Shannon Vallor
Biographic Data
| ID | 4501828 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shannon Vallor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Shannon |
| FAMILY NAME | Vallor |
| SIGNATURE | VALLOR S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Santa Clara University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7036-5222 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 9 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 33 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
In a Mirror, Dimly: Why AI Can’t Tell Our Stories and Why We Must
Today’s generative AI tools are flooding the media ecosystem with mirrored reflections of humanity’s digitized past, reconstituted as the future. Companies are rapidly embracing these tools as ways to automate the already endangered professions of storytelling and knowledge creation. Why should we resist? After all, telling our own stories can often be painful and risky, frustrating and fruitless, or just tedious. What do we lose by surrendering …
The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies spark hope for a future in which human limits and frailties are finally overcome—not by us, but by our machines. Yet rather than open new futures, today’s powerful AI technologies reproduce the past. Forged from oceans of our data into immensely powerful and useful but deeply flawed mirrors, they reflect the same errors, biases, and failures of wisdom that we are striving to escape. Our new digital mirror…
Using Philosophy of Language in Philosophy of Technology
Many philosophers of technology focus on technological artifacts, especially after the empirical turn; this has led to a neglect of the roles language plays with regard to technology. But it could be helpful for further theory development to reflect more on relations between language and technology and to learn from philosophy of language. This chapter contributes to filling this gap and explores how philosophy of language can be used in philosop…
The Minded Body in Technology and Disability
This chapter critically examines futuristic and transhumanist rhetoric about cyborg bodies, exoskeletons, and prostheses in the context of traditional philosophical accounts of the nature of mind and body. Finding that these whiz-bang accounts of future tech and the nature of body and mind mutually reinforce each other, this chapter then argues that a critical lens from disability studies provides better ways to talk about the experience of mind …
Postcolonialism and Technologies of Identification
This chapter challenges traditional diffusionist approaches to the circulation of scientific and technological knowledge, exploring instead the “geographical turn” in science and technology studies through postcolonial philosophy which was developed to understand the movement of technical knowledge between west and east. The late nineteenth-century problem of unique identification of individuals, for civil and legal purposes in colonial India, pr…
Philosophy of Technology as Politics
This chapter offers a meta-philosophical account or a philosophy of the philosophy of technology. It first pictures the philosophy of technology as itself a technique, namely an academic discipline, with its own politics. It then explores the largely unexamined political imperatives of this technique drawing from the works of Martin Heidegger and Ivan Illich as well as literature in interdisciplinary studies. The following sections offer first a …
Science Fiction Futures and (Re)visions of the Anthropocene
This chapter discusses how humans envision futures, especially environmental futures, including the climate crisis, the Anthropocene, and mass extinctions. Although the philosophy of technology has traditionally examined the forecasting of technological risk and arguments about whether to embrace or reject the growth of technological mediation of human lives, the field has yet to fully investigate environmental futurisms and imagination. To begin…
Technology, Cognitive Enhancement, and Virtue Ethics
This chapter explores how cognitive enhancement, by means of technology, in combination with a commitment to virtue ethics could improve our capacity for responsible decision making. Four examples of cognitive enhancement technologies are discussed: computer training, neurofeedback or electroencephalogram (EEG) biofeedback, transcranial direct stimulation (tDCS) and brain-computer interface (BCI). On describing and critically discussing the poten…
Understanding Engineering Design and Its Social, Political, and Moral Dimensions
This chapter covers two central issues in the philosophy of engineering design. The first concerns the nature, structure, and function of engineering design. Building on the existing literature, the chapter provides an account of engineering design from a bird’s eye view, asking what kind of practice it is, how it relates to other human practices (including other forms of design and other forms of engineering), and how engineering design processe…
Styles of Objectivity in Scientific Instrumentation
This chapter theorizes the epistemic roles of technology. Focusing on the example of magnetic resonance imaging, it approaches scientific instruments as adaptive mediators . The notion of adaptive mediator is drawn from the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon. The proposed approach aligns with accounts that historicize the conditions of knowledge but differs by pushing into an ecological and operational conceptual terrain. Challenging the dichotomy be…
What Is It Like to Be a Bot?
