Val Dusek - Philosophy of Technology. An Introduction (2006)

Philosophy of Technology:
An Introduction
Val Dusek
Blackwell Publishing
Philosophy of Technology
To my daughter Lela Dusek
PHILOSOPHY
OF
TECHNOLOGY
AN INTRODUCTION
VAL DUSEK
© 2006 by Val Dusek
BLACKWELL PUBLISHING
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1 2006
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Dusek, Val, 1941–

Philosophy of technology : an introduction / Val Dusek.
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-1163-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
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Contents
Introduction 1
1 Philosophy of Science and Technology 6

2 What Is Technology? Defining or Characterizing Technology 26
3 Technocracy 38
4 Rationality, Technological Rationality, and Reason 53
5 Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Technology 70
6 Technological Determinism 84
7 Autonomous Technology 105
8 Human Nature: Tool-making or Language? 112
9 Women, Feminism, and Technology 136
10 Non-Western Technology and Local Knowledge 156
11 Anti-technology: Romanticism, Luddism, and the
Ecology Movement 176
12 Social Constructionism and Actor-network Theory 198
Bibliography 211
Index 234
v
Allie
INTRODUCTION
Introduction
As philosophy goes, philosophy of technology is a relatively young field.

Courses called “History of Modern Philosophy” cover philosophers of the
Renaissance and the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Philosophy
of the early twentieth century is covered in “Contemporary Philosophy.”
The main branches of philosophy go back over 2200 years. Philosophy of
science was pursued, in fact if not in name, by most of the early modern
philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the mid-
nineteenth century several physicists and philosophers were producing works
that focused solely on the philosophy of science. Only sporadically were
there major philosophers who had much to say about technology, such as
Bacon around 1600 and Marx in the mid-nineteenth century. Most of the
“great philosophers” of this period, although they had a great deal to say
about science, said little about technology. On the assumption that tech-
nology is the simple application of science, and that technology is all for
the good, most philosophers thought that there was little of interest. The
“action” in early modern philosophy was around the issue of scientific
knowledge, not technology. The romantic tradition from the late eighteenth
century was pessimistic about science and technology. Romantics emphasized
their problematic and harmful aspects, and only a handful of academic phi-
losophers concerned themselves with evaluation and critique of technology
itself. Particularly in Germany, there was a pessimistic literature on the evils
of modern society in general and technological society in particular. We
shall examine at length several of the twentieth-century inheritors of this
tradition. In the English-speaking countries, with the exception of romantic
poets such as Wordsworth and mid-nineteenth-century culture critics such
as Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and Ruskin, or the socialist artist William
1
INTRODUCTION
Morris, few had much to say about the evaluation of technology. Only with
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the realization that atom and hydrogen bombs
could literally cause humanity to go extinct, did widespread, popular, critical
evaluation of technology occur in the English-speaking world. With the
widespread popular awareness that industrial pollution and its degradation
of the environment was a major problem, perhaps dated from the publica-
tion of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, or from Earth Day of 1970, a
further wave of concern for the understanding of the negative side-effects of
technology arose. With the advent of genetic engineering and the specter of
human cloning in the late 1970s, with the possibility of technologically ma-
nipulating human heredity and even human nature, there was yet another
set of issues and impulses for the critical evaluation of technology.
The Society for the Philosophy of Technology was founded in 1976,
thousands of years after the birth of philosophy, over three centuries after
the beginning of intensive examination of the nature of scientific knowl-
edge, and about a century after the beginnings of systematic philosophy of
science.
Not only was the philosophy of technology late in coming of age, but the
field itself is hardly consolidated even now. One of the problems is that
the philosophy of technology involves the intimate interaction of a number
of different fields of knowledge: philosophy of science, political and social
philosophy, ethics, and some aesthetics and philosophy of religion. Specialists
in ethics and political philosophy have rarely been deeply involved in the
philosophy of science and vice versa. Furthermore, the philosophy of tech-
nology ideally involves knowledge of science, technology, society, politics,
history, and anthropology. One philosopher of technology, Jacques Ellul,
even claims that since no one can master all of the relevant fields, no one
can direct or deflect technology (see chapter 6).
The topics of the philosophy of technology are varied. In this book there
is discussion of the relation of philosophy of science and its recent develop-
ments to the philosophy of technology (chapter 1). There is a brief discus-
sion of the nature of definition and various proposed definitions of technology
(chapter 2). The theme of technocracy, or rule by an elite of scientists and
technologists, is presented in chapter 3, and also used as a means to discuss
some of the historical philosophies of technology (such as those of Plato,
Bacon, Marx, St Simon, and Comte). The issue of technological rationality
and rationality in general is discussed in chapter 4. A variety of characteriza-
tions of and approaches to rationality are considered: formal rationality,
instrumental (or means–end) rationality, economic rationality, transcendental
2
INTRODUCTION
rationality, and dialectical rationality, among others. Risk/benefit analysis,

a form of formal rationality, closely related to mathematical economics, and
often used to evaluate technological projects, is presented and evaluated.
Next, approaches to philosophy of technology very different from the
logical, formal economic, and analytical approaches are examined. Phenom-
enology, involving qualitative description of concrete experience, and
hermeneutics, involving interpretation of texts in general, are presented in
chapter 5. Several philosophers of technology who have applied phenom-
enology and hermeneutics to fields such as technical instrumentation and
computers are discussed.
A complex of issues involving the influence of technology on society and
culture are treated in chapters 6 and 7. Technological determinism, the view
that technological changes cause changes in the rest of society and culture,
and autonomous technology, the view that technology grows with a logic
of its own out of human control, are discussed and evaluated.
Chapter 8 describes the debates concerning whether technology is what
distinguishes humans from other animals, and whether language or techno-
logy is most characteristic of humans.
Chapters 9 and 10 discuss groups of people who have often been excluded
from mainstream accounts of the nature and development of technology.
Women, despite their use of household technology and their widespread
employment in factories and in the telecommunications industry, were often
omitted from general accounts of technology. These accounts often focus
on the male inventors and builders of large technological projects. This is
true even of some of the best and most dramatic contemporary accounts
(Thompson, 2004). Women inventors, women in manufacturing, and the
burden of household work are often downplayed. Similarly, non-Western
technology is often shunted aside in mainstream Western surveys of techno-
logy. The contributions of the Arabs, Chinese, South Asians, and Native
Americans to the development of Western technology are often ignored. The
power and value of the local knowledge of non-literate, indigenous peoples
of the Americas, Africa, and the South Pacific is also often ignored. However,
ethno-science and technology raise issues about the role of rationality in
technology and the nature of technology itself.
There is also a powerful traditional critical of technology, at least since
the romantic era of the late 1700s. In contrast to the dominant beliefs about
progress and the unalloyed benefits of technology, the Romantic Movement
celebrated wild nature and criticized the ugliness and pollution of the indus-
trial cities. With the growth of scientific ecology in the late nineteenth and
3
INTRODUCTION
early twentieth centuries, a new dimension of scientifically based criticism

of pollution was added to the general preference for wild nature over tech-
nology. After 1970 the political ecology movement, especially in Germany
and the USA, became a mass movement of criticism and even rejection of
technology. Even the early nineteenth-century Luddite notion of machine
smashing was revived.
Finally, in the late twentieth century the social construction of techno-
logy became a major component of the sociology and philosophy of tech-
nology. This approach opposes and criticizes technological determinism and
autonomous technology theories that claimed to show that technology was
following a predetermined course with a logic of its own. Instead, it is
claimed that there is a great deal of contingency in the development of
technology. Many interest groups have input into the final form of a given
technology, and the apparent necessity of the paths of technological develop-
ment is an illusion.
Because of this late beginning and the overlapping knowledge require-
ments of the field of philosophy of technology, it is one in which it is
difficult to get initial orientation. On the one hand, there is a large, but
largely superficial, literature of after-dinner speeches about “Technology and
Man,” written mainly by technologists and policy-makers. On the other
hand, there is a highly convoluted and obscure European literature pre-
supposing some of the most difficult and obscure philosophers (such as
Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger). This continental European philosophy of tech-
nology does attempt to grapple with the place of technology in history. It is
grand and ambitious, but often obscure and obtuse. Certainly the German
Martin Heidegger and his students such as Arendt and Marcuse, the critical
theorists of the Frankfurt school, and the French theorist of technology out
of control, Jacques Ellul, are all notorious for the difficulty and obscurity of
their prose. That obscurity is not solely the province of European writers
is shown by the stimulating but often hopelessly muddled prose of the
Canadian theorist of the media, Marshall McLuhan. Lewis Mumford, the
American freelance architecture and city planning critic and theorist of
technology, is readable, but at times long-winded.
Not only are major European figures (such as Heidegger, Arendt, and
Ellul), whom Don Ihde has called the “grandfathers” of the field, difficult to
read, there is a further complication in that many other schools of twentieth-
century philosophy have contributed to the philosophy of technology.
Anglo-American linguistic and analytic philosophy of science has contrib-
uted. Besides the various European schools of philosophy (neo-Marxism,
4
INTRODUCTION
European phenomenology and existentialism, and hermeneutics), American

pragmatism and Anglo-American process philosophy have also supplied
frameworks for writers on technology. (Early twentieth-century process
philosophy, widely rejected by mainstream analytical philosophers, has
undergone a revival among those often dubbed “postmodern” philosophers
of technology, such as Bruno Latour and Paul Virilio, via the French
postmodernist Deleuze. Anglo-American social constructivist sociologist of
science Andrew Pickering, for instance, has become interested in Whitehead
via this French revival.)
One of the goals of this book is to introduce to the beginning student
the various philosophical approaches that lie behind different takes on the
philosophy of technology. Analytic philosophy of science and ethics, phe-
nomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, process philosophy, pragmatism,
and social constructivism and postmodernism are some of the philosophical
approaches that we shall examine. There are chapters on phenomenology
and hermeneutics, on social constructionism and actor-network theory, and on
Anglo-American philosophy of science. There are also boxes inset in various
chapters about aspects of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, about pro-
cess philosophy, and about postmodernism. It is hoped these will help to
orient the student in a field in which such a variety of approaches and
philosophical vocabularies have been deployed.
Despite the variety and difficulty of the literature of the field, there is also
promise of further research in the philosophy of technology. Various often
compartmentalized branches of philosophy, such as philosophy of science and
political philosophy, as well as competing and often non-communicating
schools of philosophy, such as those mentioned above, may become com-
bined and synthesized through their use in the philosophy of technology.
I hope that the reader will find this work a guide to the many fascinating
topics and approaches that this field encompasses.
Note: throughout the book, technical terms and names of persons that I
think are particularly important for readers to know are presented in bold
type.
5
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
1
Philosophy of Science and
Technology
Much of the philosophy of technology in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-

turies was done without consideration of or involvement with the philo-
sophy of science. There were theoretical reasons for this, tacitly assumed by
most writers. If science is simply a direct, uninterpreted description of things
as they are, untainted by cultural and social biases and constraints, then
science is simply a mirror of reality. Furthermore, if technology is simply
applied science, and technology is, fundamentally, a good thing, then there
are no special philosophical problems concerning technology itself. That is,
the frameworks for the development of technology and its reception are not
of interest. There are only after-the-fact ethical problems about technology’s
misapplication. However, recent approaches to the philosophy of science
have shown that science is laden with philosophical presuppositions, and
many feminists, ecologists, and other social critics of science have claimed
that science also is laden with social presuppositions. Many recent approaches
to philosophy of technology claim that technology is not primarily, or even
is not at all, applied science.
First we shall survey the major mainstream philosophies of science from
the early modern period to the mid-twentieth century, and then look at
some more recent philosophies of science, and how they impact our under-
standing of technology.
The most widely known and accepted philosophy of science (often pre-
sented in introductory sections of science texts) has been inductivism. Francis
Bacon (1561–1626) was not only one of the earliest advocates of the values
of science for society (see chapter 3) but also the major advocate of the
inductive method. According to inductivism, one starts with observations of
individual cases, and uses these to predict future cases. Bacon enumerated
6
what he called “idols,” or sources of pervasive bias, both individual and

