Philosophers of Technology

Stig Børsen Hansen

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110619515
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Technology is increasingly subject of attention from philosophers. Philosophical reflection on technology exhibits a wide and at times bewildering array of approaches and modes of thought. This volume brings to light the development of three schools in the philosophy of technology. Based on thorough introductions to Karl Marx', Martin Heidegger's and John Dewey's thought about technology, the volume offers an in-depth account of the way thinkers in the critical, the phenomenological and the pragmatic schools have respond to issues and challenges raised by the works of the founders of these schools. Technologies in almost any aspect of human life is potentially subject of philosophical treatment. To offer a focused demonstration of key arguments and insights, the presentation of each school is concluded with a contribution to discussions of educational technologies. In addition to philosophers seeking a valuable and clear structuring of a still burgeoning field, the volume is of interest to those working with educational philosophy and value sensitive design.

"Stig Børsen Hansen's book is a must for all interested in understanding the development of the philosophy of technology and the relation of thoughts of thinkers that have shaped the area. The author presents a new and refreshing take on the ideas from Marx to Marcuse, from Dewey to Latour, and Heidegger to Borgmann. It will engage and hopefully provoke." Dr. Jan Kyrre Berg Friis, University of Copenhagen

1 Introduction

1.1 Philosophy of technology: vagueness squared

Historian of technology David E. Nye once suggested to me: “Sometimes you have to give a collection a name. Then it becomes somebody’s job to take care of it”. He was talking about collections of objects of technical and historical interest and the demands they place on the institutions that house the collections. His observation seems an apt description of the field of philosophy of technology and outlines the task of this book. The remark points to the occasional creative nature of acts of naming – acts that achieve something new, rather than describe what already is somehow a natural collection. Philosophy of technology is now frequently spoken about as a field or collection of thoughts, philosophies and philosophers that can be taught and enlisted for different intellectual purposes. This book is written out of a perceived need for providing an overview of philosophy of technology – to take care of a collection that can prove unwieldy for a newcomer, and whose items I suggest can require dusting off, for those familiar with the objects. Highlighting and rearranging objects, as well as giving a more prominent positioning to some items in the collection, is occasionally the job of custodians of museums and academic fields alike.

This is a book on a theme that academics, policymakers and laymen alike are drawn to. Currently, technology is perhaps the most pivotal concept when we seek to make sense of ourselves, our times and societies. It informs a range of policies. As I am writing this, a new subject is being introduced into the Danish public school, a subject which is perhaps best translated as “Technological literacy” or more directly “understanding of technology”. The contents of the subjects are largely concerned with the use of computers and information technologies as they are encountered in everyday life; how to code software; how to be aware of various pitfalls when using communication technologies and how to use computers to construct things. This reform of the schooling of the nation’s youth – and the changes it entails to teacher’s colleges – is one among many witnesses to the work of political forces, to what we find important in our society and to what is perceived to be required for its continued flourishing.

When one starts reading about the motivations and reasons for having such a subject, it soon emerges that views of the future are deeply shaped by one of many prevalent technologies: the personal computer. The proposed school subject does not differ much from academic and popular discussion of technology. It immediately raises a question of definition. Technologies surely concern more than the use of computers and their information processing. The naming of the school subject – technological literacy – might suggest a tendency to work with a simplified, prototypical definition, according to which “technology” simply means a range of devices – computers – as their workings increasingly get our attention and to some appear to impact our daily lives in the most profound way. While such an understanding of “technology” might be close to the mark when it comes to popular use, no-one who offers the concept of technology a modicum of sustained reflection will be persuaded by the prototypical definition.

The fundamental challenge to definition is that of vagueness. After offering some thoughts on the history of the idea of punishment, Nietzsche mused: “all ideas, in which an entire process is semiotically summarized elude definition. Only something which has no history is capable of being defined” (2009, p. 62). The concept of technology is a case in point. It is regularly drawn on by philosophers, historians, educators, policymakers, sociologists, cultural critics and others, to understand contemporary societies and their development and to make sense of ourselves as human beings. Yet, the word itself has a confusing and multifarious history, which indeed seems to render the concept an expression of an entire process “semiotically summarized.”

Nietzsche’s disparaging remarks did not make attempts at definitions of words with a history slow down. Academics regularly offer the kind of definitions that are commonplace in philosophy. For example, a book-length study, Narratives of Technology, duly offers not one, but several definitions as an introduction to, and framing of, its fascinating topic. For reasons that will become clear, I shall not try to outdo the definitional work that the book relies on. One of the more recent attempts cited by the author defines technology as “the methods, practices, and devices a culture uses to make things function” with the following three features: “‘(1) a means to fulfil a human purpose’; (2) an ‘assemblage of practices and components’; and (3) ‘the entire collection of devices and engineering practices available to a culture’” (Arthur, 2009, 27 f., cited in van der Laan 2016, p. 6).

