Algorithmic Immaturity and the Privatization of the Public Use of Reason

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Professor of Philosophy in Basic, Technical, and Technological Education (EBTT), Federal Institute of Paraná (IFPR), Palmas Campus, Palmas, Brazil.

Abstract

Artificial intelligence revives Kant's problem of immaturity under conditions he could not have anticipated. Current debates typically locate the threat in dependence, cognitive offloading, manipulation, or the opacity of automated decisions. These diagnoses remain incomplete because they do not explain when technical assistance becomes tutelage, and they rarely connect delegated judgment to Kant's public use of reason. This article introduces algorithmic immaturity as a two-dimensional condition: At the agential level, recurrent delegation displaces the exercise of judgment; critical reappropriation may remain available but unused, or may itself be impaired. At the political level, algorithmic infrastructures personalize the visibility, salience, formulation, and circulation of reasons so thoroughly that ostensibly public speech is enclosed within privately ordered environments. Across both dimensions, the condition is self-incurred when critical reappropriation remains genuinely available but is persistently left unused. Algorithmic tutelage names cases in which technical or institutional arrangements impair or foreclose that capacity. The argument reconstructs Kant's 1784 essay on enlightenment as its central axis, in critical dialogue with the philosophy of technology and recent work on human autonomy and algorithmic governmentality. It distinguishes ordinary reliance on technical systems and expertise from relations of tutelage through a four-dimensional test of critical reversibility: detectability, intelligibility, contestability, and recoverability. Maturity in the algorithmic age requires more than individual vigilance: it depends on technical and political arrangements that preserve critical reappropriation and the reciprocal publicity of reasons.

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References

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Journal of Philosophical Investigations
Volume 20, Issue 56 - Serial Number 56
Articles
October 2026
Pages 317-336

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