social, that prevented unbiased, pure observation and logical theorizing.
One of these groups of “idols,” the idols of the theater, he claimed, was
philosophy.
Inductivism generalizes from individual cases to laws. The more individual
cases that fit a generalization, the more probable the generalization. British
philosophy from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries has been prim-
arily inductivist. The inductivist view spread widely to other nations during
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the nineteenth century the sway
of inductivism was such that even philosophers who did not really follow
the inductive method were claimed to have done so. The theorist of electro-
magnetic fields, Michael Faraday (1791–1867), is an example. In the 1800s he
was widely portrayed as what Joseph Agassi (1971) has called “the Cinderella
of science,” a poor boy who, through careful, neutral observation, arrived
inductively at major discoveries. Twentieth-century studies show that he
used romantic philosophical ideas, and in his own notebooks made numer-
ous metaphysical speculations as frameworks for his electrical conjectures
(Williams, 1966; Agassi, 1971). The evolutionist Charles Darwin (1809–82)
even claimed he worked “on true Baconian principles, without any theory,”
though his real method is one of conjecturing hypotheses and deducing
their consequences (Ghiselin, 1969). Although inductivism is probably still
the most widely believed account of science among the public (although not
as dominant as previously), inductivism has a number of logical problems.
The most fundamental is called Hume’s Problem or the problem of the
justification of induction. These are technical and may appear nit picking
to the non-philosopher, but they are significant enough problems to cause
many philosophers of science (and scientists who have thought about these
issues) to move away from straightforward inductivism (see box 1.1).
Logical positivism was a philosophy that developed in central Europe in
the 1930s (primarily Vienna, where the group of philosophers and scientists
calling itself the “Vienna Circle” arose) and spread to the USA with the
emigration of many of its leaders after the rise of Nazism. The logical posi-
tivists took over much of the spirit of Comte’s earlier positive philosophy
without its explicit social theory and quasi-religious aspect (see discussion of
Comte in chapter 3). The logical positivists, like the older positivists, saw
science as the highest, indeed the only, genuine form of knowledge. They
saw statements other than empirically supportable ones as meaningless. This
was the verification theory of meaning: for a statement to be meaningful it
had to be possible to verify it (show it true by empirical evidence). This
7
Box 1.1
The problem(s) of induction
In the early eighteenth century the Scottish philosopher David Hume
(1711–76) raised what is called the problem of induction. It is really the prob-
lem of the justification of induction. Hume granted that we use induction,
though he thought that it turns out to be a matter of custom and habit. A
later philosopher, George Santayana (1863–1952), called it “animal faith.”
We expect the future to be like the past. Hume raised the question of
the justification or rational reason for our belief in induction. The usual
answer one gives is that “induction works.” Hume doesn’t deny that it
works. However, Hume notes that what we really mean is that induction
(or science in general) “has worked in the past and therefore we expect it
to work in the future.” Hume pointed out that this reasoning from past
success to future success is itself an inductive inference and it depends on
the principle of induction! Thus appeal to success or “it works” is circu-
lar. It implicitly applies the principle of induction to induction itself. It
attempts to use the principle of induction to justify the principle of induc-
tion. Hume showed how other attempted justifications (such as an appeal
to probability rather than certainty) also fail or beg the question. Most
of Hume’s contemporaries didn’t see the problem and dismissed Hume’s
claims. However, one philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), recog-
nized the importance of Hume’s problem and called it “the scandal of
philosophy” (he could have called it the scandal of science, given its
implications, though most working scientists were unaware of it). Kant’s
solution was that principles built into the human mind, such as causality
and necessity, allow us to organize our experience in ways that allow
regularity and induction. The cost of Kant’s solution is that the regularity
of nature is no longer known in things in themselves, separate and out-
side of us, but is the way we structure our experience and knowledge of
nature. That is, we can’t know that “things in themselves” follow lawful
regularities, but only that our mind is structured to seek such regularities
and structure our experience in terms of such laws. Karl Popper (1902–
94) accepted the insolubility of Hume’s problem. However, Popper’s
solution involves giving up the claim that science uses induction. Thus
the proposed solutions to Hume’s problem lead to views of science far
from the usually accepted ones. Either we structure our experience in terms
of induction, but cannot know if nature really follows laws, or we do not
really ever use induction, but deceive ourselves into thinking that we do.
8
criterion of meaning was meant to exclude theology and metaphysics from

the realm of the cognitively meaningful. The logical positivists were guilty
of the fallacy of persuasive definition, in that they defined “meaningless” in
a technical manner, but then used the term in a pejorative, dismissive man-
ner, equivalent to “worthless” or “garbage.”
Although the logical positivists did see the spread of the scientific approach
as a boon to humankind and most of them held politically reformist and often
social democratic views, they did not consider political philosophy as part
of genuine, “scientific” philosophy, and with a few exceptions did not expli-
citly discuss their broader social views within their analyses of science. The
sociologist and philosopher Otto Neurath (1882–1945) was a notable excep-
tion, who explicitly referred to Marxism in a positive manner (Uebel, 1991).
(Neurath also contributed to highway and airport technology by inventing
the non-verbal, pictorial schemas and symbols that caution the driver about
approaching curves or deer crossings, and guide the passenger or customer
to the restroom today; Stadler, 1982.) However, even the implicit support
of social democracy by the positivists and their American followers was
suppressed during the McCarthy Era of the early 1950s in the USA (Reisch,
2005).
The “logical” part of logical positivism consisted of the reconstruction of
scientific theories using formal, mathematical logic. The apparent success of
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) in reducing mathematics to logic inspired
logical posivitists to systematize scientific theories in terms of assumptions
(axioms) and rigorous logical deductions. For the most part they analyzed sci-
ence as a body of statements or propositions. Scientific theories were treated
as primarily conceptual entities. In this the logical positivists were similar to
many earlier philosophers in their treatment of science. The positivists
simply analyzed the structure and connection of statements with more pre-
cision and rigor than their predecessors. The inspiration of Russell’s logical
foundation for mathematics inspired some positivists, notably Rudolf Carnap
(1891–1970), to attempt to develop a formal inductive logic. The failure of
this program, carried out over decades, has convinced almost all philo-
sophers of science that a formal logic of induction of the sort Carnap envi-
sioned is impossible. Induction involves informal assumptions and judgment
calls. (See chapter 4.)
The quest for precision and rigor led the positivists to self-criticism of
their own empirical or observational criterion of meaningfulness. Though
this led to the demise of the criterion (the verificationist criterion of mean-
ing), it is a tribute to the honesty and rigor of the positivists that they
9
criticized their own original program and admitted when it had failed. The
somewhat more tolerant resulting position that gave up the strict verifica-
tion criterion called itself logical empiricism. Verification was weakened to
confirmation or partial support by the logical empiricists. Empirical criteria
of meaning tended to be either too narrow, and exclude the more theoret-
ical parts of science, or so broad as to succeed in allowing the more theo-
retical parts of science, but only to readmit metaphysics and theology to the
realm of the meaningful. The original version of the verification principle
excluded theoretical terms in physics, such as “electron,” as meaningless,
while the principle would allow “Either this object is red or God is lazy” to
be verified by a red object and hence allow “God is lazy” to be meaningful.
Karl Popper (1902–94) was another Viennese philosopher of science who
knew the logical positivists personally and debated with them, but whose
views differ from theirs in some important ways. Popper claimed that
falsifiability, the possibility of being falsified or refuted, not verifiability, is
the criterion that separates science from non-science. This is Popper’s
falsifiability criterion of demarcation of science from non-science. Popper
also claimed that the more falsifiable a theory is the more scientific it is. This
leads to the view that scientific laws rather than statements of particular
facts are the most scientific statements. (For the positivists statements of
particular facts are the fully verifiable ones, hence the most scientific.) Par-
ticular facts can be verified, and, hence, achieve the highest probability,
while laws cover an indefinite range of cases and can never be verified. In
fact laws are always infinitely improbable according to Popper, because their
range of application is infinite, but only a small part of their consequences is
tested. The positivists’ view of science fits with the view of science as prim-
arily a collection of facts, organized and helpfully summarized by laws, while
Popper’s view of science makes science primarily a collection of laws. For
Popper the role of particular facts lies solely in testing or attempting to
falsify the laws. According to him science consists of bold conjectures or
guesses and decisive refutations or negative tests. This is his falsificationist
method of science. Popper accepts Hume’s claim that there is no justifica-
tion of induction, so Popper throws out induction as a “myth” (see box 1.1).
Hypotheses are guessed at, conjectured, and do not arise logically from
observations of individual cases. As long as a hypothesis survives testing it is
scientifically retained. It doesn’t matter whether it was preceded by observa-
tions or arose from a dream or a religious belief as long as it survives tests.
The famous story of how the chemist F. A. Kekulé’s (1829–96) dream of a
snake swallowing its own tail led him to hypothesize the ring structure of
10
the benzene molecule (Beveridge, 1957, 56, 76) is an example of how highly
non-rational sources can nonetheless yield testable results.
Popper, unlike the positivists, did not equate non-scientific or non-
testable with meaningless. For Popper metaphysics can be meaningful
and can play a positive role in guiding the formation of scientific theories.
Popper’s views are counterintuitive at first, but their consequences fit well
with the role of testing and criticism in science and the notion of the centrality
of universal laws in science.
Popper’s approach also has political implications. The critical approach (a
generalization of the method of refutation) is central to free thought and
democracy, the “open society” (Popper, 1945). The holding of positions as
tentative avoids dogmatism. The welcoming of criticism encourages open-
mindedness and free speech. Popper understood “reified dogmatism” as a
closed system of thought that has mechanisms to discount or dismiss over
possible objection or criticism. For Popper both religious fundamentalism
and dogmatic Marxist totalitarianism are examples of such closed systems.
However, Popper believes that schools of science themselves can develop
strategies to shield themselves from all criticism, and thereby it too can
become non-scientific in a logical sense, while mistakenly being held to be
“science” by educational and funding institutions.
To take an extreme example, the psychologist of intelligence Sir Cyril
Burt (1883–1971) was a leading scientist in the institutional sense. He
edited the leading and most rigorous Journal of Statistical Psychology. He ad-
vised the London Council on educational tracking policy. He started Mensa,
the society for people with high IQ, and even received a knighthood for his
work on the inheritance of IQ. However, shortly after his death, most psy-
chologists became convinced that the data he presented in his later years
was fraudulent. He apparently invented non-existent research assistants. He
composed letters and articles under pseudonyms incompetently criticizing
his work, to give himself the opportunity to respond brilliantly to them
(Hearnshaw, 1979). If this is true, he certainly failed in being a scientist in
the normative sense of Popper; that is, someone who was intellectually
honest, open to criticism, and willing to reject his theories.
The interesting aspects of Popper’s contrary to common sense approach
to science were only widely recognized after logical positivism ran into con-
ceptual difficulties. Popper’s views have exciting implications for both social
criticism and evaluation of programs in science, but the downside of Popper’s
views for the philosophy of technology is the sharp wedge he drives
between science and technology. Science involves daring and improbable
11
conjectures and their refutation, but technology demands reliable and work-
able devices. The collapse of a bridge has human costs different from those
of intellectual rejection of a theory in particle physics. Popper students and
followers, such as Joseph Agassi (1985) and Mario Bunge (1967, chapter 11,
1979), have made important contributions to the philosophy of tech-
nology, but Popper’s own theory of science, interesting as it is, is separate
from pragmatic considerations of technology. Nevertheless, the Popperian
approach to science opens the way to investigation of the way that philo-
sophical worldviews or metaphysical theories may influence the formation
of scientific theories. This in turn shows how cultural views can be at least as
important as observational data as a source of scientific theory, and through
applications can in turn affect technology.
One of the major debates in the philosophy of science is that between
realism and anti-realism, particularly, as Popper (1962, chapter 3) formu-
lated it, between essentialism and instrumentalism with respect to theoret-
ical terms in science. Some parts of science are particularly close to observation
and experiment. Other parts of scientific theory are only indirectly con-
nected with observation and experiment through long chains of logical
deduction. The term “electron” in physics is an example. Scientific realists
claim that the theoretical terms in science represent or refer to objectively
real entities, even if we cannot observe them. Anti-realists claim that the
theoretical terms are not to be taken to literally refer to objects or entities.
Instrumentalists treat theories merely as instruments for prediction. The
theories do not describe real, unobserved, structures, but are more or less
useful for prediction of things we can directly observe.
The metaphors used by realists and instrumentalists, respectively, are at
the basis of the theoretical and technological approaches that were histor-
ical components of the Renaissance birth of modern science. Realists often
describe scientific theories as “pictures” of the world. Instrumentalists describe
theories as “tools” for prediction. The birth of early modern science may
have been the fusion of literate scholars, knowledgeable of the Greek clas-
sics and philosophical “world pictures,” but ignorant of practical crafts, with
the illiterate but technologically skilled artisans with their tools. Economic
hard times in the Renaissance threw together impoverished wandering
scholars with wandering artisans, yielding the “marriage of metaphysics and
technology” (Agassi, 1981) that is science. The claim that the breakdown of
class barriers led to communication between humanists and artisans (Zilsel,
2000) is called “the Zilsel thesis.” While Zilsel (1891–1944) located this process
in the 1600s, it is more plausible to trace it to the Renaissance in the 1400s
12
(Rossi, 1970). The “Renaissance Men,” such as Leon Battista Alberti (1404–
72), theorist of geometrical perspective, architect, and social philosopher
of the family, and Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), the artist, philosopher,
scientist, and engineer, were artists who combined technical virtuosity in
mechanics and architecture with philosophy and scientific theory. The
“tools” in the form of painter’s brush or sculptor’s chisel were a means to
the “picture” in the form of Renaissance painting or sculpture. These compon-
ents of the birth of modern science and technology show up today in
the preferred metaphors of instrumentalism and realism as philosophies of
the relation of science to reality.
The interesting aspects of Popper’s non-commonsensical approach to
science were only widely recognized after logical positivism ran into con-
ceptual difficulties. During the 1950s and 1960s there were many criticisms
of logical empiricism. The logical empiricists were rigorous and honest
enough to qualify and limit many of their own claims. The history of logical
empiricism is one of successive retreat from the original, simple, and pro-
vocative theses of the Vienna Circle. This whittling down of logical empiri-
cism greatly increased interest in and allegiance to Popper’s alternative
approach.
However, the most well known and influential alternative was Thomas
Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn (1922–96) approached
science from the standpoint of history. Kuhn, with a doctorate in physics,
taught an undergraduate course in science for humanists, reading original
texts. Kuhn was puzzled by Aristotle’s Physics, which seemed totally non-
sense to someone trained in modern physics. One afternoon, while he was
gazing from his dorm window out on the trees of Harvard Yard, the scales
fell from his eyes, and he realized that Aristotle’s claims made perfect sense
within a framework totally different from the modern one.
The logical positivists had treated scientific theories as static structures.
They made their own formal reconstructions of scientific theories, rather than
describing the theories as their creators and contemporaries viewed them.
Kuhn claimed to present scientific theories in terms of the frameworks in
which they were originally understood, not as contemporary textbooks or
logical empiricist formal reconstructions presented them. Kuhn centered his
account of science on the notion of a “paradigm.” The paradigm is not solely
an explicit formal structure. Paradigms are not only explicit theories but
ways of viewing the world. Kuhn’s paradigms include not only (a) theories,
but also ( b) tacit skills of laboratory practice that are not recorded and are
taught by imitation of an expert practitioner. Further, paradigms encompass
13
(c) ideals of what a good scientific theory should be, and (d) a metaphysics
of what basic entities exist. Kuhn also tied the paradigm to the structure of
the scientific community. The paradigm binds the researchers in a scientific
specialty, channeling their experimental and theoretical practice in certain
directions and defining good scientific theory and practice. Later Kuhn dis-
tinguished between paradigms as exemplars, models for good scientific theory
and practice, such as the works of Galileo, Newton, or Einstein, and the
paradigm as disciplinary matrix, or belief system shared by members of
the scientific community.
Kuhn’s view of the development of scientific paradigms differs from the
positivists’ and Popper’s account of theories. Kuhn denies that either induc-
tion or Popper’s falsification describes the rise and fall of paradigms. Gener-
ally a new paradigm arises without a strong inductive base. Particular
refutations can be sidestepped by modifying one or more hypotheses in the
theory refuted. The scope of the original theory can be limited or auxiliary
assumptions can be added. Thus “refutations” are not decisive or fatal. A
slightly modified version of the “refuted” theory can survive under the para-
digm. The logic of this situation is called the Duhem thesis or Duhemian
argument (see box 1.2).
Paradigms collapse because of an accumulation of what Kuhn calls anomal-
ies. Anomalies are not strict counter-instances or refutations. They are phe-
nomena that seem not to fit with the categories of the paradigm or that are
simply left as exceptions. A paradigm is rejected only after a new paradigm
has arisen and there is a shift of allegiance of scientists. (At one point Kuhn
quotes the physicist Max Planck as saying that it is a matter of the older
generation dying off; Kuhn, 1962, p. 151.)
Kuhn’s approach opened the way for widespread appreciation of the role
of philosophical worldviews and social ideologies in the creation and accept-
ance of scientific theories. Kuhn himself did not emphasize either the philo-
sophical frameworks of theories as such or the external, social influences on
the acceptance of new paradigms, though he hinted at both in passing.
However, after Kuhn, numerous philosophers, historians, and sociologists
of science took up the issue of how philosophical views, religious beliefs,
and social ideologies have played a role in the birth and spread of scientific
theories. This in turn strengthens the case for cultural influences on tech-
nology. If the scientific paradigms at the basis of various technologies have
religious or political components, then religion and politics can influence
technology, not just in social acceptance, but also in terms of the struc-
ture of the very theories used in the technology. This approach, taking its
14
Box 1.2
The Duhem thesis
The Duhem thesis is the logic behind much of Kuhn’s claim that paradigms
in normal science do not get rejected because they are refuted. The physi-
cist, philosopher, and historian of science Pierre Duhem (1861–1916)
presented arguments against crucial refutation of theories in the early
twentieth century. He wrote decades before Popper but his arguments
are the most challenging objection to Popper’s theory of falsification.
Duhem noted that if a theory consists of several hypotheses or assump-
tions, the refutation of the theory as a whole does not tell us which
hypothesis is a fault, only that the theory as a whole made an incorrect
prediction. Duhem also argued and gave examples, in which one of the
lesser hypotheses or auxiliary hypotheses was changed in the light of a
supposed refutation of the theory, yielding a modified theory that correctly
described the situation that refuted the original version. For instance,
Boyle’s law of gases appeared to be refuted by the behavior of iodine.
However, chemists and physicists modified Boyle’s law to claim that it
applied only to ideal gases, and then claimed that iodine was not an ideal
gas. (In an ideal gas all molecules are the same. Iodine gas is a mixture of
molecules with different numbers of iodine atoms.)
The American philosopher W. V. O. Quine (1908–2000) generalized
Duhem’s claim, noting that if one allows drastic enough modifications
and redefinitions any theory can be saved from any counter-evidence
(Quine, 1951). Quine allows such extreme strategies as changing the formal
logic of the theory and “pleading hallucination” (the extreme Quinean
strategy could also, more reasonably, involve shifts in the meaning of terms
in the theory to avoid refutation). This is known as the Duhem–Quine
thesis and has influenced constructivist sociologists of scientific knowledge
and science and technology studies postmodernists. The latter claim that,
because no evidence can decisively refute any theory, the reason why
theories are rejected involves non-evidential issues, not part of the logic
of science, such as political, social, or religious interests and worldviews,
and these views in turn can influence the technology based on the theory.
Philosophers have disagreed about the legitimacy of various stronger
and weaker versions of the Duhemian argument (Harding, 1976). Ana-
lytical philosophers of science generally defend the weaker, original,
Duhem version of the thesis. Science and technology studies people gen-
erally opt for the strong, Quine, version, as it appears to make evidence
almost irrelevant to science (see box 6.3 and the discussion of the soci-
ology of scientific knowledge in chapter 12).
15
inspiration from Kuhn, has been used to counter technological determinism