Such conceptual work is best seen as an attempt at offering a descriptive definition. Such definitions seek to be faithful to ordinary usage and as a consequence, in this case they become extremely inclusive. Van der Laan emphasises means and ends when understanding technology. Should one sing a lullaby to make one’s child sleepy with a view to making the following workday an acceptable experience, the song would count as a technology, based on aspects of the definition above (given, of course, that we agree what a thing is). The point of discussing songs and things is not to offer a counterexample with a view to somehow refine the definition of technology. Understanding tunes as tools might well be an interesting and worthwhile intellectual exercise that helps us understand our culture and its practices. The point is that the definition seems to have lost one of the useful features of good definitions: they leave a sufficient number of things and phenomena out. Further attempts will typically make use of additional concepts such as “rationality”, “science”, “system”, “power” and “efficiency”. This opens the definitional exercise to another charge. It is using words that themselves stand in need of clarification and in some cases are only marginally clearer than the word they serve to define.

Though enjoying no legislative powers over the use of language, philosophers will often try to somehow set the history of a word straight by offering a normative, rather than a descriptive, definition. While registering a multitude of actual uses of a word, they will insist that there are uses of the word that are somehow truer to an origin of the word, and importantly, more fruitful for conducting the intellectual and practical pursuits that lead us to doing the definitional work in the first place. For example, according to one normative definition, neither the lullaby, drying racks, Kaplan turbines nor the latest smartphone (a prototypical specimen) is a technology. Taking notice of the “logos” that can be traced in the word “technology”, philosophers such as Bruno Latour and Larry Hickman have suggested that the word already implies a general and reasoned discourse about things technical, rather than talk about the technical things themselves. We don’t talk about “biologies,” but about giraffes and amoebas, while reserving “biology” and its branches for a systematic study of living things. This usage of “ology” is in many cases well-established but has mostly been abandoned in the case of “technology”. Schatzberg (2018) suggests that European languages, not counting English, for most parts of the 20^th century made a distinction between variants of “technique” and “technology”, where the latter had to do with the science of, and education in, the former. Eventually, this was muddled by the influence of the concept as it had developed in the English language, primarily through adoption in a North American context. Pointing to the “technics” and “logos” that make up the word “technology” is worthwhile, and Marcuse made a point of distinguishing the two. Yet, it remains foreign to ordinary usage of the word in the academic lingua franca, English.

In discussing technology, philosophers have historically used words that were in some ways different from those currently in use. Heidegger’s very influential lecture was not addressed to a question concerning technology, but to one of Technik. Ellul’s stake of the century concerned “La Technique”. Only at a late stage in the development of his thinking does Dewey consider that speaking of technology, rather than of instruments or simply, arts, might have served him better in getting his thoughts across to his readers. Then, use of “arts”, though increasingly prefaced by “industrial” or “useful” was a widespread way of talking about what we today mean by “technology”. Today, however, “art” has retained a different meaning and at times is contrasted with technology. Marx rarely used the word technology, and when he did, he relied on what is called a Kameralist understanding of “technology”, that was on the vane, and in some respects, foreign to our use (Schatzberg, 2018). In different ways, these philosophers relied, more or less consciously, on words already in use in the wider culture, among engineers, educators and, in Marx’s case, scholars of state administration.

So far, I have pointed to some challenges of defining the word in a way that is faithful to both contemporary usage and the use made of it by different philosophers. While the meaning of the word “technology” is remarkably complex and multifarious, one can trace its complex history.¹ The Oxford English Dictionary suggests the first usage to have occurred in 1612, and a landmark in the use of the word is considered to be Johann Beckmann’s 1777 Anleitung zur Technologie, where technology was understood to be a science of the processing of natural materials and knowledge of handicrafts. This use was itself not without a history as it drew on Greek terminology. The subsequent use of the word in its travels in European and North American contexts has left us with a concept that can only offer to us a confused “semiotic summary”. Moments of notice in its varied use was the need for a word to describe the process that concerned Karl Marx – the industrialization and widespread use of machinery that had occurred primarily in the 19^th century in parts of Europe. Leo Marx (2010) describes this need as a semantic void that was filled by “technology”. The concept that did the filling was not entirely plastic. It had already been shaped by the adoption of the German “Technik” by American social scientists and changed in the process. The history of the concept is fascinating, and in virtue of the deep concerns and hopes that cultural and historical analyses have placed on technology, the concept has found application in many regions of the intellectual life of Western cultures. Schatzberg finds that three distinct meanings, each with their own history, but with porous boundaries, are contained in contemporary use of the concept of technology: “Technology as industrial arts, as applied science and as technique” (2018, p. 13). These different meanings continue to rear their heads in contemporary use of the words, and they bring with them both the practical contexts of engineering and deepfelt pessimism about the ways our culture uses tools.

