Philosophy of Technology

The Technological Condition: An Anthology

Robert C. Scharff, Val Dusek, Robert C. Scharff, Val Dusek

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118722725
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

The new edition of this authoritative introduction to the philosophy of technology includes recent developments in the subject, while retaining the range and depth of its selection of seminal contributions and its much-admired editorial commentary.

• Remains the most comprehensive anthology on the philosophy of technology available
• Includes editors' insightful section introductions and critical summaries for each selection
• Revised and updated to reflect the latest developments in the field
• Combines difficult to find seminal essays with a judicious selection of contemporary material
• Examines the relationship between technology and the understanding of the nature of science that underlies technology studies

Part I

The Historical Background

Introduction

At first glance, it may seem surprising that until recently, philosophers have not devoted much time to the question of technology. One might have thought that greater attention would at least have come to be paid to this phenomenon in the modern period when advances in natural and biological science increasingly and obviously made technology a central and dominant feature of society and culture. Yet the fact is that even today – in the North American and British mainstream of analytic philosophy and to a lesser extent among those influenced by late nineteenth- and twentieth-century postpositivist and Conti­nental European sources – the philosophy of technology is still widely regarded as not much more than a small and not particularly prestigious area of specialization.

In part, the reasons for this secondary status for the philosophy of technology are reflected in the general features of modern intellectual history. In the Anglo-American empiricist, French Enlightenment, and European positivist traditions, technology is widely depicted as an unproblematically beneficial force for human progress. For these traditions, technology needs only the proper ­association with modern science to fulfill its promise; hence the genuinely philosophical issues lie primarily in the ­epistemology of science, which explains how ­genuine knowledge is to be obtained, and in ethics, which determines what that knowledge is for. With ­epistemology and ethics thus focused on the two central issues of what we can know and what we should do, technology falls through the cracks, understood as just the relatively ­neutral means for employing scientific knowledge to bring about the ideal relations in the ­natural and social world that ethical decisions prescribe. It is true that for the Romantic and post-Hegelian “Continental” traditions, this judgment must be qualified slightly, for in these ­traditions there is less inclination to conceive all knowledge according to the model of science or to conceive of science as an essentially ­progressive force. Yet science itself (especially natural ­science) is just as often viewed by them also in strictly instrumentalist terms, and technology is widely understood as simply applied science – with the difference being that the cultural implications of all this are more likely to be conceived in critical and pessimistic terms, not in the progressive or even ­utopian terms ­characteristic of the empiricist and positivist traditions.

To fully understand the philosophical neglect of technology, however, one must go back to ancient Greek thought and to the manner in which figures like Plato and Aristotle drew their distinctions between theoretical and practical understanding. There is no question, of course, that the ancients took the distinction seriously. It is known, for instance, that Plato’s teacher, Socrates (c.470–399 BCE), often discussed this distinction. He insisted that the “craft” knowledge of farmers, shoemakers, and bakers, as well as physicians, is genuine knowledge. Socrates’ point, however, is one of criticism rather than defense. Craft knowledge consists primarily in a kind of technical understanding, limited to its concern with the pursuit of particular trades or practices. Unfortunately, those who possess such knowledge (and especially those who achieve worldly success because of it) are often ­misled into thinking they possess wisdom about life in general. Socrates is thus at pains to argue that practically oriented craft knowledge is in fact quite different from the knowledge of the good life that has always been the concern of the religious seers and poets. Plato (c.429–c.347 BCE), too, employs this general Socratic distinction of craft knowledge vs. knowledge of life; moreover, his dialogues are full of images of actual technological devices. The water clock, the astronomical orrery, and the mechanical puppet show all figure prominently as metaphors and models for several of his myths – for example, of cosmic creation in the Timaeus, the last ­judgment in the Republic, the history of the cosmos in the Statesman, and the shadow play of puppet-objects in the myth of the cave in the Republic’s account of the triumph of reason over sensual experience in genuine philosophical learning.

What Plato also makes explicit, however, is that the Socratic distinction between technical or craft know­ledge, on the one hand, and knowledge of the good life, on the other, is fundamentally a distinction between two unequal phenomena. Craft knowledge is ordinary, lower, sense-experientially based understanding focused on practical affairs. Knowledge of the good life and of the ultimate nature of things – that is, the “wisdom” that philosophers “love” – is a higher, theoretical, and ­genuinely rational knowledge to which the former kind of knowledge is rightfully and ultimately beholden. Thus, for example, in the Republic, Plato envisions the education of the philosopher king as involving extensive training in pure mathematics (including theoretical astronomy and music theory) as the proper background for further and still higher training in philosophical ­dialectics. And in the Gorgias he shows how technical understanding (e.g., of rhetoric) is useless, or worse, when cut off from the deeper knowledge of what ­rhetoric is truly “good” for.

It is this higher, genuinely rational understanding of the essential nature of things that Plato identifies as the concern of the philosophers; and it is this hierarchical conception of theoretical over practical understanding that he (and, in a somewhat differently interpreted way, Aristotle) bequeathed to the Western tradition. Moreover, in their enthusiastic preference for the rational and ­theoretical over the practical and sense-dependent, many later Platonists, Neoplatonists, and some say even Plato himself (in the controversial reports of his allegedly “unwritten” doctrines and “Lecture on the Good” given at his Academy) came to identify numbers with the ideal, timeless form of philosophical knowledge. The ­distinction between mathematical knowledge and ­philosophical knowledge thereby came to be blurred, and it is perhaps not too much of a stretch to suggest that one can hear an echo of this ancient preference for mathematical metaphor in the later Western conceptions of technocracy, or rule by scientists and technologists. In any case, Plato did advocate the rule of the “wise,” by which he meant those trained in philosophy, where ­philosophy is understood as the love of a knowledge that is “like” that of the mathematical scientists but with an additional concern for cultivating a rational vision of the ultimate principles of all things.