(see chapter 6).
Two topics raised by the post-positivist philosophy of science are the
theory-laden nature of observation and the underdetermination of theor-
ies by evidence. Kuhn, as well as several other philosophers of science of the
late 1950s and 1960s, such as Norwood Russell Hanson (1958), emphasized
how sensory observations depend on contexts of theory and interpretation.
They appealed to psychological studies of perception and visual illusion.
They followed the claim that beliefs and expectations influence perception.
Michael Polanyi (1958) emphasized how skills of interpretation are developed
though apprenticeship and practice. The interpretation of medical X-ray pic-
tures or the identification of cell organelles through a microscope is not
obvious. It involves training. ( James Thurber recounts how, after a long
bout with a school microscope, he realized he was studying not a microscopic
creature, but the reflection of his own eyelash.)
Another form of theory dependence of observation includes the role of
theories of our measuring and observing instruments in our construal of the
readings and observations our instruments produce. Theory also plays a role
in the selection of what to observe and in the language in which observa-
tions are described and interpreted. Even when perceptual observation has
been replaced by machine observation these latter influences of theory on
the nature and structure of observation reports remain.
Closely related to the problem of induction (box 1.1) and to the Duhem
thesis (box 1.2) is the underdetermination thesis. Many different theories,
such as both the new theory and the appropriately modified version of the
old, supposedly refuted theory, can explain the same set of data. The same set
of data points can be predicted or accounted for by many different equations.
Many different continuous curves can be drawn through any set of points,
and thus the many different equations of those curves can be said to describe
those points. Thus the logic of confirmation or inductive support does not
lead to one unique theory. Considerations other than empirical evidence are
used in making the choice of theory. It is true that most of the mathemat-
ically possible theories that account for a given set of data are excessively
complicated and most could be eliminated as unreasonable. Nevertheless,
where more than one reasonably manageable theory accounts for the data,
there is a turn to considerations of simplicity or elegance. But what is con-
sidered simple depends on ideals of what a good theory is and aesthetic
considerations of the scientist or scientific community. Consistency with
other theories held also counts as a non-empirical constraint on theory choice.
16
Many sociologists of scientific knowledge and science and technology stud-

ies postmodernists appeal to the underdetermination thesis as well as the
Quine–Duhem thesis.
Sociology of Scientific Knowledge
The work of Kuhn (and a number of other philosophers of science of the

period) opened thinking about science to a number of issues and considera-
tions that the positivist approach to science as a body of statements had
overlooked or not considered worthy of investigation. Kuhn’s paradigmatic
approach opened science to the kinds of examination that humanists had
traditionally used in examining art and culture. It also opened up the social
examination, not just of the institutions and networks of science, but also of
the content of scientific theories (sociology of scientific knowledge or SSK)
(see chapter 12). A number of sociologists of science, particularly in the
United Kingdom, took up this investigation.
Earlier sociology of knowledge, initiated by Karl Mannheim (1893–1947)
in 1936, had investigated political and religious beliefs but exempted the
claims of science from sociological explanation (Mannheim, 1936, p. 79). A
majority of sociologists consider themselves to be scientists and to share at
least a diluted version of Comte’s (1798–1857) positivistic ideal of objective,
lawful sociological knowledge (see the discussion of Comte in chapter 3).
Most sociological studies of science prior to the 1970s concerned networks
of journal citations or patterns of funding and professionalization, assuming
the content of science to be beyond social explanation. Robert K. Merton’s
(1910–2003) influential sociology of science concentrated on the norms of
science. These are the values professed by the scientific community. These
norms include: (a) universalism; (b) disinterestedness (lack of interest-based
bias in investigation); (c) “communism” (the free sharing of data and res-
ults); and (d) organized skepticism (the tendency to doubt and question
results and theories). These values resemble Karl Popper’s norms of science,
although the later Popper emphasizes that these are ideals of science, not a
description of actual scientists’ behavior. (In contrast to Popper, Kuhn claims
to be giving an account of the actual behavior of scientists.) Philosophically
trained sociologist of science Steve Fuller (1997, p. 63) has noted that Merton
takes the professed ideals of scientists at face value as accounts of actual
scientific behavior, while sociologists of politics and religion often doubt or
even debunk explicitly professed ideals and contrast them with the actual
17
doings of politicians and religious people. It is significant that Merton first

discussed the norms of science in an article concerning totalitarian restraints
on science in Nazi Germany (Merton, 1938). His use of the term “commun-
ism” for sharing of data shows a residue of his earlier leftist political views.
Later, Merton contrasted these norms of science primarily with those of
the USSR.
SSK claims that the statements, laws, and experiments of science are them-
selves legitimate objects of scientific investigation. Earlier philosophers and
sociologists of science thought (and many still think) that scientific errors
could be explained by social or psychological causes, but scientific truths
could not. David Bloor (1976), who initiated what he called the “Strong
Programme,” proposed (a) a Principle of Symmetry, that the same sort of
causal explanations ought to be given of both truth and error in science and
of both rational and irrational behavior; (b) a Causality Principle, that all
explanations of scientific knowledge should be causal; (c) the Impartiality
Principle, that SSK should be impartial with respect to truth and falsity,
rationality and irrationality; and (d) the Reflexivity Principle, that these prin-
ciples should apply to sociology itself.
Other sociologists of scientific knowledge such as Harry Collins (1985)
bracketed or set aside the truth or falsehood of scientific statements,
studying gravitational waves and parapsychology with the same methods
and approaches. Many in SSK followed the social construction of scientific
knowledge approach (see chapter 12). The social construction approach
can mean a number of things. The weakest version of the thesis is that
social interaction of humans is the basis for the formation of scientific
theories and experiments. This claim is reasonable. Science differs from
introspective knowledge in that it is supposed to be public and replicable.
Science is a social enterprise. Another reasonable claim is that technological,
instrumental apparatus is physically constructed in a literal sense. An issue
arises, however, as to whether the construction of concepts and the construc-
tion of apparatus ought to be considered with a unitary conception of
“construction” or whether two different sorts of activities are being illicitly
run together.
A stronger thesis of the social construction position is that the objects of
science or scientific truths are socially constructed. If the latter claim means
that what we take to be scientific truths or what we believe to be scientific
truths are socially constructed then it collapses into the first position. Many
of the defenders of social construction would claim that there is no differ-
ence between a truth and what we take to be a truth. This is a version of the
18
consensus theory of truth, that what is true is what the community believes.
Opponents of the extreme social construction view claim that the objects
that we think exist may not be the same as the objects that genuinely exist
and that what our community holds to be true may not be true.
Among the contributions of the social constructivist and related ap-
proaches are case studies showing how consensus is formed in scientific com-
munities. Political negotiation, appeals to authority of eminent scientists,
recruitment of allies, and rhetorical persuasion of the undecided all play a
role. Extra-scientific factors often play a role. Pasteur’s experiments in the
mid-nineteenth century rejecting the spontaneous generation of life from
non-living material were welcome to the Catholic Church in their defense
of the necessity of divine creation. Although Pasteur himself did not really
reject an origin of life in the distant past due to natural causes, he was happy
to play to the conservative atmosphere in France in his day (Farley and
Geison, 1974; Geison, 1995). Often the consensus is formed without some
major objections being accounted for. Some conflicting experiments and
studies are rejected because of the reputation or lack of prestige of the
experimenters. Data that don’t fit the expected result are ignored. Once the
conclusion is reached it seems in retrospect to be inevitable. It is difficult to
remember or imagine the state of uncertainty and disagreement that pre-
ceded it.
Social Epistemology
In Anglo-American analytical philosophy a field of social epistemology