In this way, the phenomenon of vagueness seems particularly acute in the case of “technology”. Vagueness is frequently presented as a technical problem in philosophical logic: the meaning of some words (such as “bald”, “heap”, “poor”) is such that they have no clear boundaries. This allows for deriving a paradox – a symptom of a disease in our thought – and technical, philosophical work in formal logic can begin. Wittgenstein’s contribution to the question is often restricted to that which can be gathered from his concept of family resemblance. However, in the passage below, Wittgenstein suggested we think about the vagueness of concepts as a more general phenomenon, that in many cases upsets the expectations we have of our concept: to be clear, precise and fit for expressing thoughts:

“If a concept refers to a certain pattern of life then it has to contain a degree of indefiniteness”. I am thinking of something like this: On a strip of paper we have a continuous and regular pattern of drawing or painting, which we describe in relation to the pattern, since the relation is what matters to us. If the patterns were to run: a b c a b c a b c etc. I would have a special concept, for example, for something red that is on a c, and something green that appears on the following b.

Now once anomalies occur in the pattern I will be in doubt as to which judgement ought to be made. But couldn’t my instruction have provided for this? Or do I simply assume that in being instructed in the use of the concept, that particular pattern was just taken for granted, but was never itself described? (Wittgenstein, 1982, §206)

Wittgenstein is reminding us that our concepts are embedded in the hurly burly of everyday life, our form of life. We may instruct ourselves and others in the use of a concept. Such an exercise is, however, done on the background of existing usage and practical matters of concern to us. Wittgenstein’s picture is meant to bring into focus the reliance on potentially changing background for words to have their meaning. The “background is the bustle of life. And our concepts refer to something within this bustle. And it is this very concept ‘bustle’ that brings about this indefiniteness. For a bustle only comes about through constant repetition. And there is no definite starting point for ‘constant repetition’” (Wittgenstein (1980), § 625 – 626). Rather than being a secluded topic in logic, vagueness as a linguistic phenomenon has meta-philosophical repercussions. We can, on occasions of writing a book or introducing a new policy, define concepts like “technology”, and interesting conceptual work can certainly be done. When we today use the concept of technology, it brings with it a rich, and at times contradictory, history. However, there are rich studies of the history of the word that achieve much in terms of bringing out the different backgrounds on which engineers, historians, sociologists and “ordinary people” have made use of this concept, and their point of doing so in different contexts.

These studies are interesting in their own right, but our interest here is ultimately philosophical, not historical. Rather than hope for a Pentecost miracle, or try to legislate a certain use of a word without appropriate legislative powers, this book will let each philosopher’s use of the concept speak for itself, as it is placed on the background of academic and practical “hurly burly of everyday life”. Rather than offering definitions, Wittgenstein’s characterisation of our quandary suggests that our task is as much a matter of making clear the background pattern that allows one to go on using a concept in the way it was used on a certain occasion. For example, when an exposition of Marx’s thoughts makes him speak of technologies, it is in many ways on a very different background from the one on which Albert Borgmann speaks of them. Their concepts of technology can be made clear by bringing out the pattern they are repeating and sometimes slightly altering. Importantly, they used rough equivalents of our concept of technology to talk about what mattered to them and still matters to us.

The multiplication of vagueness suggested by the title of this section comes from prefacing “technology” with “philosophy of”. This should be seen as part of a larger change in the organization and specialisation of academic philosophy. As an attempt at making philosophy applicable and useful, we begin getting “philosophies of” from the 1970’s. Philosophers have different ways of compartmentalising their discipline and combined with these different compartments in the form of traditions, schools and fields, there is a constant tendency toward division and separation. This is partly a result of the organisation of academia, but it tends to make the collection of items in the philosophy of technology harder to survey. For example, Don Ihde features prominently in what is called post-phenomenological philosophy of technology, a more recent field within philosophy of technology. It is described by central proponents as follows:

Post-phenomenologists study the relationships that develop between users and technologies. This perspective addresses questions such as: How do technologies shape our choices, our actions, and our experience of the world? How are technologies at once objects we use for our own purposes, and at the same time objects that have an influence on us? How do technologies inform our politics, ethics, and our understandings of the basic features of our everyday experience?… [P]ostphenomenology brings together the phenomenological approach and the ontological commitments of the American pragmatist tradition of philosophy. (Rosenberger & Verbeek, 2015, p. 1)

This characterisation points to a range of important questions. It is likely specific versions of these that draw ...