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Impersonal Normativity and the Eclipse of Agency: Procedural Validity in Algorithmic Systems

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Bibliographic Details
Title: Impersonal Normativity and the Eclipse of Agency: Procedural Validity in Algorithmic Systems
Authors: Perez, Carlos
Publisher Information: Zenodo, 2025.
Publication Year: 2025
Subject Terms: Linguistics/standards, History of philosophy, Philosophy of language, Linguistics/economics, Linguistics/methods, Linguistics, Linguistics/ethics, Linguistics/classification, Linguistics/organization & administration, Linguistics/education, FOS: Philosophy, ethics and religion, Philosophy, Political philosophy, FOS: Languages and literature, Religious Philosophies/psychology, Linguistics/instrumentation, Medieval philosophy, Linguistics/trends
Description: This article investigates how automated environments implement decision-making by strictly executing rules, thereby dispensing with subjective agency. Grounded in structuralist and post-foundational epistemology, it shows that procedural validity, understood as the precise alignment of operations with a formal rule set, provides a sufficient basis for institutional acceptance. Drawing on philosophy of language, legal theory, and recent critiques of algorithmic governance, the study explains how the syntactic architectures of artificial systems enable impersonal justification that replaces intention and interpretation with reproducible form. Through critical analysis of practical cases and contemporary literature, the paper details three linguistic mechanisms: passive voice, nominalisations, and deictic neutrality. These features sustain an appearance of impartiality while concealing the absence of individual responsibility. The conclusion identifies limits of procedural validity such as responsibility gaps, masked biases, and semantic drift, and proposes research aimed at reintroducing minimal forms of agency without sacrificing the operational efficiency of algorithmic systems.
Document Type: Article
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15721809
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15721810
Rights: CC BY
Accession Number: edsair.doi.dedup.....6514688d8c4d8f93bb35178de64fb2e1
Database: OpenAIRE
Description
Abstract:This article investigates how automated environments implement decision-making by strictly executing rules, thereby dispensing with subjective agency. Grounded in structuralist and post-foundational epistemology, it shows that procedural validity, understood as the precise alignment of operations with a formal rule set, provides a sufficient basis for institutional acceptance. Drawing on philosophy of language, legal theory, and recent critiques of algorithmic governance, the study explains how the syntactic architectures of artificial systems enable impersonal justification that replaces intention and interpretation with reproducible form. Through critical analysis of practical cases and contemporary literature, the paper details three linguistic mechanisms: passive voice, nominalisations, and deictic neutrality. These features sustain an appearance of impartiality while concealing the absence of individual responsibility. The conclusion identifies limits of procedural validity such as responsibility gaps, masked biases, and semantic drift, and proposes research aimed at reintroducing minimal forms of agency without sacrificing the operational efficiency of algorithmic systems.
DOI:10.5281/zenodo.15721809