(social theory of knowledge) developed in the last two decades of the twen-
tieth century (Fuller, 1988; Kitcher, 1993). Social epistemology, like traditional
epistemology, but unlike sociology of scientific knowledge, is normative.
That is, it is concerned with evaluation of the knowledge claims made by
scientists. On the one hand, social epistemology differs from traditional
philosophical epistemology in treating knowledge, especially scientific
knowledge, as a social rather than an individual achievement. On the other
hand, social epistemology contrasts with Kuhn’s and other “historicist”
(history-oriented rather than logic-oriented) post-positivistic philosophy of
science in claiming to take a descriptive approach. It also contrasts with
the evaluatively neutral stance taken by most social constructivist sociology
of science, such as in the bracketing of truth-claims by Collins noted above.
Some “historicist” philosophers of science, such as Feyerabend, do take
19
evaluative stances, in judging and rejecting certain scientific theories, and

social constructivists, while professing a neutral stance, often implicitly
debunk the traditional “naive” truth claims made by scientists. That con-
structivists are not as totally normatively neutral as they profess to be is
suggested by the fact that though they treat occultism or parapsychology
neutrally, none so far has treated racist science or Nazi science in an
evaluatively neutral manner.
Feminist, Ecological, and Multicultural Science

and Technology Studies
Accepting Kuhn’s views, if cultural considerations of worldview and

attitude toward nature were significant for the nature of scientific theories,
then theorists of science with critical approaches to dominant social
attitudes could criticize the theories and methods of various sciences and
technologies themselves. Feminists and ecological critics of contemporary
society have been prominent in taking this approach (see chapters 9 and
11). Similarly, anthropology and some cultural studies approaches to science
and technology have criticized the assumption of universality of Western
science and technology. These responses note earlier, but often fruitful,
approaches to science and technology in Egyptian, Babylonian, Chinese,
Indian, and Muslim civilizations of ancient and medieval times. These cul-
tures contributed a great deal of technology and science to the West, but
often based their investigations on worldviews and metaphysics very
different from that of modern Western science. From this multicultural
critics raise questions about the supposed “universality” of Western science
(Harding, 1998).
Likewise, the “local” knowledge in non-literate societies has often con-
tained considerable knowledge of medicinal and other values of local plants,
agricultural techniques, survival skills in harsh climates, and navigational
skills. Contemporary ethno-botanists investigate indigenous cures and the
chemistry of plants used by local healers. Western Arctic explorers bor-
rowed the design of their clothing and many survival techniques from the
Inuits and other inhabitants of the Arctic, usually without crediting them.
Apparently local religiously based seasonal cycles of planting, such as those in
Bali, have sometimes proven more agriculturally effective than the recom-
mendations of Western “experts.” Social constructivist and postmodernist
20
defenders of ethno-science sometimes claim that it is simply an alternative

knowledge to Western science, which is itself a “local knowledge,” whose
locality is the laboratory. (See chapter 10.)
The “Science Wars”
With the post-Kuhnian development of politically critical studies of science

by feminists, activists in indigenous cultures, ecologists and others, as well
as the development of sociological studies of scientific knowledge and
literary studies of scientific texts a backlash has arisen. A number of disparate
groups are involved. There are scientists and technologists who believe
the objectivity of their field is being wrongly denied by social, political
and literary studies of science. There are also political conservatives, oppo-
nents of feminism and ethnic movements, and opponents of the ecology
movement. There are also traditional literary and humanist opponents of
postmodernist movements in the humanities (see box 6.3). These groups
have formed an unstable alliance to attack the new science studies in the
so-called Science Wars (Ross, 1996; Dusek, 1998). A great many articles,
both scholarly and polemical, were written for and against the new science
studies (Koertge, 1997; Ashman and Baringer, 2001). The most famous, or
notorious, incident in the science wars was the Sokal hoax. Alan Sokal, a
physicist, wrote an article titled “Transgressing the boundaries: toward a
transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity” (1995), which contained
within its implicit satire the most ridiculous and exaggerated claims to be
found in science studies and the political criticisms of science. He was
able to publish it in a cultural studies journal, and then revealed his hoax.
In the wake of this revelation both sides in the dispute issued hundreds of
news stories, editorials, and articles both pro and con, ranging from
conservative political commentators Rush Limbaugh and George Will to
angry letters to editors of various eminent scientists and humanists (Editors
of Lingua Franca, 2000). At least two science studies people were denied
prestigious positions, and an editor nudged into earlier retirement, because
of letter writing campaigns by the scientist science warriors. The fires of the
science wars in the form that gained mass media attention died down by the
beginning of the new century, but they continue to smolder in less public
and explicit forms.
21
Instrumental Realism
A later development in the philosophy of science with the greatest relevance

to philosophy of technology was what Don Ihde (1991, p. 150 n1) called the
instrumental realist approach to science. The positivists, the followers and
descendents of Kuhn in the new philosophy of science, and even the soci-
ology of scientific knowledge concentrated on science as primarily a theoretical
enterprise. Empirical testing was definitive of positivism’s definition of
scientific knowledge, but the model of testing was generally direct sense
observation.
Philosophers and historians such as Ian Hacking (1983), Robert Ackermann
(1985), and Peter Galison (1987) emphasize the mediating role of observa-
tional instruments and the manipulative nature of scientific knowledge. The
American pragmatists, such as John Dewey, early emphasized physical
manipulation of nature as central to knowledge. However, later academic
pragmatism became strongly influenced by the positivists. Emphasis on
practice and manipulation declined in later “pragmatic” accounts of science.
Kuhn had included tacit laboratory skills in his account of science, but
later discussions of Kuhn in philosophy of science debates focused primarily
on the conceptual aspects of the paradigm. Jerome Ravetz developed Kuhn’s
emphasis on the craft nature of science and Michael Polanyi’s notion of tacit
skills into a thoroughgoing treatment of science as craft, but it was not
influential, perhaps because it was neither fully within philosophy of science
nor within the developing sociology of scientific knowledge (Ravetz, 1971).
The instrumental realists of the 1980s developed a strong focus on the em-
bodied, active aspects of science that became a significant movement within
the philosophy of science. For the instrumental realists scientific instrumen-
tation is central to science. The active, manipulative aspect of instrumental
observation takes priority over passive observation and contemplation.
Today most scientific observations are far from the naked eye observations
of older astronomy and natural history. The “Baconian” ideal of induction
from pure, unbiased perceptions is modified by the technology-laden nature
of contemporary scientific observation. French physicists call the tendency
to look where our instruments allow us to look “the logic of the lamp post,”
after the old joke about the drunk who looked for his keys under the lamp
post because there was better light, even though he had dropped his keys
down the block where it was pitch black.
22
Since contemporary science is so involved with and dependent upon

sophisticated technological instrumentation, insofar as scientific discovery is
based on observation, technology is prior to science as well as driving sci-
ence. This is the opposite of the account of technology as “applied science,”
in which science is prior to and drives technology. In the “technoscience”
view of Bruno Latour (1947–) and others, technology and science are today
inextricably interwoven. The notion that modern science is dependent on
technology has some similarity to Heidegger’s later views (see box 5.1).
For Heidegger, technology is the fundamental fact or force in the modern
condition, and technology is philosophically prior to science.
Instrumental realism shifts the dividing line between theory and observa-
tion in such a way as to make the realm of pure theory minimal. Where the
ability to manipulate the situation is a criterion of the reality of the entity
manipulated, much that was formerly treated as “purely theoretical” in the
philosophy of science becomes real. Hacking’s famous example is that on
hearing that elementary particles (often treated as theoretical entities by
philosophers) can be sprayed, he concluded if they can be sprayed they are
real (Hacking, 1983). The realist/instrumentalist dispute mentioned earlier
in this chapter treated theoretical entities as objects of contemplation, not of
manipulation. By rejecting this contemplative stance instrumental realists
not only make clearer the close connection of modern science with tech-
nology (thereby implicitly justifying the running together of the two as
“technoscience” by postmodern science studies), but also eliminate the break
between ordinary experience and the objects of science.
Approaching and integrating the work of the instrumental realists from a
phenomenological point of view (see chapter 5), Don Ihde has drawn the
implication of this approach that even the most esoteric scientific research
involving advanced, abstract theories is highly perceptual, given that testing
via instrumentation is an extension of perception. Ihde also points out that
instruments as an extension of (or, better, literally incorporated into) bodily
perception incorporate human embodiment into even the most arcane,
advanced science.
One irony of the development of the instrumental realist approach from
post-positivist philosophy of science is that in its application to the history of
science the emphasis on experiment has reintroduced the characterization of
scientific method as inductive. Yet it is precisely the problem of induction
and responses to it such as Popper’s that led to the emphasis on the theory-
driven account of science and on the theory-laden character of observation.
23
Historians and sociologists of science who use the instrumental realist

approach may not be bothered by these problems (though at least one soci-
ologist of scientific knowledge, Collins, uses the problem of induction to
undermine empirical accounts of scientific change). Instrumental realism
brings us full circle to the original inductivism, if not that of the simplest
variety. Philosophers, however, may need to re-examine their approaches
to the logical problem of induction in relation to the defense of the instru-
mental realist approach.
Conclusion
Inductivism supported the view that science grows directly out of percept-
ual observations unbiased by theory. The logical positivist or logical empiri-
cist philosophy of science has often been used to reinforce the notion of
science as neutral and technology as applied science. Popper’s falsificationism
or critical approach, belatedly appreciated, allowed for the role of theory as
prior to observation and the role of philosophical theories as background
frameworks for scientific theories. Kuhn and post-positivist, historicist philo-
sophy of science opened the door to considering the role of philosophical,
religious, and political influences on the creation and acceptance of scientific
theories. Feminist, ecological, and multiculturalist critics use Kuhn’s notion
of a paradigm to expose what they claim to be pervasive bias in the methods
and results of mainstream Western science and technology. Sociologists of
scientific knowledge emphasize that the logic of evidence and refutation of
theories does not determine the course of theory change. Instead, the pres-
tige of established scientists, recruitment of allies, and negotiation between
competing teams leads to a closure of scientific disputes that is later attrib-
uted to the facts of nature. Instrumental realists emphasize that, in con-
temporary science, observation itself is mediated through the technology of
scientific instrumentation. Rather than technology being applied science,
technology is prior to scientific observation.
Study questions
1 Do you think that inductivism is adequate as a theory of scientific method?