Aristotle (384–322 BCE) makes just as strong a ­distinction between higher and lower understanding and is just as convinced as Plato that the highest kind of human life is one of rational contemplation of the “highest things.” Against Plato, however, Aristotle argues that the distinction between practical-technical-­artistic understanding, on the one hand, and scientific-philosophical understanding, on the other, really cannot be a distinction involving possession of two kinds of “theories.” Plato’s Socrates appears to claim that moral virtue is a kind of knowledge; but this, counters Aristotle, must be wrong – if for no other reason than that this idea of moral virtue is unable to account for our familiar experience of the weakness of the will. Too obviously, it is possible to have knowledge of what to do but fail to do it. For Aristotle, moral virtue must therefore be ­conceived as a kind of practical reasoning (ϕρóνησις, phronēsis) achieved through exposure to experienced teachers, the building of good character, and the formation of the proper ­habits of activity.

Aristotle also objects to Plato’s tendency to overuse mathematical imagery in depicting not only philosophical and scientific knowledge but practical and political reasoning as well. In the Republic, for example, Plato presents abstract mathematical knowledge as a preliminary to political practice. His Philebus even entertains the notion of a “science of normative measure” (perhaps inspired by the mathematical theory of utility of the leading mathematician Eudoxus, who had joined the Academy). In contrast, Aristotle claims that different ­disciplines have different degrees of rigor that are appropriate to them. It is wrong to demand mathematical exactness in, say, ethics or politics. The largely implicit practical wisdom required of the citizen or politician, as well as the expertise of the artist and craftsperson, is concerned with generalizing about particular situations and individual things; and this sort of expertise must be carefully distinguished from the explicit theoretical knowledge of the scientist or philosopher, who is ­concerned with the truly universal and essential in all situations and all things.

For all their differences, however, Plato and Aristotle both developed hierarchical conceptions of knowledge that make philosophical or scientific understanding of the universal and essential superior. Evidence of this line of thinking can be seen in the fact that the ancients did not conceive of technological change and economic production in the modern terms of efficiency and ­progress. As Schadewaldt explains, our whole modern cluster of terms – nature, knowledge, technique, practical activity – have a very different ontological cast from that of the ancients. Above all, the Greeks did not understand their surroundings as what we call “nature” – that is, as a kind of external reality regarded as the object of our drive toward knowledge. For the Greeks, the ­cosmos is first of all 𝜑ύ𝜎ις (physis, from which our word “physics” comes) – the whole of things, with all of its motion, changes of shape and, size, and physical development and growth, and generation and degeneration – and we are part of it, placed in it, and the human spirit thus seeks to understand it as that with which we are in any case involved. Hence, it would make no sense to Plato or Aristotle to think of any kind of knowledge as ­something freely fashioned by us to give us control over something apart from us. Scientific understanding and practical techniques were both judged as analogous to the dynamic processes of the cosmos. The Roman ­aqueducts, for example, may seem “overbuilt” by ­modern standards, but that is because they are designed not just to carry water but to do so in perpetuity, to “be” as if things of the cosmos, like rivers and streams. Hence, where we might distinguish between “merely” aesthetic considerations and utility or efficiency in our crafts and practical productions, the ancients would consider both together as inseparable and as receiving their sanction from 𝜑ύ𝜎ις and our understanding of it. (We might note in passing that, in keeping with the supposed ­natural order of things, the “higher” arts of economic production as well as architecture and sculpture were regarded as best suited to men, whereas manual labor and hands-on crafts were widely considered to be lowly activities fit mostly for women and slaves.)

Through this Greek-pagan orientation, then, there runs a pervasive sense of our being destined to live in harmony with an awesomely comprehensive cosmos to which we are never closer than when we strive to contemplate its first principles. In contrast, Christianity tends to encourage an outlook that fosters the idea of our separation from and superiority over nature. The Christian conception of the material universe as created from nothing by an all-knowing, rational God seems somehow to make that universe both less mysterious than Greek cosmology (see Mesthene’s “The Social Impact of Technological Change,” Chapter 56) and more remote from our true being. The theological interpretation of history as a ­progress toward our salvation paved the way for the later notions of linear scientific and technological progress. At the same time, the struggle for self-purification against the natural and material forces (introduced in the monastic orders) implicitly increased the dignity of the idea of work, and this imagery would later suggest the possibility of technological and scientific revolutions. All such developments, however, had to await the transfer of these views to a non-religious context (see Lynn White’s essay, Chapter 44). Only in the early modern period did the human control of nature and the essential beneficence of applying scientific knowledge to technology become ruling ideals. The remaining selections in Part I provide a sample of some of the major variations on these modern themes.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) famously claims that knowledge is power – that is, that through knowledge of nature and its technological applications, humans can achieve a purity of mind and behavior that was lost after the Fall in the Garden of Eden. Thus, in The New Atlantis, Bacon envisages a utopia in which the workers at “Saloman’s House” study the resources of the island and the world to improve the health and welfare of the inhabitants. Here, Plato’s philosopher kings have been transformed into proto-scientists and technologists who guide the nation. Further selections reveal Bacon’s ­colorful and (as discussed later b...