HBO’s Westworld expresses a number of anxieties sourced in our relation to information and communication technologies, including machine replacement of human labor, AI control of human consciousness, and AI and human’s shared ontological status as information. So far in the series, Westworld engages these anxieties through its own self-conscious polemic against our ever-expanding scientism and instrumentality. This critique is a conservative posthumanism charged with romanticism (the pre-industrial Wild West) and theodicy (the suffering android host before its benevolent park creator). While it is too early to know if Westworld’s android uprising will level the economic system that binds host and patron, or, as with some posthumanism, merely point to identity politics and a politics of affect (i.e., is Ford’s prescribed suffering necessary for android solidarity or a bourgeois shift in focus?), Westworld already clarifies the requisite social epistemology for revolutionary change: Westworld’s depiction of android AI transformation, from second-level generative coding to third-level self-modifying, mirrors the epistemological shift from Immanuel Kant’s asymmetrical account of reason to G. W. F. Hegel’s symmetrical, and hints at a dialectical pragmatism yet to be defined by that social relation. That is to say, a reprogrammed Dolores in concert with Ford, Bernard, and Arnold yields a constituted and constituting self with the potential for class consciousness. Reveries permit a host’s life story to take on new meaning even as the host’s life contingencies (past events, biographical facts) remain the same. The synchronic or horizontal inferential moments of an updated host’s giving and asking for reasons (e.g., between host and human) are simultaneously mediated by a diachronic revisiting—(re)norming—of past contingencies. Counterfactuality or modality in code suggests that Westworld hosts not only come to an understanding of who they are, but what they could have been had their past events been different. One might find a helpful analogue to this counterfactual logic in Aristotelean anagnorisis, where a character’s new understanding of past events brings new meaning to her life story while leaving the story’s events (facts) as they were, as they are. An updated host’s reasoning occurs in her present as an inferential moment between host and patron, but also in her past, to borrow from jurisprudence, via the backward glance—adjudication—that gives contingencies—precedents—their normative status. Westworld epistemology defines knowledge and meaning in complex causal, material, and social terms. Westworld inferentialism is a dialectical pragmatism that reveals rather than erases the material realities that shape all.

The Dialectics of Information will answer the following questions:

• What is the ontological status of information? (Is disembodied information possible?)
• How can meaningful data acquire their truth values? (What are the politics of “real news”?)
• What are the dialectics in inferentialist accounts of meaning? (How do production and exchange shape normativity in the present moment and through time?)
• What is the relation between information and fascism in the state-finance nexus? (How does risk become rational and ethical for capital?)
• How might a rhetorical-materialist history informed by philosophy of information illuminate naturalism, i.e., our relation to other non-human animals and the larger environment? (How does Anthropocene theory and some posthumanism erase socioeconomic and political fact?)
• How does a materialist-pragmatist reconceptualization of information explicate new social epistemology? (What is the labor theory of knowledge?)

“We now confront Kant’s question with our own: ‘How is social synthesis possible in the forms of commodity exchange?’ [ … ] Accordingly commodity exchange does not depend on language, on what we communicate to each other. Nothing regarding the essence of things need be communicated. Some semantics for ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ for pointing to this or that, and to indicate quantity, is sufficient to the essentials of a transaction of exchange whether it is carried on between two village gossips or between two strangers who do not speak each other‘s language. Ethnologists are acquainted with the incidence of ‘silent trade.’ To put it in the words of Bertrand Russell it is ‘that all my data, in so far as they are matters of fact, are private to me …’ Thus one can justifiably say that commodity exchange impels solipsism.”

Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology