Mindful Mending: The Repair of Thought and Action Amidst Technologies

<p>My thesis is that the concept and practice of repair, properly understood and circumscribed, can serve to: (1) specify a responsibility to care for individuals who are cognitively dependent on particular configurations of technologies and suffer cognitively significant harms following damage to various technologies, and (2) to act as a standard by which to regulate the design, implementation, and selection of technologies available for human use and appropriation. I begin (Chapters One and Two) by providing a critical investigation of the concept and practice of repair. In Chapters Three and Four, I set forth a proposal to consider what I term "cognitive-agentic repair" as the mindful mending of agentic skills/autonomy competency by way of those constitutive cognitive processes that are extended/situated in objects and arrangements of objects that constitute particular material spaces and places (home, workplace). As such, I argue that when either intentional or unintentional harms are committed against individuals who are cognitively situated in the world, there is a prima facie responsibility to attempt the specific act of cognitive-agentic repair so as to support the possibility of personal autonomy. To justify this ethical responsibility, I advance an account of human persons that is grounded in both feminist philosophy and recent work in the cognitive sciences on the hypotheses of extended and embedded cognition. I then move to consider how my account of repair can constructively inform the design, implementation, and selection of particular technologies by acting as a regulative standard. This analysis is divided into two parts: (1) a theoretical construction that utilizes work in the philosophy of technology to distinguish the pattern of those technologies that would facilitate cognitive-agentic repair (Chapter Five) and (2) a practical application to telemedical/telehealth technologies (Chapter Six).</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Philosophy

Year dc:date.available

2014

Author dc:creator

• Kibbe, Bryan

Contributors dc:contributor

• Ethics and Political Philosophy
• Copyright © 2014 Bryan Kibbe
• Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

• autonomy
• cognitive-agentic repair
• ethics
• repair
• situated cognition
• technology
• Ethics and Political Philosophy

Repository record dc:identifier

https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1093

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ecommons.luc.edu:luc_diss-2092