This chapter seeks to further develop, define, and differentiate human-technics alterity relations within postphenomenological philosophy of technology. A central case study of the Alexa digital assistant establishes that digital assistants require the adoption of the intentional stance, and illustrates that this structural requirement is different from anthropomorphic projection of mindedness onto technical objects. Human-technics alterity relat…
Technological Multistability and the Trouble with the Things Themselves
Following Husserl, phenomenologists and “postphenomenologists” often use a rhetoric of getting back to the “things themselves.” However, open questions remain about how we should understand the metaphysical status of the technologies that we encounter. These questions remain especially open for perspectives such as postphenomenology (and sister accounts such as feminist new materialism, and actor-network theory), with their commitments to an onto…
The Technological Uncanny as a Permanent Dimension of Selfhood
“The uncanny valley” indicates that as a robot approaches a nearly human state, initial positive responses quickly turn to strong revulsion. After reviewing various explanations for this phenomenon, this chapter interprets the uncanny feeling towards humanoids not as a response to a lack of humanness but rather as a response to the inability to fathom and appropriate what makes the viewer of the robot different from the robot, that is, what makes…
Why Confucianism Matters for the Ethics of Technology
There are a number of recent attempts to introduce Confucian values to ethical analysis of technology. These works have not, however, attended sufficiently to one central aspect of Confucianism, namely ritual (“ Li ”). Li is central to Confucian ethics, and it has been suggested that the emphasis on Li in Confucian ethics is what distinguishes Confusion ethics from other ethical traditions. Any discussion of Confucian ethics for technology, there…
Whence and W(h)ither Technology Ethics
Will there be a future for technology ethics as a respected academic discipline among philosophers, scientists, engineers, and the general public? We hope that the answer is, “Yes.” But for that to be so, the field must undertake a frank assessment of its historical origins in Heidegger’s ideology-laden, technology critique and in the environmental crisis of the 1960s and 1970s, along with the nuclear arms race and protests against newer technolo…
Freedom in an Age of Algocracy
There is a growing sense of unease around algorithmic modes of governance (“algocracies”) and their impact on freedom. Contrary to the emancipatory utopianism of digital enthusiasts, many now fear that the rise of algocracies will undermine our freedom. Nevertheless, there has been some struggle to explain exactly how this will happen. This chapter tries to address the shortcomings in the existing discussion by arguing for a broader conception of…
Revisiting Smartness in the Smart City
This chapter critically examines the intelligence of smart city government, which often ignores experiential and practical knowledge of citizens. The smart city movement’s tunnel-visioned pursuit of technology-driven intelligence distracts from smart citizenship: civic intelligence and knowledge that lives outside the scope of business-friendly tech entrepreneurs. The disenfranchised, although knowledgeable decision makers, are often ignored in t…
Outer Space as a New Frontier for Technology Ethics
As technologies help us to push further and further into outer space, new ethical issues emerge, as is typical for new frontiers. This chapter will survey issues ranging from the practical to the theoretical, such as bioethics for astronauts, including issues of sex and reproduction and whether we should initially send humans at all (instead of robots); commercial activities in space, including tourism and property rights; terraforming, colonizat…
What Is Living and What Is Dead in Classic European Philosophy of Technology?
Classic European philosophy of technology is the original effort to think critically rather than promotionally about the historically unique mutation that is anchored in the Industrial Revolution and has since progressively transformed the world and itself. Three representative contributions to this pivotal philosophical project can be found in texts by Alan Turing, Jacques Ellul, and Martin Heidegger. Despite having initiated analytic, sociologi…
Introducing the Philosophy of Technology
This introduction to the Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Technology begins with a provocation and rumination on the lateness of its arrival—that is, the fact that only in the twenty-first century do we have a mature body of Anglophone philosophical scholarship on technology that seems worthy of such an in-depth survey. Technology has been radically transforming the conditions of human existence for millennia; how could the pursuit of wisdom …
Technology and the Ontology of the Virtual
This chapter offers a critical analysis of the current impact of digital technologies on the ontology of the virtual. In particular, it investigates the potential challenges to traditional metaphysics and ontology raised by the ongoing digitization of reality, which promises to increasingly result in the creation of new virtual, augmented, and mixed realities. Such realities have a profound impact both on us and on our world, since they augment, …
The Epistemic Role of Technical Functions
Technical functions of artifacts are commonly distinguished from their social functions and from biological functions of organisms. Schemes for classifying functions often encounter what the author calls the continuum problem—the imperceptible merger of function kinds. This is a special case of a debate about natural kinds in philosophy of science, which has resulted in a turn to an epistemological construal of kinds, in contrast to the tradition…
Emerging Technology as Promise and Peril
Recent work in the philosophy of technology draws attention to the connection between technology and the good life. Discourse around emerging technologies also makes this connection, albeit implicitly, when it focuses on the promises and perils of going forward with a nascent technology. Emerging technologies are touted for their potential to bring about increased safety, health, convenience, or enlightenment and disparaged for their perils—dimin…
The Empirical Turn
