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Copyright

Janna van Grunsven; Bouke van Balen; Caroline Bollen;

Published On

2024-10-16

Page Range

pp. 241–266

Language

  • English

Print Length

26 pages

10. Three Embodied Dimensions of Communication

Phenomenological Lessons for and from the Field of Augmented and Alternative Communication Technology

Chapter of: Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Technology(pp. 241–266)
In the last chapter, Janna van Grunsven, Caroline Bollen and Bouke van Balen show how the phenomenology of communication can inform the field of augmented or alternative communication technology (AAC-tech). AAC-tech is a set of technologies developed for people who are unable to use some of their bodily expressive resources due to congenital or acquired disability. This inability often makes it very difficult for those people to communicate. Developers of AAC-tech often take a cognitivist starting-point, thereby missing out on the subtle ways in which embodiment shapes communication. The phenomenological description of the lived experiences of these people offers a fruitful starting-point for recognizing the often forgotten embodied dimension of communication, and enables to formulate desiderata for how AAC-tech should be developed: AAC-tech should take into account (1) embodied address, (2) embodied enrichment, and (3) embodied diversity. Focusing on the lived experience of potential users of AAC-tech has, according to van Grunsven, Bollen, and van Balen, not only direct practical applications for technology development but also can inform phenomenology methodologically: focusing on a limit case as the one discussed in this chapter makes visible that communication takes place in a wide variety of ways and that it is not the task of the phenomenologist to lay bare a general or essential structure of communication that can be taken as a standard.

Contributors

Janna van Grunsven

(author)
Assistant Professor at Technische Universiteit Delft
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8751-1289

Janna van Grunsven is an Assistant Professor in TU Delft’s ethics and philosophy of technology section. With the support of an Veni personal grant from the Dutch Research Council, she conducts research at the intersection of embodied cognition, philosophy and ethics of technology, and disability studies. In her project, Mattering Minds: Understanding the Ethical Lives of Technologically Embedded Beings with 4E Cognition, she is particularly interested in the notion of moral visibility, i.e., the idea that people’s expressive embodied behaviour is often (but certainly not always) directly seen by others as constraining and motivating a range of moral actions. Specifically, she examines how different technologies can promote or subvert people’s moral visibility and, with that, their ability to flourish as embodied beings, situated in a technological environment. Her work has appeared in journals such as Social Epistemology, Ethics and Information Technology, Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, and the Journal of Consciousness Studies.

Bouke van Balen

(author)
PhD candidate in Philosophy and Ethics of technology at University Medical Center Utrecht
https://orcid.org/0009-0001-9540-5515

Bouke van Balen is a PhD candidate in Philosophy and Ethics of technology at UMC Utrecht (Neurology & Neurosurgery), TU Delft (Ethics & Philosophy of Technology), and TU Eindhoven (Human Computer Interaction). In this interdisciplinary project, he is embedded in a lab of neuroscientists at the UMCU that develop implantable communication Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) for independent home-use. His research is on the intersection of philosophy of technology, phenomenology, embodied cognition, neuroscience, and ethics. He is specifically interested in how BCIs can and should shape the perceptions and experiences of communication and subjectivity of people with severe communication problems due to paralysis. His project is part of the ESDiT (Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies) consortium.

Caroline Bollen

(author)
Postdoctoral Researcher at Technische Universiteit Delft
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0176-1832

Caroline Bollen is a postdoctoral researcher at Delft University of Technology (Ethics & Philosophy of Technology) and Eindhoven University of Technology (Human Technology Interaction). She has an interdisciplinary background in medical biology, neuroscience, and science in society. In her PhD project, she developed a novel account of empathy as a normative concept that is applicable in a social environment that is more and more mediated by communication technologies. In her research, she emphasizes social and epistemic (in)justices, and she explores how many accounts of empathy exclude autistic empathetic experiences and expressions. This project is part of the ESDiT (Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies) consortium.