If it is not, why do so many working scientists hold to it?
2 Are scientific theories decisively refuted by counter-evidence or do they
“roll with the punches,” so to speak, being readjusted to fit what was
24
counter-evidence for the old version? Give an example not in the chapter
if possible.
3 Are scientific theories direct outgrowths of observation or are they influ-
enced as well by assumptions and worldviews of their creators?
4 Do you think that the scientists involved in the “science wars” who
dismiss and ridicule sociological and literary accounts of the success of
scientific theories are justified in dismissing the social, political, and
rhetorical aspects of science as irrelevant to scientific truth and validity?
5 Does the instrumental realist approach do away with the problems raised
by earlier accounts of science, such as the inductive, Popperian falsi-
ficationist, and Kuhnian approaches?
25
WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY?
2
What Is Technology?
Defining or Characterizing
Technology
Why Bother with Definitions?
Many students, in my experience, especially in the natural sciences, are

impatient with disputes about definitions. They are often called “merely
semantic” and may seem hairsplitting. Indeed, they are semantic, in that they
deal with meaning, but they are hardly trivial. Many apparently substantive
disagreements really stem from the disputants having two different definitions
of what is being discussed, say religion, but not being aware of it. Often
people think that definitions are purely arbitrary; it means that effort need
not be wasted on choosing among opposing or alternative definitions. This
is itself based on one view of definition, but it is not the only one. We shall
learn something about philosophy by seeing the different sorts of definitions
that people have used and their connection to differing philosophical views.
Looking at the alternative definitions of technology shows something
about the alternative kinds of definition and also about the characterization
of technology. Even if one doesn’t find a final definition on which everyone
can agree, an investigation of the definition of technology shows us the
range of things that can count as technology and some of the borderline
cases where people differ on whether something should be counted as tech-
nology or not. Even an unsuccessful search for a best definition helps us to
explore the layout of the area we are investigating.
Kinds of Definitions
Let us look at a few different sorts of definitions. At one extreme is the

ancient notion of a real definition. The ancient Greek philosophers Socrates
26
WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY?
(470–399 BCE), his student Plato (428–347 BCE), and his student, in turn, Aris-
totle (384–322 BCE) held to this notion of definition. This view assumes that
there is a real structure to the world that corresponds to our words and that
a correct definition will match the real nature of things. Socrates went about
questioning people about the definition of notions such as justice, courage,
or piety and showed the people he questioned how their definitions failed to
fit with their notions. Socrates appeared to assume and Plato argued that
there is a real nature or structure of justice, of courage, and of piety and that
the real definition will fit this. Aristotle claimed that objects have essences
and that real definitions will match these. Real definitions of the sort that
Plato and Aristotle sought are supposed to “cut nature at the joints”; that is,
correspond to the “natural kinds” of things. Some contemporary thinkers
view scientific definitions, such as definitions of the chemical elements in
terms of atomic weight and number, as true definitions in this sense. Some
recent writers in technology studies claim that leading writers on techno-
logy in the twentieth century, such as Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and
Jacques Ellul (1912–94), are mistakenly searching for an “essence” of tech-
nology. Heidegger, in fact, rejected the traditional account of forms and
categories of Plato and Aristotle. Nevertheless, it is true that Heidegger and
Ellul do present what they claim is a single, real, core notion of technology.
A different, nearly opposite, view of definitions is that of stipulative def-
initions. This conception is closer to the view of definitions held by many
people today. It is claimed that definitions are arbitrary choices or stipula-
tions. Definitions are about words and not things. Opponents of the notion
of real definitions deny that there are natural classes or real natures of things
to be captured by definitions.
Definitions, on the nominalist view, arbitrarily carve up the world of
individuals into classes of things. One can define anything as anything one
wishes. Lewis Carroll (1832–1898), who was a logician as well as a writer of
children’s books, had Humpty Dumpty hold this view of definitions. Humpty
claimed it was a matter of who was master, he or the words. But as some of
Humpty’s definitions showed, we cannot sensibly define things in absolutely
any way we want. We cannot define religion as a coffee pot and expect to
make progress investigating the features of religion. In purely formal systems
of abstract math or logic, stipulative definitions make more sense than in
common sense or everyday discussions. In an abstract system of math one
can lay down a definition and carry it through the system by exact rules of
inference. One can use stipulative definitions for the purposes of argument
or for a very limited investigation of everyday concepts, but one problem
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WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY?
Box 2.1
Nominalism in British philosophy
Nominalists in the late Middle Ages, such as William of Ockham (1285–
1347), denied the reality of essences or universals and claimed that only
individuals are real. British philosophers of the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries, in the early days of experimental science, held that there
were no real definitions. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) claimed that def-
initions are stipulative, even though he thought he could base science on
them. In the seventeenth century, Hobbes successfully described the
definitional or postulational side of science, but he failed to explain how
he tied his definitional and deductive notion of science to observation.
For Hobbes, definitions are introduced at the start of an investigation,
they are not, as they were for Aristotle, the final result of investigation.
John Locke (1632–1704) claimed that we cannot know the real essences
of substances. Definitions do not describe essential properties of things
or even whether the things defined exist. We can know only nominal
essences of substances. In the early eighteenth century David Hume (1711–
76) totally denied the existence of real essences, and his position was
highly influential upon later empiricism.
with using stipulative definitions in everyday reasoning is that the ordinary

meaning of commonly used words sneaks back into the discussion without
the author noticing. She slides from her stipulative definition to the ordinary
meaning unaware. Writers on technology are, of course, free to define it
any way they wish, but they then need to be careful they do not slip back
into using other definitions or understandings of technology common in the
culture without realizing they have strayed from their original definition.
This leads us to another sort of definition different from both the above,
the reportative definition. This sort of definition is a report of how people
ordinarily use words. It doesn’t claim to find the true structure of reality,
but it also doesn’t simply make up an arbitrary definition by fiat. Dictionary
definitions are close to reportative definitions. However, a purely reportative
definition would simply describe how people use the word, without legislating
“proper” usage. Dictionary definitions contain some normative content. A
pure reportative definition could be quite complicated, describing how people
in different regions or of different social status use the word. Reportative
definitions often have fuzzy boundaries or vagueness of application. Ordinary
28
WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY?
language is frequently imprecise as to exactly what objects count as falling

under the definition. The problem with using reportative definitions of tech-
nology is that there are so many different uses of the term around. For in-
stance, some educators associate the word “technology” solely with computers
in the classroom, while the school building itself, as well as such older aids
to teaching as the blackboard, are part of technology in the broadest sense.
A kind of definition used in philosophy and in other academic areas is a
précising definition. This sort of definition retains the core ordinary mean-
ing of the word. It is not stipulative or arbitrary. However, unlike a reportative
definition it does not simply describe how people actually use the word. It
attempts to sharpen up the boundaries of application of the word by describ-
ing the range of application and cut-off points. (How big is “big” for a
certain kind of thing? How few hairs can one have and still be counted as
bald?) Any philosophical attempt at a general definition of technology will
be a précising definition.
British empiricist philosophers rejected the existence of essences as real
natures of things, but the notion of definition by single defining character-
istic continued in general use. In the second half of the twentieth century a
number of philosophers concluded that kinds of entities couldn’t be charac-
terized by an essence. One view (of Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1889–1951) is that
objects classified under a single name do not share any one single character-
istic but share a “family resemblance.” One can often recognize similarities
between members of the same human family but cannot find any single
feature that they all share. Any pair of things in the class shares some char-
acteristics but no one characteristic is shared by all of them. Wittgenstein
gave the example of the notion of “game.” The usual characteristics used to
define a game are not shared by every game. Not all games have competing
players. Not all games have hard and fast rules, involve equipment or game
pieces, and so forth. A game is best defined according to the family resemb-
lance approach by giving paradigmatic examples and suggesting that sim-
ilar things should also be included. Some contemporary philosophers present
views that would make technology an example of a family resemblance
concept. Current philosophers of technology such as Don Ihde, Donna
Haraway, Andrew Feenberg, and others have ceased searching for an “es-
sence of technology” of the sort propounded by early or mid-twentieth-
century thinkers such as Martin Heidegger (see chapter 5) or Jacques Ellul
(see below in this chapter, and chapter 7). It is suggested that the things that
are included under technology are too varied and diverse to share a single
essence.
29
WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY?
As mentioned above, the major theorists of technology of the first two-

thirds of the twentieth century believed that a universal, essential definition
of technology could be given. A number of recent theorists, such as Don
Ihde, Andrew Feenberg, and others, believe, in contrast, that there is not an
essence or single defining characteristic of technology, and that searching
for an essential definition is unproductive.
Guidelines for Definitions
Some general guidelines for definition are the following:
1 A definition should not be too broad or narrow. (That is, the definition
should not include things we would not designate by the word we are
defining, and the definition should not be so restricted as to exclude
things that should fall under the term defined.)
2 A definition should not be circular. (For instance, we shouldn’t define
“technology” as “anything technological” and then define “technolo-
gical” as “anything pertaining to technology.”)
3 A definition should not use figurative language or metaphors.
4 A definition should not be solely negative but should be in positive
terms. (A purely negative definition in most cases would not sufficiently
limit the range of application of the term. A definition by contrast has to
assume that the hearer knows the contrasting or opposite term.)
Box 2.2
Philosophical exceptions to the standard rules for definition
The rough guidelines for definitions will have exceptions if one holds
certain non-commonsensical philosophical views. For example, some
mystics believe God can be characterized only negatively, and hold to
so-called “negative theology.” Although a simply circular definition is
completely unhelpful, it has been pointed out that if one follows out
the definitions in a dictionary, looking up the words in the definition, one
eventually goes in a circle, although it is a big circle. Some philosophers,
such as Hegel, have suggested that the point is not to avoid circularity
but to make the circle big enough to encompass everything!
30
WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY?
An example of defining technology in a too narrow manner is the com-

mon contemporary tendency to mean by “technology” solely computers
and cell phones, leaving out all of machine technology, let alone other tech-
nology. A case of defining technology in a manner that may be too broad is
B. F. Skinner’s inclusion of all human activity in technology. Skinner under-
stands human activity as being conditioned and self-conditioning. For Skinner
conditioning is considered to be behavioral technology. A related move is the
general inclusion of “psychological technology” as part of the motivational
apparatus of technological activities, such as chanting in hunter-gatherer
societies, or various political beliefs in industrial societies (propagated by
propaganda, understood as a kind of technology by Ellul), thereby erasing
the distinction between technology and culture by including all of culture
within technology (see below on Jarvie).
Definitions of Technology
Three definitions or characterizations of technology are: (a) technology as

hardware; (b) technology as rules; and (c) technology as system.
Technology as hardware
Probably the most obvious definition of technology is as tools and ma-
chines. Generally the imagery used to illustrate a brochure or flier on tech-
nology is that of things such as rockets, power plants, computers, and
factories. The understanding of technology as tools or machines is concrete
and easily graspable. It lies behind much discussion of technology even when
not made explicit. (Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) made a distinction between
tools and machines in which the user directly manipulates tools, while
machines are more independent of the skill of the user.)
One problem for the definition of technology as tools or machines is cases
where technology is claimed not to use either tools or machines. One such
non-hardware technology is the behavioral technology of the psychologist
B. F. Skinner (1904–90). If one considers verbal or interpersonal manipula-
tion or direction of the behavior of another as technology then it appears we
have technology without tools. Mumford claims that the earliest “machine”
in human history was the organization of large numbers of people for manual
labor in moving earth for dams or irrigation projects in the earliest civiliza-
tions, such as Egypt, ancient Sumer in Iraq, or ancient China. Mumford calls
31
WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY?
this mass organized labor “the megamachine” (Mumford, 1966). Jacques

Ellul considers patterns of rule-following behavior or “technique” to be the
essence of technology. Thus, propaganda and sex manuals will be techno-
logy involving rules, and can, but need not always, involve use of tools or
hardware.
Technology as rules
Ellul’s “technique” mentioned above is a prime example of another defini-
tion of technology. This treats technology as rules rather than tools. “Soft-
ware” versus “hardware” would be another way to characterize the difference
in emphasis. Technology involves patterns of means–end relationships. The
psychological technology of Skinner, the tool-less megamachine of Mumford,
or the “techniques” of Ellul are not problems for this approach to techno-
logy. The sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), with his emphasis on “ration-
alization,” resembles Ellul on this, characterizing the rise of the West in
terms of rule-governed systems, whether in science, law, or bureaucracy.
Physical tools or machinery are not what is central; instead it is the means–
end patterns systematically developed.
Technology as system
It is not clear that hardware outside of human context of use and under-
standing really functions as technology. Here are some examples:
1 An airplane (perhaps crashed or abandoned) sitting deserted in the rain

forest will not function as technology. It might be treated as a religious
object by members of a “cargo cult” in the Pacific. The cargo cults arose
when US planes during the Second World War dropped huge amounts
of goods on Pacific islands and cults awaited the return of the big “birds.”
2 The Shah of Iran during the 1960s attempted to forcibly modernize the
country. He used the oil wealth to import high technology such as jet
planes and computers, but lacked sufficient numbers of operators and
service personnel. It has been claimed that airplanes and mainframe com-
puters sat outside, accumulating sand and dust or rusting, as housing for
storage and the operating and repair staffs for them were not made
available. The machinery did not function as technology.
3 Technological hardware not functioning as technology is not solely the
province of indigenous societies or developing nations, but can also be
32
WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY?
present in a milieu of high tech, urban sophisticates. Non-Western