The history of the philosophy of technology is marked by a transition in its approach to technology. After an initial twentieth-century phase of analyzing ‘Technology’ and its conditions and social implications, a period now indicated as ‘classical philosophy of technology,’ the field made an ‘empirical turn’ in order to do more justice to the concreteness of actual technologies in their relations with human beings and societies. This chapter des…
Engineering Knowledge
This chapter seeks to advance our understanding of engineering knowledge. The authors distinguish existing views of engineering knowledge as subordinating , contrasting , or assimilating it to (natural-)scientific knowledge. After identifying shortcomings and useful elements of each view, the authors offer ingredients for an alternative analysis, focusing on knowledge produced in the design of high-tech systems. This analysis builds on elements o…
Hitting the moving target: Challenges of creating a dynamic curriculum addressing the ethical dimensions of geospatial data
While established ethical norms and core legal principles concerning the protection of privacy may be easily identified, applying these standards to rapidly evolving digital information technologies, markets for digital information and convulsive changes in social understandings of privacy is increasingly challenging. This challenge has been further heightened by the increasing creation of, access to, and sophisticated nature of geocoded data, th…
The Ethics of IT
Carebots and Caregivers: Sustaining the Ethical Ideal of Care in the Twenty-First Century
Hitting the moving target: Challenges of creating a dynamic curriculum addressing the ethical dimensions of geospatial data
While established ethical norms and core legal principles concerning the protection of privacy may be easily identified, applying these standards to rapidly evolving digital information technologies, markets for digital information and convulsive changes in social understandings of privacy is increasingly challenging. This challenge has been further heightened by the increasing creation of, access to, and sophisticated nature of geocoded data, th…
Moral Deskilling and Upskilling in a New Machine Age: Reflections on the Ambiguous Future of Character
Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting
The 21st century offers a dizzying array of new technological developments: robots smart enough to take white collar jobs, social media tools that manage our most important relationships, ordinary objects that track, record, analyze and share every detail of our daily lives, and biomedical techniques with the potential to transform and enhance human minds and bodies to an unprecedented degree. Emerging technologies are reshaping our habits, pract…
Technology and the Virtues: A Response to My Critics
Using Philosophy of Language in Philosophy of Technology
Many philosophers of technology focus on technological artifacts, especially after the empirical turn; this has led to a neglect of the roles language plays with regard to technology. But it could be helpful for further theory development to reflect more on relations between language and technology and to learn from philosophy of language. This chapter contributes to filling this gap and explores how philosophy of language can be used in philosop…
The Minded Body in Technology and Disability
This chapter critically examines futuristic and transhumanist rhetoric about cyborg bodies, exoskeletons, and prostheses in the context of traditional philosophical accounts of the nature of mind and body. Finding that these whiz-bang accounts of future tech and the nature of body and mind mutually reinforce each other, this chapter then argues that a critical lens from disability studies provides better ways to talk about the experience of mind …
Postcolonialism and Technologies of Identification
This chapter challenges traditional diffusionist approaches to the circulation of scientific and technological knowledge, exploring instead the “geographical turn” in science and technology studies through postcolonial philosophy which was developed to understand the movement of technical knowledge between west and east. The late nineteenth-century problem of unique identification of individuals, for civil and legal purposes in colonial India, pr…
Philosophy of Technology as Politics
This chapter offers a meta-philosophical account or a philosophy of the philosophy of technology. It first pictures the philosophy of technology as itself a technique, namely an academic discipline, with its own politics. It then explores the largely unexamined political imperatives of this technique drawing from the works of Martin Heidegger and Ivan Illich as well as literature in interdisciplinary studies. The following sections offer first a …
Science Fiction Futures and (Re)visions of the Anthropocene
This chapter discusses how humans envision futures, especially environmental futures, including the climate crisis, the Anthropocene, and mass extinctions. Although the philosophy of technology has traditionally examined the forecasting of technological risk and arguments about whether to embrace or reject the growth of technological mediation of human lives, the field has yet to fully investigate environmental futurisms and imagination. To begin…
Technology, Cognitive Enhancement, and Virtue Ethics
This chapter explores how cognitive enhancement, by means of technology, in combination with a commitment to virtue ethics could improve our capacity for responsible decision making. Four examples of cognitive enhancement technologies are discussed: computer training, neurofeedback or electroencephalogram (EEG) biofeedback, transcranial direct stimulation (tDCS) and brain-computer interface (BCI). On describing and critically discussing the poten…
Understanding Engineering Design and Its Social, Political, and Moral Dimensions
This chapter covers two central issues in the philosophy of engineering design. The first concerns the nature, structure, and function of engineering design. Building on the existing literature, the chapter provides an account of engineering design from a bird’s eye view, asking what kind of practice it is, how it relates to other human practices (including other forms of design and other forms of engineering), and how engineering design processe…
Styles of Objectivity in Scientific Instrumentation
This chapter theorizes the epistemic roles of technology. Focusing on the example of magnetic resonance imaging, it approaches scientific instruments as adaptive mediators . The notion of adaptive mediator is drawn from the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon. The proposed approach aligns with accounts that historicize the conditions of knowledge but differs by pushing into an ecological and operational conceptual terrain. Challenging the dichotomy be…
What Is It Like to Be a Bot?
