Measurement as a Medium for Communication and Social Action II: The Promise and Power of Being Amodern

摘要

As was elaborated in Part I, understanding the implications of an unmodern (Dewey 2012) or amodern (Latour 1999) philosophy for measurement, communication, and coordination begins from the way the use and development of language is not controlled or determined via a process of deliberate design. Hayek's (1948, p. 54) sense of this "central question of all social sciences" points toward the fundamentally symbolic nature of social reality, in Ricoeur's terms (1981, p. 219), and the active role of things themselves in conceptual formations not determined by any one thinker or actor (Gadamer 1989, p. 463). The technical media of language and communication, from phonemes to books to digital fonts to wifi to voltmeters, enable fragments of knowledge possessed by different people to spontaneously coordinate and self-organize in ways that may appear to have been centrally directed. But no individuals, organizations or governments have the depth or breadth of reach necessary for controlling the emergence or production of even phenomena as relatively simple as new slang terms, much less for the technical standards embodied in complex electronics or machines.