technology was displayed in an exhibit of “Primitive [sic] and Modern Art”
at the Museum of Modern Art as purely aesthetic or artistic phenom-
ena. Indigenous implements and twentieth-century Western abstract art
objects were exhibited side by side to emphasize similarity of shape and
design. The labels of the primitive implements often did not explain
their use, only their place and date. (The use of these devices for cook-
ing, navigation, and other purposes was not explained in the captions.) In
some cases neither the museum visitors nor even the curators knew the
technological function of the objects. Therefore, although the artifacts
were simultaneously both technology and art for their original users,
they were not technology, but solely art, for the curators and viewers of
the museum exhibit.
These examples suggest that for an artifact or piece of hardware to be tech-

nology, it needs to be set in the context of people who use it, maintain it,
and repair it. This gives rise to the notion of a technological system that
includes hardware as well as the human skills and organization that are
needed to operate and maintain it (see consensus definition below).
Technology as Applied Science
Much of contemporary technology is applied science. However, to define

technology simply as applied science is misleading both historically and sys-
tematically. If one understands science in the sense of the combination of
controlled experiment with mathematical laws of nature, then science is only
some four hundred years old. Even the ancient Greeks who had mathemat-
ical descriptions of nature and observation did not have controlled experi-
ment. The medieval Chinese had highly developed technology (see chapter
10) and a rich fund of observation and theory about nature, but had neither
the notion of laws of nature nor controlled experiment. Technology in some
form or other goes back to the stone tools of the earliest humans millions of
years ago. Clearly, with this understanding of science and technology, through
most of human history, technology was not applied science. Part of the issue
is how broadly one defines science. If one means by science simply trial and
error (as some pragmatists and generalizers of Popper’s notion of conjecture
and refutation have claimed; Campbell, 1974), then prehistoric technology
could be treated as applied science. However, now the notion of science has
33
WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY?
been tremendously broadened to include virtually all human learning, in-

deed all animal learning, if one holds a trial and error theory of learning.
Perhaps this is an example of a definition of science that is too broad.
Even after the rise of early modern experimental science and the notion
of scientific laws in the seventeenth century, and the development of the
technology that contributed to the industrial revolution, most technological
development did not arise from the direct application of the science of Gali-
leo (1564–1642) and Newton (1642–1727). The inventors of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries usually did not know the theories of mathematical
physics of their day, but were tinkerers and practical people who found
solutions to practical problems without using the science of their day. Even
as late as Thomas Edison (1847–1931) we find a tremendously productive
inventor in the field of electricity who did not know the electromagnetic
theory of James Clerk Maxwell (1831–79) and his followers, but who pro-
duced far more inventions than those scientists who did know the most
advanced electrical field theories. Edison initially even disparaged the need
for a physicist as part of his First World War team, thinking one needed a
physicist only to do complicated numerical computations, but that a physi-
cist would have nothing much to contribute to technology. By this time
Edison’s view of the role of theory was getting somewhat dated.
Even in the contemporary situation, in which scientific training is essen-
tial for most technological invention, the notion of technology as applied
science, if taken in too simple and straightforward a way, is misleading.
Modern technology is pursued primarily by those with a scientific back-
ground and within the framework of modern science, but many of the
specific inventions are products of chance or of trial and error, not a direct
application of scientific theory to achieve a pre-assumed goal. Many chem-
ical discoveries have been results of accidents. Safety glass was discovered
when a chemical solution was spilled on a piece of glass laboratory appar-
atus, the glass was accidentally dropped, and it did not break. Penicillin was
discovered when a bacterial culture was accidentally contaminated by a
mold. Paper chromatography was discovered when a scientist accidentally
spilled some chemical on a filter paper, and the chemical separated into two
components as it seeped up the paper. The Post-it was discovered when a
technologist, Art Fry, using little bookmarks in his hymnal, remembered a
temporary glue that a colleague, Spencer Silver, had developed back in 1968
that was too weak to permanently stick two pieces of paper together. In
1977–9 3M began to market the invention, and by 1980 it was sold through-
out the USA. Charles Goodyear’s development of vulcanization of rubber
34
WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY?
involved numerous trials and experiments, but one crucial event involved
him accidentally leaving his treated “gum elastic” on a hot stove, and notic-
ing that it charred like leather. He then experimented to find a lesser, but
optimum, heat of exposure (Goodyear, 1855). Louis Pasteur (1822–95) fa-
mously said that chance favors the prepared mind. The development of
these accidental discoveries made much use of the scientific knowledge of
the people who made them. But the discoveries were hardly the straightfor-
ward application of scientific theory to a preset problem.
For these reasons, although technology involves knowledge, particularly
know-how, a definition of technology that characterizes it simply as applied
science is too narrow.
Systems Definition as a Consensus

Definition of Technology
A number of writers have formulated a somewhat complex definition of

technology to incorporate the notion of a technological system. The eco-
nomist John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2004) defined technology as “the
systematic application of scientific or other knowledge to practical tasks”
(Galbraith, 1967, chapter 2). Galbraith describes this as incorporating social
organizations and value systems. Others have extended this definition to
mention the organizational aspect of technology, characterizing technology
as “any systematized practical knowledge, based on experimentation and/or
scientific theory, which enhances the capacity of society to produce goods
and services, and which is embodied in productive skills, organization and
machinery” (Gendron, 1977, p. 23), or “the application of scientific or other
knowledge to practical tasks by ordered systems that involve people and
organizations, living things, and machines” (Pacey, 1983, p. 6). We can com-
bine these definitions into “the application of scientific or other knowledge
to practical tasks by ordered systems that involve people and organizations,
productive skills, living things, and machines.”
This consensus definition is sometimes characterized as the “technolo-
gical systems” approach to technology. The technological system is the
complex of hardware (possibly plants and animals), knowledge, inventors,
operators, repair people, consumers, marketers, advertisers, government
administrators, and others involved in a technology. The technological sys-
tems approach is more comprehensive than either the tools/hardware or
the rules/software approach, as it encompasses both (Kline, 1985).
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WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY?
The tool approach to technology tends to make technology appear neut-

ral. It is neither good nor bad. It can be used, misused, or refused. The
hammer can be used to drive a nail or smash a skull. The tool user is outside
of the tool (as in the case of carpenters’ tools) and controls it. The systems
approach to technology makes technology encompass the humans, whether
consumers, workers, or others. The individual is not outside the system, but
inside the system. When one includes advertising, propaganda, government
administration, and all the rest, it is easier to see how the technological
system can control the individual, rather than the other way round, as in the
case of simple tools.
The notion (known as autonomous technology) that technology is out of
human control and has a life of its own (see chapter 7) makes much more
sense with technological systems than it does with tools. Technological sys-
tems that include advertising, propaganda, and government enforcement
can persuade, seduce, or force users to accept them.
As noted above, not all students of technology wish to develop a defini-
tion or general characterization of technology. Some, particularly among
the “postmodern” devotees of science and technology studies, claim not
only that there is no “essence” of technology of the sort that mid-twentieth-
century thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul and others claimed
or sought, but that no general definition of technology is possible.
Despite the validity of the doubts of postmodern students of technology
studies concerning an essence of technology, the “consensus definition”
delineated above will help to keep the reader roughly focused on the kinds
of things under discussion. For instance, the recent advocates of “actor-
network theory” (see chapter 12) developed an approach to technology that
has many affinities to the consensus definition in the technological systems
approach. Advocates of the technological systems approach have recently
begun to ally with or even fuse with the social construction of technology
approach. Understanding technology as a network fits well with the Euro-
pean sociology of actor-network theory (see box 12.2). Thomas P. Hughes,
the person who is perhaps the leading American historian of technological
systems, has moved toward the social construction view, and combined it
with his own approach (Bijker et al., 1987; Hughes, 2004).
Study questions
1 Do you think we can have successful discussions of controversial topics

without bothering at all about definitions of major terms?
36
WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY?
2 Can we make words mean anything we wish? In what sense is this true
and in what sense is this false?
3 Are there any areas of knowledge or subject matters in which there are
“real definitions”? Are there any areas in which there are essential defini-
tions?
4 What sorts of classes of things might have only “family resemblances”
and no essential definitions? (Give examples other than the two given in
the chapter and explain your answer.)
5 The philosopher Arne Naess (decades later to be the founder of “deep
ecology”) in his earliest work surveyed people on the street as to their
definitions of various philosophical terms. What sort of definitions was
he collecting? Do you think this is a fruitful way to clarify philosophical
issues?
6 Do you think that the characterization of technology as applied science is
correct? Give examples that support this characterization and examples
that go against it (other than ones given in the chapter).
7 Does the notion of technology without tools make sense? If not, why
not? If so, try to give some examples not mentioned in the chapter.
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TECHNOCRACY
3
Technocracy
Technocracy is a theory of rule by technical experts. (Various other similar

terms for rule are: democracy, rule by the demos or common people; aristo-
cracy, rule by the aristos or best; and plutocracy, rule by plutocrats or the
wealthy.) Theories of technocracy have differed over exactly which sorts of
experts are fitted for rule, ranging from pure scientific or engineering expert-
ise to including the social scientific expertise of economists and sociologists.
In various forms, blatant and subtle, technocratic notions have been present
in the attitudes of many twentieth-century and present policies. The exten-
sion of the prestige and authority of technical experts to authority in non-
technical, especially political and economic, decision-making is an implicit
technocratic development.
This chapter surveys the major figures who have advocated rule by an
intellectual or technical elite. It turns out that they also comprise most of
the major historical philosophers who have written on issues related to
technology. As noted in the Introduction, not many of the major past philo-
sophers dealt at length with technology. However, Bacon around 1600, as
well as St Simon and Comte in the early nineteenth century, are three of the
early major philosophers of technocracy, and are also advocates of techno-
cracy in one form or another. Plato, who is the first Western philosopher by
whom we have extensive writings, is also one of the towering figures of
Western philosophy. The twentieth-century philosopher and mathemat-
ician Alfred North Whitehead was hardly exaggerating when he said, “The
safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is
that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” (Whitehead, 1927, p. 39). He
also was the major inspiration for later utopias and for theories of rule by
an intellectual elite. We re-encounter Bacon, who was a major precursor
38
TECHNOCRACY
of technocratic thinking as well as a scientific methodologist. St Simon in

France in the early nineteenth century proposed fully fledged technocratic
theories, with physical and social scientists, respectively, as the rulers. Then
we examine early twentieth-century technocracy, whose major thinker was
the American economist and sociologist Veblen. Finally, we survey late
twentieth-century technocratic thinkers, who had influence on government
and policy, including “postindustrial” social theory.
Plato
The word “technocracy” dates from the 1920s, but the roots of the notion of
technocracy go far back into Western history. In ancient Greece Plato (c.428–
347 BCE) proposed rule by philosophers in his Republic (c.370 BCE). However,
Plato’s proposed training of his philosopher kings included a great deal of
advanced mathematical education. The reason for this was that Plato be-
lieved there were real structures and natures of things that he called the
forms (see the section on “real definitions” in chapter 2). Plato argued that
there are ideal forms of shapes (geometrical forms) and of physical objects.
There are also ideal forms of ethical notions such as courage, piety, and
justice. These could be known only by purely intellectual grasp, not by
sense perception, which Plato considered a lower and less accurate form of
knowledge.
In the famous Allegory of the Cave in the Republic Book VII, Plato com-
pares ordinary humans to prisoners chained in a cave who are entertained
by the shadows on the wall of puppets. They see only the shadows and
neither the puppets that cast the shadows nor the fire that illumines the wall
(it has been suggested that Plato may have used the technology of puppets
of his day as the basis of his metaphor for the illusion of common-sense
knowledge; Brumbaugh, 1966). Plato tells the tale of a person who descends
into the cave and frees one of the prisoners to ascend and be exposed to
direct sight of physical objects and finally to brief glimpses of the sun. Plato
claims that ordinary humans know only the shadows of the forms as phys-
ical objects. Intellectual education can lead individuals to grasp the forms and
eventually to glimpse the Form of the Good. Plato’s scheme of education
for the rulers of his Republic is this journey to the light.
Plato not only presented his ideal Republic as ruled by an elite educated
in the highest forms of reasoning, but, quite unsuccessfully, attempted to
persuade the tyrant of Sicily to institute some of his ideas. According to one
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TECHNOCRACY
story, Plato was sold into slavery by the angry ruler, and his wealthy friends
had to pay ransom for him. (The dramatic story of Plato’s expedition to
Sicily is told in his Seventh Letter, a work that Plato ought to have written,
whether or not he is the real author.)
For the purposes of political rule Plato was interested in the forms of
justice and other ethical notions. Mathematics presented the clearest example
of precise intellectual knowledge of the forms (of numbers and geometry).
However, mathematics also exemplified strict reasoning from determined
assumptions. Mathematics remained the model of all rationality for many
later philosophers (see chapter 4). The geometry of Euclid (c.365–275 BCE)
begins with a set of assumptions, axioms, and postulates, and by logical
steps deduces the results of geometry. In the educational program for rulers
in Plato’s Republic mathematical study was only a preliminary to higher philo-
sophical study as a preparation for rule. While soldiers and craftspeople
needed very simple geometry and arithmetic for tactics or trade, the rulers
were trained for a decade in the theoretical mathematics of the day, includ-
ing a purely mathematical astronomy and theory of music. Plato even claimed
that pursuers of this pure mathematics should not concern themselves with
astronomical phenomena or hear music. Once the advanced mathematics of
the day had been mastered, the rulers were introduced to philosophical
reasoning or dialectic. Plato claimed that mathematical reasoning started
with basic assumptions or axioms. Philosophical dialectic was a higher form
of knowledge, in that it questioned and evaluated the basic assumptions of
knowledge. Thus Plato’s rulers or philosopher kings and queens were not
genuine technocrats. Their mathematical training was only a prelude to
acquiring philosophical wisdom and the ability to reason about moral and
political matters.
In much of the later Platonic tradition the sharp distinction between math-
ematics and the higher realm of philosophy was blurred or erased. Some
later neo-Platonists (and even, allegedly, Plato himself, according to contro-
versial reports of his later, unwritten teachings and of the “Lecture on the
Good” allegedly delivered at the Academy) shifted the emphasis to math-
ematical knowledge or mathematics-like knowledge as the key to all philo-
sophy. Plato’s nephew Speusippus (410–337 BCE) took over the academy of
Plato and replaced the forms with numbers. Plato’s greatest student; Aris-
totle, claimed that the immediate successors of Plato mistakenly identified
philosophy with mathematics. Thus the line between mathematics and
philosophy was partially erased in much of the later neo-Platonic tradition,
opening the way to universalizing the mathematical model of knowledge in
40
TECHNOCRACY
later technocratic thought. The power, rigor, and prestige of mathematical