This chapter seeks to further develop, define, and differentiate human-technics alterity relations within postphenomenological philosophy of technology. A central case study of the Alexa digital assistant establishes that digital assistants require the adoption of the intentional stance, and illustrates that this structural requirement is different from anthropomorphic projection of mindedness onto technical objects. Human-technics alterity relat…
Technological Multistability and the Trouble with the Things Themselves
Following Husserl, phenomenologists and “postphenomenologists” often use a rhetoric of getting back to the “things themselves.” However, open questions remain about how we should understand the metaphysical status of the technologies that we encounter. These questions remain especially open for perspectives such as postphenomenology (and sister accounts such as feminist new materialism, and actor-network theory), with their commitments to an onto…
The Technological Uncanny as a Permanent Dimension of Selfhood
“The uncanny valley” indicates that as a robot approaches a nearly human state, initial positive responses quickly turn to strong revulsion. After reviewing various explanations for this phenomenon, this chapter interprets the uncanny feeling towards humanoids not as a response to a lack of humanness but rather as a response to the inability to fathom and appropriate what makes the viewer of the robot different from the robot, that is, what makes…
Why Confucianism Matters for the Ethics of Technology
There are a number of recent attempts to introduce Confucian values to ethical analysis of technology. These works have not, however, attended sufficiently to one central aspect of Confucianism, namely ritual (“ Li ”). Li is central to Confucian ethics, and it has been suggested that the emphasis on Li in Confucian ethics is what distinguishes Confusion ethics from other ethical traditions. Any discussion of Confucian ethics for technology, there…
Whence and W(h)ither Technology Ethics
Will there be a future for technology ethics as a respected academic discipline among philosophers, scientists, engineers, and the general public? We hope that the answer is, “Yes.” But for that to be so, the field must undertake a frank assessment of its historical origins in Heidegger’s ideology-laden, technology critique and in the environmental crisis of the 1960s and 1970s, along with the nuclear arms race and protests against newer technolo…
Freedom in an Age of Algocracy
There is a growing sense of unease around algorithmic modes of governance (“algocracies”) and their impact on freedom. Contrary to the emancipatory utopianism of digital enthusiasts, many now fear that the rise of algocracies will undermine our freedom. Nevertheless, there has been some struggle to explain exactly how this will happen. This chapter tries to address the shortcomings in the existing discussion by arguing for a broader conception of…
Revisiting Smartness in the Smart City
This chapter critically examines the intelligence of smart city government, which often ignores experiential and practical knowledge of citizens. The smart city movement’s tunnel-visioned pursuit of technology-driven intelligence distracts from smart citizenship: civic intelligence and knowledge that lives outside the scope of business-friendly tech entrepreneurs. The disenfranchised, although knowledgeable decision makers, are often ignored in t…
Outer Space as a New Frontier for Technology Ethics
As technologies help us to push further and further into outer space, new ethical issues emerge, as is typical for new frontiers. This chapter will survey issues ranging from the practical to the theoretical, such as bioethics for astronauts, including issues of sex and reproduction and whether we should initially send humans at all (instead of robots); commercial activities in space, including tourism and property rights; terraforming, colonizat…
What Is Living and What Is Dead in Classic European Philosophy of Technology?
Classic European philosophy of technology is the original effort to think critically rather than promotionally about the historically unique mutation that is anchored in the Industrial Revolution and has since progressively transformed the world and itself. Three representative contributions to this pivotal philosophical project can be found in texts by Alan Turing, Jacques Ellul, and Martin Heidegger. Despite having initiated analytic, sociologi…
Introducing the Philosophy of Technology
This introduction to the Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Technology begins with a provocation and rumination on the lateness of its arrival—that is, the fact that only in the twenty-first century do we have a mature body of Anglophone philosophical scholarship on technology that seems worthy of such an in-depth survey. Technology has been radically transforming the conditions of human existence for millennia; how could the pursuit of wisdom …
Technology and the Ontology of the Virtual
This chapter offers a critical analysis of the current impact of digital technologies on the ontology of the virtual. In particular, it investigates the potential challenges to traditional metaphysics and ontology raised by the ongoing digitization of reality, which promises to increasingly result in the creation of new virtual, augmented, and mixed realities. Such realities have a profound impact both on us and on our world, since they augment, …
Epistemology (34 works) · Sociology (30 works) · Philosophy (29 works) · Computer Science (21 works) · Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations (18 works) · Engineering (17 works) · Political science (17 works) · Law (14 works) · Engineering ethics (13 works) · Psychology (13 works)