A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

Jan Kyrre Berg Olsen, Stig Andur Pedersen, Vincent F. Hendricks, Jan Kyrre Berg Olsen

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781118346310, 9781405146012
• eBook ISBN: 9781118394236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

Drawing on essays from leading international and multi-disciplinary scholars, A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology is the first comprehensive and authoritative reference source to cover the key issues of technology's impact on society and our lives.

• Presents the first complete, authoritative reference work in the field
• Organized thematically for use both as a full introduction to the field or an encyclopedic reference
• Draws on original essays from leading interdisciplinary scholars
• Features the most up-to-date and cutting edge research in the interdisciplinary fields of philosophy, technology, and their broader intellectual environments

Part I
History of Technology

Chapter 1
History of Technology

THOMAS J. MISA

A generation ago, before the much-noted “empirical turn” in philosophy, it was unlikely that an assessment of the philosophy of technology would have prominently featured the history of technology. Put simply, there were relatively few common concerns, since historians of technology rarely engaged in the sort of questions that animated philosophers of technology. Consulting the published volumes of Research in Philosophy and Technology and Technology and Culture three decades ago suggests two divergent scholarly communities, separated by research methods and background assumptions, and pursuing largely independent investigations. At the time, historians of technology were insisting on technology being an ontologically and epistemologically separate category from science, and vigorously insisting that technology is not merely applied science, while philosophers were ready and more comfortable with sweeping normative assessments about the essential characteristics of technology and its impact on society. In the debates on technological determinism, philosophers of technology and historians of technology were nearly as far apart as possible: while historians of technology adamantly refuted any and all claims of technological determinism, philosophers of technology were as a discipline the most enthusiastic in exploring and embracing the notion that technology determines social and cultural change and that technology develops more or less autonomously of social and cultural influences (Winner 1977; Misa 2004b). In this climate, there was not so very much that the two specialist fields held in common.

In the last ten years or so, however, there has been increasing mutual interest in philosophy and history of technology (Achterhuis 2001; Ihde 2004). It has not been that a hybrid discipline such as the history of philosophy of science has emerged, but rather that some historians and some philosophers have discovered common interests and common concerns. The essays in this volume are testimony to this shared mutual interest, although the individual topics they explore do not really exhaust the range of shared topics and emergent themes (see Misa et al. 2003). The commissioned essays examine the cultural contexts of technology, notably in the specific contexts of Japan, Islam, China and the West, as well as examining the problem areas of defining technology and assessing military technology. These essays develop some of the shared concerns and concepts that are emerging between these two fields. Accordingly, this essay will provide a summary of their main findings but also attempt a wider assessment of these shared concerns and emerging problems. I shall do so by accenting three themes: the challenges of defining the term “technology”; the varied concepts and problems in defining “culture” as well as its relations to and interactions with technology; and the issue of technological determinism, a scholarly and practical problem that, for several decades, has merited philosophical reflection and historical analysis.

Definitions of “Technology”

Historians of technology have for many years pointedly resisted giving a prescriptive definition of the term “technology.” This stance, somewhat paradoxically, reflects the disciplinary maturity and confidence of their field. They have frequently observed that no scholarly historian of art today would feel the least temptation to try to define “art,” as if that complex expression of human creativity could be pinned down by a few well-chosen words. And similarly, as the noted historian of technology Thomas Hughes has written (2004: 2), “Defining technology in its complexity is as difficult as grasping the essence of politics. Few experienced politicians and political scientists attempt to define politics. Few experienced practitioners, historians, and social scientists try to inclusively define technology.” Most historians writing on technology have defined the term mostly by presenting and discussing pertinent examples. Many historians studying the twentieth century have focused on large technological systems, such as electricity, industrial production, and transportation, that emerged in the early decades and became more or less pervasive in the West during the second half of that century.

Other historians even of the twentieth century, however, would strongly prefer to examine technologies from the perspective of “everyday life” or from a user’s perspective. Even what might on the surface be considered the same technology can look quite different when viewed “from above” using a manager’s or a business executive’s perspective or, alternately, “from below” using a worker’s or an individual consumer’s perspective. Often, the view from above leaves the impression of large systems spreading more or less uniformly across time and space – as, for instance, maps showing the increasing geographical spread of railways and highways or statistical tables showing the increasing pervasiveness of such electrical consumer goods as irons, refrigerators and televisions. Conversely, locally situated studies of individual technologies, sometimes inspired by consumption studies, often find substantial variability in patterns of use and in the meanings these technologies have for subcultures that form around them. As studies inspired by the productive “user heuristic” have shown, there is a great deal of creativity and inventiveness that is uncovered when paying close attention to these local processes (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003; Hippel 2005). Farmers invented new uses for Henry Ford’s classic Model T automobile when adapting it for use on the farm as a source of power. Even the widely popular invention of email was at the start “unplanned, unanticipated, and most unsupported” by the original designers of the Internet (Abbate 1999: 109). Japanese teenagers created new uses for mobile pagers and cell phones, and created a new culture in doing so (Ito et al. 2005). Many times these activities, not originally conceived by the system designers, can be taken up by the producers of these devices and systems and transformed into economically lucrative marketing strategies. This finding of substantial diversity has implications beyond merely complicating any tidy definition of technology; this diversity, especially the agency of users in divining and defining new purposes for a certain technology and new activities around it, also keeps open the question whether technologies can meaningfully be said to have “impact” on society and culture. Normative evaluations of technology, then, cannot assume that the meanings or consequences of technology can be easily comprehended; nor, as was once the case in the early days of the technology-assessment movement, can these characteristics be predicted from the technology’s “hardware” characteristics. Indeed, all assessments of technology need to grapple with these epistemological and methodological problems.

