The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Hermeneutic Network: A New Approach to Analysis and Design of Intentional Systems

Digital information technologies are increasingly being adopted in the humanities as both research tools and supports for new forms of cultural expression. Some of these digital technologies, in particular artificial intelligence (AI) programs, exhibit complex behaviors described as creativity, planning, and learning, behaviors usually seen as the territory of intentional human phenomena. This paper identifies a prototypical subset of these programs, which we name intentional systems, and argues that their seemingly “intentional” behaviors are not the sole effect of underlying algorithmic complexity and knowledge engineering practices from computer science. In contrast, we argue (paralleling the field of software studies) that intentional systems, and digital systems at large, need to be analyzed as a contemporary form of historically, culturally, socially, and technically situated texts. Perception of system intentionality arises from a network of continuous meaning exchange between system authors’ narration and users’ interpretation processes, situated in social contexts. The central contribution of this paper is a new interdisciplinary analytical framework called the AI hermeneutic network that is informed by traditions of hermeneutic analysis, actor-network theory from sociology and science studies, cognitive semantics from cognitive science, computational semantics from