Following the epistemological framework of Actor Network Theory, and its core concepts of mediation, translation and representation, the book sets out an introduction to understanding what lies behind technological devices. #Pragmata meaning software#This can be done through an analysis of the materiality of code, which he defines as pragmata, and by constructing a phenomenology and philosophy of software despite its relatively ephemeral being.Īlthough Berry doesn’t elaborate on what he means by pragmata, the materiality of code that Berry introduces in the first two chapters of the book becomes somewhat clearer through examples taken from a multiplicity of realities: from the red light at the traffic light, to the world of computer and Internet music in the work of Masahiro Miwa. As Berry argues throughout the book, questions related to digital media are too often discussed in essentialist or contradictory terms, and what is instead needed is to “unpack different modalities of code as digital forms and allow us an understanding of how it is used in computer technology” 4. Taking into consideration these and other questions, The Philosophy of Software tries to move towards an understanding of the materiality of software. Berry asks “what is culture after it has been softwarised?” 2, echoing Lev Manovich’s questions about “how is cultural production being changed by software and code?” and “how and in what perspective can we talk about “software culture”?” 3. This leads to some important questions being raised. As David Berry has aptly observed, we are trying to learn “the way in which certain social formations are actualized through crystallization in computer code” 1. This has led to the development of Software Studies, a nascent field that takes into analysis how “the background”, or data and software assemblages, contribute to the world. Nevertheless, over the last fifteen years there has been an increasing interest in how software forms society in a way that goes beyond its being more than a set of “inaccessible codes”. Despite this, what lies behind these technological assemblages – data, code, and software – has received little attention, effectively remaining an off-limits world populated by software engineers, programmers, and geeks. the best you can do here is think about the word in the context, having in your head the range of possible meanings it could have.Everyday life relies heavily on networked technologies that allow for a wide range of actions to take place, from the management of medical devices to the withdrawal of money from a cash point. Sometimes you might think the meaning is vague or ambiguous, rather than definitely falling within one particular section of the LSJ article on πρᾶγμα - no problem here, there's no reason to assume that grk authors attributed to every abstract word they used a crystal-clear and fixed meaning. Other times the author does not say expressly the contrary of πρᾶγμα in the particular context, and so you need to try to work this out yourself, what it generally means in this particular context. demosthenes in the third philippic contrasts πράγματα with ὀνόματα (s15): Sometimes authors make the contrary to πρᾶγμα clear, eg. To figure out what πρᾶγμα actually means in any particular text, you can use this strategy (like for any abstract word which is potentially ambiguous): ask yourself, can you guess what would be the contrary meaning to πρᾶγμα here? (aristotle gives this as a tactic for discovering ambiguity in words in topica 106a10) Have a look at all the different meanings of the verb πράσσω, and think (for each of those meanings) the action or result, and you’ll get a bit more of a general sense of the possible range of meanings for πρᾶγμα – it’s wide. the difference is that πρᾶγμα tends to be more concrete than πρᾶξις (chantraine, dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque). Πρᾶξις also can express the action or result of πράσσειν (and comes from the same root). Πρᾶγμα means basically the action or result of πράσσειν. The word πρᾶγμα and the verb πράσσω have the same root. To get a fuller sense of what it means, read a bit more on where the word comes from. The quick way to see this range of meanings is to read all of the LSJ article on πρᾶγμα, not just sII.2 (the bit you referred to above): Hi, no it doesn’t just mean a material thing.
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