reasoning plays an important role in modern technocratic thought, insofar
as engineers, economists, and others who use mathematical methods can
associate that aura of precision and rigor with their pronouncements in
politics and other areas beyond their specialties.
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon (1561–1626) in the early modern period presented a utopia

much closer to a genuine technocracy than Plato’s Republic. Bacon was an
extraordinary figure of the English Renaissance. He modestly claimed to
take “all knowledge for his province,” and did so. He became Lord Chancel-
lor of England and is famous as the author of succinct and pithy essays.
(Some have so admired his writing style as to claim, most implausibly, that
he was the author of Shakespeare’s works.) Bacon was active in law,
philosophy, and science. After working his way from a penniless youth to
a figure of great wealth and power he was indicted for accepting a bribe
(although this was common practice at the time and his indictment was
likely a product of political conflicts). His death, according to legend, was
caused by bronchitis brought on from getting a chill while experimenting
with preserving a chicken by stuffing it with snow. In order to maintain his
status he chose for recuperation a wet and cold bed in an elegant room in a
castle over a warm, dry bed in a much smaller room, and this choice of
aristocratic elegance over efficiency killed him.
Francis Bacon believed that through both knowledge of nature and tech-
nological power over nature humans can regain the clarity of mind and
purity of action that Adam and Eve had before the expulsion from the
Garden of Eden. Despite this religious formulation of the goal, Bacon in his
New Atlantis described an ideal society in which pursuers of something closer
to the modern notion of scientific and engineering knowledge played a cen-
tral role in the running of a prosperous and healthy society.
In Bacon’s (1624) utopia, New Atlantis, Salomon’s House was the name
for a kind of national research institution. Here experiments were carried
out and the properties of minerals, plants, machines, and many other things
for the purpose of the improvement of life were studied. Salomon’s House
even included individuals who worked as what we today call industrial spies,
traveling in disguise to other countries to observe their crafts and manufac-
tures. Bacon unsuccessfully proposed a more modest but real version of
41
TECHNOCRACY
Salomon’s House in the form of an actual college that would contain zoolo-
gical and botanical gardens, laboratories, and machine shops. Unfortunately,
King James I, sponsor of the King James Version of the Bible, showed no
interest in such an enterprise, or in Bacon’s dream of social betterment for
the nation.
Bacon also advocated experimental science and the inductive method
(see chapter 1). Theories of nature, he argued, should be based on general-
ization from individual observations and tested by individual observations,
not deduced from general principles. Bacon’s empirical approach was the
opposite of Plato’s. Where Plato downgraded the status of sense perception
to veritable illusion and claimed that pure intellectual reasoning was the
way to truth, Bacon claimed that sense observation was the road to truth
and that theories spun out of pure reason and philosophical speculation
were worthless paths to error. Bacon presented his theory of the sources of
error in his New Organon (1620) (modestly titled to suggest that it was re-
placement for the two millennia old Organon, or logical works of Aristotle).
In evaluating our observations Bacon claimed that we constantly had to be
on guard against what he called “the idols,” or distortions of perception and
thought, to which humans are prone and which they need to correct. He
classified these as: (a) the Idols of the Tribe, which are features of the human
constitution that mislead us, such as perceptual illusions and biases, as well
as cases where our hopes and preconceptions distort our perceptions; (b) the
Idols of the Cave (referring to Plato’s cave), which are illusions particular to
the subjective experience and background of the individual; (c) the Idols of
the Market Place, which are products of human communication, particularly
the distortions and ambiguities of language; and (d) the Idols of the Theater,
or delusions produced by belief in speculative philosophical systems.
Bacon’s idea of empirical scientific research inspired some decades later a
number of founders of the Royal Society, the premier British scientific soci-
ety, which exists to this day. Just as Plato taught that the intellectual of the
forms, most evident in mathematics, could be applied to ethics and politics,
Bacon believed that his inductive method should be applied to jurispru-
dence, deriving legal maxims by induction from legal cases the way one
derives scientific laws by induction from particular observations. Bacon stated
that knowledge is power and that one could command nature (control it) by
obeying it (grasping the principles and causes). Bacon often analogized the
relationship of the inquirer to nature as that of man to woman and used
metaphors of seduction, unveiling, and force to describe the process of
inquiry (see chapter 9). Bacon’s claim that knowledge is power and that
42
TECHNOCRACY
investigation of nature is the way to social prosperity and well-being is

much closer to the technocratic notion of Plato’s philosopher-rulers. How-
ever, the investigators at Bacon’s Salomon’s House did not themselves seek
to rule. They merely advised the rulers (prudently not specified or described
in his New Atlantis).
Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de St Simon
While inquirers at Salomon’s House did not themselves directly rule soci-
ety, in some of the schemes of the French Comte de St Simon (1760–1825)
in the early nineteenth century, scientists and technologists did directly rule
society.
St Simon participated in the American Revolution, offered his services
elsewhere as a soldier of fortune, and supported the French Revolution,
renouncing his title and presiding over a meeting of his community. In the
wake of the French Revolution he made a fortune speculating on the prop-
erty abandoned by fleeing royalists and on the deserted churches that
had been closed by the revolutionaries. He made money by selling the lead
from the windows and roofs of churches, attempting at one point to sell
the roof of Notre Dame in Paris. According to legend his valet was under
orders to awaken him each morning by announcing, “Arise Count, you
have great things to do today!” He allegedly proposed, unsuccessfully, to the
leading literary woman of the day, Madame de Staël, by saying “Madame,
you are the most extraordinary woman on earth and I am the most extraord-
inary man; together we shall produce an even more extraordinary child”
(Heilbroner, 1953).
St Simon, no technical man himself, and largely self-educated (by inviting
the leading scientists of the day for dinner conversations), gathered a circle
of engineering students from the leading French technical school of the day,
L’Ecole Polytechnique, founded during the French Revolution and supported
and further developed by Napoleon. St Simon saw the older feudal society
as wasteful, superstitious and warlike, supporting numerous parasites in the
form of the nobility and the clergy. He provocatively opens one essay with
the claim that if one morning the nation woke up to find all the clergy and
nobility gone the nation would not suffer, but if all the scientists, techni-
cians, and business people were gone society would collapse (St Simon,
1952, p. 72). The new alternative that St Simon saw emerging was industrial
society.
43
TECHNOCRACY
During the course of his lifetime, St Simon sketched a number of different

plans for the rule of industrial society. They varied with the tumultuous
politics of the times, whether dominated by radical revolutionaries, royal-
ists, or businessmen, probably with an eye to support from the rulers or the
powerful of the society of the day. Some were radically socialistic, and some
were capitalist, but all were quite centralized (like later French capitalism).
St Simon called the ruling body of his ideal society the Council of Newton,
suggesting the scientific nature of the rule by associating it with the name of
the pre-eminent physicist of the previous centuries. Scientists, technicians,
industrialists, and bankers filled the seats of various versions of the council.
Priests and nobility were eliminated from the new society.
St Simon’s ideas were influential on politically divergent groups. Some of
the early French capitalist proponents of railroad lines and of what was to
become the Suez Canal were followers of St Simon, but so were various
socialist revolutionaries (Manuel, 1962, chapter 4). St Simon coined a number
terms that came into worldwide use, including “individualism,” “physicist,”
“organizer,” “industrialist,” and “positivist” (Hayek 1952). The word “social-
ism” was not coined by St Simon, but soon appears in a St Simonian journal
written by his followers. Both the capitalism and the socialism that St Simon
variously advocated were planned and centralized. His capitalism was one
controlled by banks and monopolies. St Simon’s technocratic and centrally
planned version of socialism resembles that of the USSR. A number of his
slogans found their way into the Communism of Lenin and Stalin in the
Soviet Union via the writings of Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820–
95). (Engels introduced a number of St Simonian phrases and ideas that
were not present in Marx’s draft of The Communist Manifesto.) Lenin described
the future social organization of communism using the St Simonian terms
“society as one vast factory,” and “the organization of things and not of men.”
Stalin used St Simon’s phrase to characterize “artists as engineers of the
human spirit.” Ironically, a similar notion appears in the designation of the
technicians at Disneyland as “imagineers” (or engineers of the imagination).
St Simon’s views, unlike those of Plato and Bacon, present a fully fledged
technocracy. In some of his presentations, at least, the experts literally rule.
Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte (1798–1857) attended the L’Ecole Polytechnique and studied

the physical sciences of his day, but was expelled after being involved in a
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TECHNOCRACY
protest against the takeover of the school by the new monarchy that fol-
lowed the defeat of Napoleon. Comte began as a follower of and assistant
to St Simon. Comte systematized and greatly expanded the scattered and
disorganized ideas and lectures of his teacher St Simon. One of Comte’s
most central doctrines was his Law of the Three Stages, which claimed
that society evolved from a theological or religious stage, through a meta-
physical or philosophical stage, to a final positive or scientific stage. In the
theological stage the reasons for things are believed to be due to a will or
wills. At first, in fetishism, every object has its own will. Then, in polytheism,
there are the wills of a number of gods. Finally, in monotheism, a single
divine will accounts for everything. In the metaphysical stage the causes of
things are considered real abstractions, such as powers and forces. Finally, in
the positive stage the search for ultimate causes is relinquished and laws of
succession are the goal of knowledge. For Comte religion and metaphysics
are inferior, less evolved forms of knowledge in comparison to scientific
knowledge. The superior status of scientific knowledge and the downgrad-
ing or dismissing of other, non-scientific forms of knowledge in the human-
ities is very much part of the technocratic creed.
The first part of Comte’s philosophy is a theory of scientific knowledge
and philosophy of science. The second part is a social and political philo-
sophy of the organization of industrial society. Comte associated the forms
of thought of the three stages with forms of society. The theological stage
of society is militaristic. The metaphysical stage of society is centered on
law and jurisprudence. Finally, the positive stage corresponds to industrial
society.
Comte’s later work on social organization and the “religion of humanity”
may have been influenced by his love life, whether in a new appreciation of
the emotions in his love for Clothilde de Vaux, or in guilt over his mistreat-
ment of his companion. In Comte’s industrial society scientists literally re-
placed the Roman Catholic priesthood. A hierarchy of technical experts
replaced the church hierarchy.
In the twentieth century, books about the scientific elite had titles, such as
The New Priesthood (Lapp, 1965), that were meant metaphorically, but Comte
meant this quite literally. Comte’s plan for positivist churches that were to
replace the Catholic Church was a non-starter, although a few existed from
Brazil to England. The flag of Brazil bears Comte’s slogan “Order and
Progress.” Influential figures in Mexico during the late nineteenth-century
rule of Porfirio Diaz (1830–1915) professed allegiance to positivist ideals
(Zea, 1944, 1949).
45
TECHNOCRACY
Comte’s positivism was highly influential in less explicit and blatant forms
throughout the twentieth century. Rule of society based on knowledge means
rule of society based on scientific knowledge. Politics becomes a form of
applied science or social engineering. Comte invented the field and coined
the term “sociology” for the scientific study of society. He saw sociology as
the master discipline of social rule. For Comte, sociology, though not at the
basis of the hierarchy of science as was physics, was truly Queen of the
Sciences. Thus Comtean technocracy included social scientists, not just phys-
ical scientists, in a central role in the rule of society, as was often the case in
St Simon. Technocracy as rule, not specifically by engineers but by social
scientists of various sorts, became characteristic of the theories of a number
of social theorists in the USA and Europe in the 1950s through 1970s (see
below).
Comte’s philosophy of science and philosophy of history (the three stages)
were more long lasting in their direct influence than Comte’s plans for
social organization and the “religion of humanity.” Logical positivism (see
chapter 1) eliminated Comte’s political and religious theories. Nevertheless,
logical positivism retained an updated form of Comte’s claim that science is
the highest form of knowledge, indeed the only genuine knowledge.
Thorstein Veblen and the Technocracy Movement

