Book part:

Augmenting Experience, Virtualizing Nature – A Pragmatist Epistemology for the Digital World

While most of technology philosophy emphasizes the enormous changes (cheered or condemned) in human life brought along by the digital age, the case of experiencing augmented and virtual realities show that our basic psychological procedures stay the same. In this paper I shall argue that the naturalistic epistemology of John Dewey may give a plausible conceptual framework for this kind of interpretation, and that from this theoretical point of view ‘artificial’ experiences are no less natural, then ‘non-artificial’ ones. If we accept, following Dewey, that there are no boundaries between the human mind and the natural world, experience will be always completely natural independently from instruments transmitting it. Finally some considerations will be made about the special characteristics of experiences caused by augmented and virtual resources which may constitute the basics of a new digital epistemology.