Critique of Artificial Judgment

This active research project examines how technology reconfigures the capacity to judge. It distinguishes technologically mediated human judgment from artificial judgment: judgment performed by technical systems such as AI.

Kant’s distinction between determinant and reflective judgment provides a framework for examining both the application of established concepts to particular cases and situations where the appropriate concept or rule must itself be sought.

Technological and artificial intuition

Technological intuition names the ways instruments and computational interfaces mediate sensible presentation for human judgment. Artificial intuition raises a distinct question: whether artificial processing of sensory inputs constitutes access to particulars comparable to intuition, and whether it could support judgment by the system itself.

Margaret Cavendish’s critique of optical instruments, Don Ihde’s Instrumental Realism and Davis Baird’s Thing Knowledge provide resources for investigating how technically produced appearances acquire epistemic authority.

Aesthetics and teleology

AI-assisted medicine and law offer comparative cases. Who or what judges when a technical system presents a case, classifies it or proposes an assessment? How are purposes such as care and justice represented, and how do demands for efficiency alter them?

In dialogue with Yuk Hui’s Kant Machine, the aesthetic inquiry examines human judgments of AI-generated images and whether an artificial system could itself judge something as beautiful or sublime. What would distinguish such judgment from predicting human preferences or reproducing aesthetic classifications?

These questions connect the technical presentation of particulars with the capacity to judge their significance and purposiveness.