When technology managers employed technological
determinist discourse, the tendency was to make the indeterminate state of things appear to be determined because of the perceived inevitability of technological change (Leonardi, 2008).
Thus, the linguistic
determinist thesis seems undermined.
Another important argument of the
determinist perspective is that human society is understood as developing first from the primal division between the sexes, with the inevitable attraction between male and female then becoming an impetus for creation of society.
The exact significance of this stress on politics in inflecting the Brennerite model is not indicated but its net effect is to soften the economic
determinist logic of that approach.
Second, the Libet experiments don't prove anything even about the decision-making process in the laboratory situation they created; both the
determinist interpretation of the experiments and Libet's own interpretation ignore the fact that perception takes time.
No
determinist in his religious beliefs, he provides no comfort for those who excuse themselves and others by blaming technology for the human condition.
Gender is persistently redefined by the contributors not as biologically
determinist but rather as a set of practices "embedded within other cultural and historical social institutions and ideologies such as status, class and race" (p.50).
The second related problem deals with our potential lack of "alternate possibilities": even though our wills play a causal role in the outcomes of our lives, if they are governed by causal laws in such a way that only one outcome is possible, argues the hard
determinist, then we cannot be said to truly have a "choice" with respect to that outcome.
It has made me less of a
determinist, and more of an optimist." MARGARET WENTE
The central theme of this book is that there is no necessitation in causation--whilst it seems right to suppose that the coming together of two instantiated powers might not produce its manifestation (due to interference, and so on), metaphysically the
determinist will claim otherwise, and this book is supposed to be consistent with determinism.
Never a technology
determinist, Mike brought to the journal a profound understanding of the practical circumstances within which information technologies could (and sometimes could not) be successfully deployed.
We are not passive, helpless victims of the impersonal,
determinist forces of history.