DOI: 10.29130/dubited.1989745 ISSN: 2148-2446

The Engineering-Oriented Empirical Turn in the Philosophy of Technology and AI: Perspectives from American and Chinese Pragmatism

Tuğba Torun, Muhammet Özdemir
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This article critically interrogates the analytical historiography of the engineering-oriented “empirical turn” in the philosophy of technology and artificial intelligence (AI) by contrasting the accounts of Hans Achterhuis, Philip Brey, and Vincent Blok with the pragmatist frameworks of Stephen H. Cutcliffe and Bocong Li. While Achterhuis institutionalized the “American philosophy of technology: empirical turn” and Brey theorized this paradigm through Carl Mitcham’s humanities-vs.-engineering dichotomy, their strictly analytical orientation significantly disregards both American and Chinese pragmatist traditions. To bridge this conceptual omission, this study operationalizes Cutcliffe’s and Li’s engineering philosophies by integrating Charles Sanders Peirce’s nominalism and experimentalism, William James’s consequentialism, and medieval Muslim philosopher al-Ghazâlî’s nominalist-experimentalist insights. We position Cutcliffe and Li as the foundational theorists of American and Chinese pragmatist engineering-oriented empirical turns, respectively, both arguing that the discipline must be fundamentally rooted in society-centered, generative production processes—a stance that directly challenges Brey’s taxonomies. Furthermore, although the “philosophy of AI” emerged through the seminal works of Margaret A. Boden (1990) and Matt Carter (2007), this article substantiates why the discourse must now be subsumed under a broader philosophy of technology. Ultimately, by leveraging Li’s ontology—which aligns technological production with historical identity and existential validation—this article synthesizes an engineering-oriented empirical paradigm with contemporary post-colonial manufacturing and technological agency.

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