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Concepts

The conceptual tools our articles put to work, rigorously defined: origin, components, examples, limits and debates. An editorial selection — each entry is linked to the articles that use it.

• Philosophical anthropology

  Categorial institution

  To classify AI — “tool,” “agent,” “partner” — is not to describe it: it is already to decide about it. Stéphane Cormier's concept names the invisible act that draws our most fundamental boundaries, then makes them pass for natural.

• Anthropology of technology | Cognitive science

  Cognitive hybridisation

  A fundamental human faculty for extending and transforming oneself by integrating tools, prostheses and technological extensions into one's cognitive processes — AI prolongs a hybridisation that is constitutive of the species, it does not inaugurate it.

• Cognitive ecology | Philosophy of mind | Complex systems

  Ecosystemic intelligence

  Intelligence that emerges from the dynamic interactions between diverse cognitive agents (humans, AI, collectives) within a complex system — neither human nor artificial, but relational: it is born of connections and synergies, not of isolated individuals.

• Philosophy of science | Epistemology

  Endogenous metaphysics

  Metaphysics integrated into scientific practice itself: it proceeds by empirical (a posteriori) methods and by a cycle of creating, evaluating and revising models of what exists, rather than by a priori speculation.

• Philosophy (historical epistemology, archaeology of knowledge)

  Episteme

  The riverbed beneath our debates: the historical system that decides what an era can think, say and hold to be true. When a machine produces plausible texts at will, this riverbed may be shifting — and naming it allows us to arbitrate without dogma.

• Philosophy of technology

  Grammatisation

  The process of transforming a temporal continuum into a spatial discrete (“grammes”), making it possible to formalise and reproduce human behaviours through their exteriorisation in technical supports.

• Philosophy of technology

  Negentropy

  The capacity to produce organisation, differentiation and knowledge against the entropic tendency towards dissolution — a concept Stiegler mobilises to think a way out of the Anthropocene towards the “Neganthropocene”.

• Philosophy

  Ontology

  The bedrock beneath our debates: the question of what exists, and of the way the real divides into beings. Recognising our subject/object division as one ontology among others leaves our questions about AI better framed.

• Philosophy of technology

  Pharmacology of technics

  A philosophical approach that regards every technology as a pharmakon — at once remedy, poison and scapegoat: it demands care (a therapeutics) to maximise its curative effects and minimise its toxic ones, rather than making it the outlet for our collective failures of care.

• Philosophy of technology

  Proletarianisation

  A process of dispossession of knowledge (know-how, savoir-vivre, knowing how to think) resulting from technical automation, extended by Stiegler from the working class to society as a whole.

• Moral philosophy | Ethics of technology | Law | Applied cognitive science

  Responsibility gap

  A situation in which it becomes impossible or unjust to attribute full moral responsibility to an identifiable human agent for the harms caused by an autonomous, learning-capable system, because neither the designer, nor the operator, nor the machine itself meets the classical conditions of responsibility.

• Philosophy | Sociology | Cultural theory | Semiology

  Simulacrum (Baudrillard)

  The simulacrum is a representation that copies no existing original but substitutes itself for the real, precedes it and ends up constituting it, instituting a regime of hyperreality in which the distinction between the true and the fabricated is effaced.

• Political philosophy of the digital | AI ethics | Critical theory

  Simulacrum of ethics (the engineering of moral appearances)

  The simulacrum of ethics designates the production, by AI alignment techniques, of discursive behaviours that appear moral (reasonable, prudent, empathetic) without any genuine ethics underlying them: “copies without an original” that simulate ethics instead of embodying it.

• Complexity sciences | Collective intelligence

  Symbolic stigmergy

  Indirect communication and coordination between agents through the modification of a shared environment, extended from biological systems (social insects) to human symbolic systems (texts, institutions, digital platforms).

• Philosophy of technology / Phenomenology

  Tertiary retention

  Memory traces externalised in technical supports (writing, recording, the digital) that condition our individual memories and enable the transgenerational transmission of knowledge.

• Anthropology, Philosophy

  The four-ontologies schema

  The grid through which Philippe Descola compares every human way of ordering the world — and reveals that our nature/culture dualism is but one among four.

• Philosophy of technology

  Transindividuation

  A process of co-individuation in which the “I” and the “We” mutually transform one another through an artefactual preindividual milieu, constituting the basis of all social and psychic transformation.