Indeed, recent research has productively treated the term “technology” as an emergent and contested entity. Technology is not nearly as old as we commonly think, especially if we have in mind the several technologically marked historical epochs, such as the Bronze Age or the Iron Age. Jacob Bigelow, a medical doctor and Harvard professor, is often credited with coining the term in his book Elements of Technology (1829). “The general name of Technology, a word sufficiently expressive … is beginning to be revived in the literature of practical men at the present day,” he wrote (Bigelow 1829/1831: iv–v). “Under this title it is attempted to include … an account … of the principles, processes, and nomenclatures of the more conspicuous arts, particularly those which involve applications of science, and which may be considered useful, by promoting the benefit of society, together with the emolument of those who pursue them.” Earlier than this, the term “technology” in English, as well as its cognates in the other principal European languages, referred most directly to the treatises and published accounts describing various technical crafts. Bigelow’s own coinage did not immediately catch on, however. His speech to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology more than three decades later helped recast the term as an aggregate of individual tools and techniques, an agent of progress, and an active force in history. “Technology,” he asserted in 1865, “in the present century and almost under our eyes … has advanced with greater strides than any other agent of civilization, and has done more than any science to enlarge the boundaries of profitable knowledge, to extend the dominion of mankind over nature, to economize and utilize both labor and time, and thus to add indefinitely to the effective and available length of human existence” (Segal 1985: quote 81).

Following Bigelow’s use, “technology” gained something of its present-day associations in the next several decades. Numerous institutes and colleges of technology in the United States took up the name: not only the flagship of MIT (founded 1861) but also other colleges, schools, or institutes of technology such as Stevens (1870), Georgia (1885), Clarkson (1896), Carnegie (1912), California (1921), Lawrence (1932), Illinois (1940) and Rochester (1944). Polytechnics in Europe, often modeled on the pioneering École Polytechnique (founded much earlier, in 1794) in Paris, provided broadly similar educational opportunities. In 1950, the Indian government founded Kharagpur Institute of Technology, the first in a national network of seven technical universities.

As Ruth Oldenziel (1999) has made clear, in these same decades “technology” took on a distinctly male-oriented slant. Earlier terms such as “the applied arts” or “the industrial arts” could be associated equally with the products of women’s work as with men’s; but “technology” after 1865 increasingly came to signify male-oriented machines and industrial processes. Oldenziel sees the emergence of technology in the personification of the (male) engineer as an instance of the gender-coding of the modern world. Eric Schatzberg situates the rise of “technology” as a keyword in the writings of social critic Thorstein Veblen, who drew heavily on the contemporary German discourse around “technik,” as well as of the popular historian Charles Beard. “Technology marches in seven-league boots from one ruthless, revolutionary conquest to another, tearing down old factories and industries, flinging up new processes with terrifying rapidity,” in Beard’s arresting and deterministic image (Schatzberg 2006: 509). Also following Raymond Williams’s method of keywords, Ronald Kline (2006) examines origins of “information technology” in the management-science community of the 1960s and its subsequent spread into the wider discourse.

Recently, the term “technoscience” has found favor in the writings of some, if not all, philosophers of technology and historians of technology. Advocates of the term maintain that the practices, objects and theories of science and technology, even if they once were separate professional communities, have blurred to a point at which they share many important features – indeed, to a point at which their similarities outweigh their differences. The term is not merely a recognition that biologists today frequently enough apply for patents and create start-up companies; it also draws attention to hybrid forms of knowledge and practices. (As such, the appeal to hybridity is an important aspect of the anti-essentialism that is characteristic of much recent technology studies.) With a tone of c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: History of Technology
• Part II: Technology and Science
• Part III: Technology and Philosophy
• Part IV: Technology and Environment
• Part V: Technology and Politics
• Part VI: Technology and Ethics
• Part VII: Technology and the Future
• Index
• End User License Agreement