is central. Ones experience of embodiment not only exceeds the mechanical; it is not limited to being a clear and distinct object. In the Phenomenology of Perception, there are two striking instances, which illustrate this point: the blind mans cane and the woman with the feathered hat. Both illustrate the same phenomenon: A woman may, without any calculation, keep a safe distance between the feather in her hat and the things which might break it off. She feels where the feather is just as we feel where our hand is. If I am in the habit of driving a car, I enter a narrow opening and see that I can get through without comparing the width of the opening with that of the wings, just as I go through a doorway without checking the width of the doorway against that of my body (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 143). The blind mans stick has ceased to be an object for him and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch and providing a parallel to sight. In the exploration of things, the length of the stick does not enter expressively as a middle term: the blind man is rather aware of it through the position of object than of the position of objects through it. The position of things is immediately given through the extent of the reach that carries him to it, which comprises, besides the arms reach, the sticks range of action (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 143). Here are descriptions of human-technology relations in a rich phenomenological sense, but note, in this context, these technologies are neither mechanical nor external objects. In short, in such human-technology relations, both the common sense and dystopian concepts of technologies are transcended. Could it be that more complex technologies, such as cybernetic devices and translation programs could also fall into human practices in similar ways? The trajectories from such an insight were not followed by MerleauPonty himself. This pregnant insight, however, in some degree still falls outside the question of an epistemology engine. The camera obscura served as a point-by-point model for early modern epistemology; it was a conceptual device. And, once so understood, it is, we would argue, much more easily seen with respect to

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both its productive suggestibility, and its severe limitations that today are becoming questioned. There is, in conclusion, a moral to the story: If the internal secret to the early modern epistemology engine of the camera lies in the cheat code whereby the inventor simultaneously sees both the inner workings and the outer situation, the phenomenological critique is one which restores the need to recognize the reexive perspective from which the situation is described. That is what is done when Descartes position is implicitly identied with the God position. Or, to invert the situation, had Descartes taken his own description of the epistemological situation as true, he would have had to have done the description from the perspective of the subject-in-the-box, which he did not, in fact, do. To recognize this is to make a phenomenological point. There remains, however, a subtler point to be made. It could be stated that the deepest level of modeling done within Cartesian thought reads materiality mechanically, whereas the implicit reading of embodiment, which foreshadows a sense of materiality, is not mechanical. It is precisely this point that an emphasis upon epistemology engines brings out technological materiality is not itself mechanistic, but is human-technology interactive. Technological materiality is thus poorly understood when it is characterized in terms of mechanical metaphors. But to recognize the role of technologies and to understand these with sensitivity calls for a sensitivity beyond that practiced by the classical phenomenologists of the early to mid-twentieth century. Notes
1. The notion of epistemology engine was rst developed in Ihde (2000). 2. For a more in-depth discussion of posthumanism, see Ihde and Selinger (2003). 3. Closely related to the topic of epistemology engines is the theme of the lifeworld origins of theories and ideas that can be found in the contemporary technoscientic literature. A few examples will prove illustrative. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer (1985) trace the genealogy of modern experimental science and its foundational notion of empirical objectivity to the technology and culture of the airpump. They argue that differing relations towards (and with) this device proved so decisive in the debates between Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle that science and politics became radically restructured for Western society. Manuel De Landa (1991) demonstrates that the art and science of warfare ranging from the mobile siege artillery of the Renaissance, the clockwork armies of the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic campaigns, the Nazi blitzkrieg, contemporary cybernetic battlemanagement systems, and satellite reconnaissance networks cannot be understood in the absence of philosophical-historical reection upon the changing forms through which humans and technologies are combined and organized. Most recently, Peter Galison (2003) demonstrates a connection between Albert Einsteins involvement with railway schedules and clocks as a patent clerk and his theory of special relativity. Galisons analysis effectively deconstructs the traditional account of genius, bringing materiality and meaning back to the lifeworld. 4. For a more in-depth discussion of material-semiotic couplings, see Haraway (1997). 5. The conceptual structure of human-technology-world relations, and its relevance to the philosophy of technology, is developed in Ihde (1990).

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6. The most relevant contemporary empirical eldwork on the topic of genius and its relation to practical involvement can be found in Mialet (1999). 7. This is why Ihdes philosophy of epistemology engines is structured in terms of inquiry into how technologically mediated practical action can subsequently inform how theories, even theories about the body, are congured. The main idea here is that the environment which one is immersed in exerts a strong metaphorical inuence over how most, if not all, things that enters into that environment are interpreted. For example, in Ihdes recent work in Bodies in Technology, he shows how material practices can function as a preconscious springboard that shape what theorists imagine the body to be and how they imagine it to function. Instead of viewing the so-called history of philosophy principally as an intellectual history of ideas, Ihde places philosophical thought on a continuum with lifeworld activity, provocatively suggesting that philosophical ideas can be generated from technologically meditated lifeworld praxes. 8. For in-depth analysis of Merleau-Ponty and the topic of scientic realism, see Rouse (1986). 9. Merleau-Ponty criticizes Karl Jaspers for setting up an opposition between descriptive and explanatory psychology. He writes: For the philosopher, as for the psychologist, there is therefore always a problem of origins, and the only method possible to follow, in its scientic development, the causal explanation in order to make its meaning quite clear, and assign to its proper place in the body of truth. That is why there will be found no refutation, but only an effort to understand the difculties peculiar to causal thinking (1962: 7, fn.1). 10. The epistemological use of ideology is elaborated and defended in Feyerabend (2001). 11. For an explicit comparison of the relation between Merleau-Ponty, see Sanders (1993). 12. For more on the use of the screen metaphor, see Merleau-Ponty (1967: 219). 13. Dreyfus tends to use three strategies to defend himself on this charge (although these comments were made years prior to the Deep Blue match). Firstly, against early critics, such as Alvin Tofer, Dreyfus claims that his initial comments on chess playing machines were descriptive and not predictive, i.e. they were simply reports about the state of the art in the 1960s (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1986: 112). Secondly, Dreyfus associates his predictions about holistic understanding with the inability of technologies to exhibit consistent success: We predict that in any domain in which people exhibit holistic understanding, no system based upon heuristics will consistently do as well as experienced experts, even if those experts were the informants who provided the heuristic rules (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1986: 112). Third, Dreyfus claims that what he is really saying is that computers will not play chess in the manner that human beings play chess: Since similarity for a strong chess player means similar elds of force and since no one has yet succeeded in describing such elds, there is little prospect of duplicating human performance in the foreseeable future (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1986: 115). 14. This reframing narrative is based upon research done by William Braynen and reported in an unpublished research paper produced for the Technoscience Research Seminar, Stony Brook University, Fall, 2002.

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