Robert Rosenberger, associate professor in the School of Public Policy, contributed a chapter to the new book The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology. Rosenberger’s chapter is titled “Technological Multistability and the Trouble with the Things Themselves.”

In it, he argues that technological multistability — or “the idea that technologies always support multiple meanings and uses” — is a valid jumping-off point for the analysis of how we encounter the world and the things in it. He uses Jean-Paul Sartre’s example of the letter opener as a way of exploring this idea.

“Where the letter opener’s form is the result of the plans of designers and manufacturers, Sartre claims that we human beings instead have no such luck,” Rosenberger writes. “Unlike the letter opener, human beings find themselves here in existence without a pre-designed purpose or context of meaning set out ahead of time by some designer. If an artifact’s essence precedes its existence, then the opposite is true for us.”

Read the full chapter at https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190851187.013.42.