Neuroadaptive technology (NAT) is a closed-loop neurotechnology designed to enhance human–computer interaction. NAT works by collecting neurophysiological data, which are analysed via autonomous algorithms to create actions and adaptations at the user interface. This paper concerns how interaction with NAT can mediate self-related processing (SRP), such as self-awareness, self-knowledge, and agency. We begin with a postphenomenological analysis of the NAT closed loop to highlight the built-in selectivities of machine hermeneutics, i.e., autonomous chains of algorithms that convert data into an assessment (...) of psychological states/intentions. We argue that these algorithms produce an assessment of lived experience that is quantitative, reductive, and highly simplistic. This reductive assessment of lived experience is presented to the user via feedback at the NAT interface and subsequently mediates SRP. It is argued that congruence between system feedback and SRP determines the precise character of the alterity relation between human user and system. If feedback confirms SRP, the technology is regarded as a quasi-self. If there is a disagreement between SRP and feedback from the system, NAT is perceived to be a quasi-other. We argue that the design of the user interface shapes the precise ways in which NAT can mediate SRP. (shrink)

Thurgood Marshall (1908?1993) profoundly shaped the direction and success of the American civil rights struggle. Joining the staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1936, he headed its Legal Defense and Educational Fund from 1939 until 1961, subsequently becoming a federal appeals court judge, Solicitor General, and Justice of the US Supreme Court. Marshall was more an egalitarian integrationist than a pluralist and deployed the law in pursuit of this moral objective. Although tolerant of (...) the Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s, he supported anti?communism in the 1950s as a means of gaining significant support for black civil rights from the federal government. On the Supreme Court, Marshall sought to extend equality not only to African Americans but also to women, gays and the poor. Flexible and pragmatic, Marshall viewed the law as a means to an end, and the relevant end, or ideal, for him was liberal equality. (shrink)

We argue for a procedural approach to ethical critique in CDA based upon the ‘argumentative turn’ in CDA advocated in our recent publications. This is not a matter of abandoning substantive critique, or abandoning the long-standing commitment of our version of CDA to critique of domination and of ideology, but of integrating them into a deliberative procedure for critical questioning, from an impartial and unbiased standpoint. The advantage of this position is that it enables us to accentuate ethical criticism and (...) critique in CDA, rather than advocacy and partisanship. The task of critical discourse analysts is to subject argumentation, including their own argumentation, to systematic critical questioning in the spirit of open debate, with no ideological parti-pris. (shrink)