in the USA and Elsewhere
During the early twentieth century the term “technocracy” was introduced
for the first time. The economist John M. Clark coined the term “techno-
cracy” in the mid-1920s. In the USA there was an actual technocratic move-
ment named as such in politics. Its heyday was in the 1920s and 1930s and
the movement was always small. It still exists today but is hardly noticed.
The economist Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) was the major American
theorist of technocracy in the early twentieth century. Veblen was a de-
tached and arch critic of the Gilded Age society of late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century America. He studied the customs of the business elite of
his day the way an anthropologist studied an exotic pre-civilized culture. He
despised the prissy academic culture in which he taught, and his book about
universities, The Higher Learning in America, was originally to be subtitled A
Study in Total Depravity (Dowd, 1964). He had almost equal disdain for eco-
nomic formalism. When The Theory of Business Enterprise was refused by a
publisher for not having enough mathematical economics in it, he simply
46
TECHNOCRACY
added some fake equations in footnotes. Veblen’s irreverent and iconoclas-

tic remarks and his risqué lifestyle caused him to be separated from several
of the major universities at which he taught (at one point he lived in a tent
in a pasture just outside the perimeter of the Stanford campus). He is prob-
ably most famous for his notion of “conspicuous consumption” in The Theory
of the Leisure Class (1899), in which ostentatious display of one’s purchases is
utilized both to advertise one’s wealth and importance and to intimidate the
lower classes.
In The Engineers and the Price System (1921) and other works Veblen con-
trasted the wastefulness and inefficiency of business practices with the effi-
ciency of the engineers. He contrasted the human “instinct for workmanship”
manifested in modern times most fully by the engineer with the predatory
instincts of the businessman. He proposed a society run by engineers rather
than by businesspeople. During the economic downturn after the First World
War and in the wake of the Russian Revolution Veblen proposed a genuine
revolution of the engineers and even spoke somewhat facetiously of “a
Soviet of engineers” (though he soon backed away from a direct proposal of
political action).
A follower of Veblen and self-proclaimed engineer, Howard Scott con-
tinued the political technocratic movement (Scott hung out in Greenwich
Village coffee houses in New York and was a kind of coffee house engineer
analogous to the coffee house poets of the period). Scott’s activism and
following was revived during the Great Depression of the early 1930s. Scott’s
technocrats combined the conditioning of human behavior, following the
behaviorist psychologists Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) and John Watson (1878–
1958), with their conception of society run as a machine by engineer ex-
perts. The political technocratic movement in the USA, like Comte’s positivist
churches, did not ultimately catch on. Scott’s Technocracy, Inc., with its
uniforms, identical automobiles, and yin–yang symbol icon, was widely dis-
credited after the failure of a much-anticipated national radio address by
Scott (Elsner, 1967). By 1936 the political movement that explicitly called
itself technocracy lost its popular appeal but it exists to this day as a small
sect that runs advertisements in liberal and leftist magazines.
The technocratic tendency diffused widely throughout American society
in the Progressive movement of the period around the First World War and
in the New Deal of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945) during
the 1930s. Both the Progressive movement and the New Deal were responses
to social disorganization and crisis. The Progressives reacted against corrupt
city political machines and price-gouging monopolies. The New Deal was a
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TECHNOCRACY
response to the Great Depression (1929–1941). However, the phrase social

engineering had already become current among politicians of the Progress-
ive Movement and among followers of American pragmatism in politics.
Even pro-capitalist engineers such as Herbert Hoover (1874–1964), later to
be US President, proclaimed the ideal of the engineer as manager of an
efficient society. Nonetheless, all but a handful of engineers drew back from
Scott’s radical conclusion of the promotion of engineers to be rulers.
Technocracy was not limited to the USA. In Sweden, the early works of
now famous sociologists Gunnar and Alva Myrdal advocated technocracy.
The Myrdals, however, unlike many other technocrats, clearly saw the dan-
gers of the conflict of technocracy with democracy, and attempted to syn-
thesize the two (Myrdal, 1942). In Germany, Karl Mannheim, the sociologist
of knowledge, wrote on “democratic planning” and on the role of the elite
of free-floating intellectuals in the 1920s, and continued writing on this theme
after he fled to Britain in the 1930s (Mannheim, 1935; 1950). Mannheim’s
and the Myrdals’ technocratic social planners were social scientists, not phys-
ical technologists.
Meanwhile, both totalitarian dictatorships of the period, Germany and the
USSR, had strong technocratic components. Nazism incorporated a strange
mixture of anti-technological, pagan, health food, nudist, back-to-nature rhet-
oric, with a technocratic belief in the capacity of engineers of new technology
to bring the regime to world power. During the war the technocratic aspect
won out over the romantic, ecological element (Herf, 1984; Harrington,
1996, pp. 193–9). In the USSR a strong technocratic ideology was present in
the Stalinist rhetoric of forced industrialization (Bailes, 1978). As noted, the
central planning ideal of the USSR resembled St Simon’s dream.
Technocracy and Post-industrial Society Theory
During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in the USA, the welfare states of Europe,
and the communist USSR, technocratic tendencies were influential in theor-
ies of government. During the New Frontier of the presidency (1961–3) of
John F. Kennedy and the Great Society (1963–8) of Lyndon Johnson in the
USA, and in the Labor government (1964–70, 1974–6) of Harold Wilson in
the UK, technocratic notions were afloat among advisors. Some spoke of
the “white-hot” technological revolution, and Wilson in a preface to a
Labour Party report claims his party “believed that manpower and resources
must be planned intelligently . . . [but] in the modern world such planning
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TECHNOCRACY
would be meaningless without the full planning and mobilization of scient-

ific resources” (Werskey, 1978, p. 320). In the USA, former General Motors
executive Robert S. McNamara and his “whiz kids” were the experts in
quantitative analysis who did the strategic planning for the Vietnam War
(1961–73). After the Second World War the centrality of scientific research
and development to the economy was recognized. Big Science, such as the
atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, had come of age during the Second
World War. Nuclear physicists, such as, successively, J. Robert Oppenheimer
(1904–67) and Edward Teller (1908–2003) (Herken, 2002), as well as the
mathematician John von Neumann (1894–1964) (Heims, 1980; Poundstone,
1992), became important advisors to government during the Cold War
nuclear arms race. President Dwight Eisenhower, in his in 1960 farewell
address, famously warned of the growing power of the “military industrial
complex,” the complex of large corporations producing military armaments
and the Pentagon bureaucracy.
In the USA and in Germany it was claimed by various sociologists that
political ideology had become irrelevant and what was important was
tinkering to fine tune the economy by economists and social planning by
technocratic social science experts (Bell, 1960; Aron, 1962; Dahrendorf,
1965). This was the “end of ideology” thesis. In contrast, in the Soviet Union,
Marxist-Leninist ideology was claimed to be the true theory of politics. In
the Soviet Union Marxism-Leninism played the role of the technocratic
social science of central planning. It was claimed to be the science of society
(and even of nature) on the basis of which political decisions were made. In
Western Europe ideology had a less pejorative connotation than in the USA,
and by the end of the century often had a positive one. In the USA, political
commentators still discussed “ideologists” versus “pragmatists” as the fac-
tions in the People’s Republic of China.
In the West, the theory of post-industrial society was advocated by a
number of technocratic thinkers in the 1960s and 1970s. These thinkers
included the economist John Kenneth Galbraith (1967), the sociologist Dan-
iel Bell (1973), and the foreign policy advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (1970).
Post-industrial society theory is a kind of technological determinism (see
chapter 6). It claims that various forms of the technology of industrial pro-
duction produce different forms of social rule. In this respect it is like Marx-
ism, but it rejects Marx’s socialism and communism for a prediction of the
coming of technocratic rule in post-industrial society.
Post-industrial society theory describes the stages of society as agricultural
followed by industrial followed by post-industrial. Agricultural production
49
TECHNOCRACY
using human and animal power along with some wind and waterwheel
power yields a society of peasants and feudal rule. Mechanized manufactur-
ing industry leads to blue-collar factory workers and rule by capitalist owner-
entrepreneurs. Finally, the rising dominance of information processing and
service industries leads to new forms of educated workers to oversee auto-
mated machinery and also leads to technocratic rule. In industrial society
agricultural workers, once the vast majority of the population, become a
small minority. So, it is claimed, in post-industrial society blue-collar factory
workers shrink to a minority. Information technology rather than energy
technology becomes dominant. Brzezinski even claimed that the student
revolts of the 1960s were similar to the peasant revolts of the early modern
period, in that the desperate, rebelling humanities students found them-
selves to be superfluous in a society that was to be run by computer scient-
ists and engineers.
Large corporations owned by numerous stockholders but run by man-
agers replace the traditional, family owned and run firms of earlier capitalism.
Post-industrial society theorists claim that the new society is post-capitalist
in that the capitalists, the owners of stock, no longer run the firms. Instead,
a variety of planners, engineers, industrial psychologists, advertising, mar-
keting and media experts, economists, and accountants supply the informa-
tion to the managers. The “separation of ownership and control,” first
described by Franklin Roosevelt advisor Adolph Berle (Berle and Means,
1933) and later developed by economist John Kenneth Galbraith (1967),
describes the situation. Galbraith and others went as far as to claim that
long-term rational planning in the corporation under managers comes to
dominate the traditional search for short-term profits by capitalists. Some
conservative post-industrial society theorists claim that a “new class” is
replacing capitalists as most influential in society. This class is variously
identified with technocrats or with managers, and is sometimes described
as the professional managerial class (PMC).
The technocracy thesis for post-industrial society has a simpler and a
subtler form. The simpler form is that the stratum of technocratic experts,
what Galbraith calls the technostructure, directly rule, replacing traditional
politicians and business leaders. The subtler form, suggested by Galbraith
(1967), is that politicians and corporate chief executives are dependent for
information on the basis of which to make decisions on numerous lower
level technical experts, scientists, engineers, accountants, economists, polit-
ical scientists, psychologists of propaganda and the media, and so forth. These
often invisible lower level figures frame and even bias the alternatives
50
TECHNOCRACY
between which the politician or executive chooses, and thus surreptitiously

channel and direct policy. So-called “policy wonks” and “computer nerds,”
to use the disparaging slang applied to them, actually control the direction
of the state, despite their lack of visibility. This form of the technocracy
thesis has relevance even when the national leaders profess political views
that would reject technocracy, but nevertheless are dependent for their
decision-making on numerous economists, military technology experts, polit-
ical scientist pollsters, and science advisors. (For instance, 1988 presidential
candidate Michael Dukakis was disparaged as a “technocrat,” although the
elder George Bush, as former head of the CIA, was hardly detached from
the technostructure.)
Conclusion
Technocracy is a notion with a long prehistory and a variety of forms in

contemporary society. Plato emphasized the knowledge in rule and used
mathematics as a model of intellectual knowledge and a means of training
rulers, although the rulers themselves were philosophers. Bacon empha-
sized the power of knowledge of nature and presented a utopia in which
investigators of nature supplied information to the rulers and in which the
exploitation of nature led to prosperity and power for the state. St Simon
and Comte emphasized the superiority of scientific knowledge to religion
and philosophy and directly advocated a ruling role for scientists and engin-
eers. In the early twentieth-century USA, the word technocracy and an
actual political technocracy movement arose. The movement had only a
brief span of interest and popularity, but the technocratic notion became
widespread in less blatant forms. In the USA, Western Europe, and the
USSR during the 1950s through the 1970s more subtle forms of technocratic
doctrine were widespread. In the USA and Western Europe political ideo-
logy was said to be obsolete and replaced by social and economic engineer-
ing during the late 1950s. In the 1970s, theorists of post-industrial society
claimed that traditional owner-entrepreneurs and traditional politicians were
being replaced by corporate and government technocrats in the information
society.
Claims about the disappearance of political ideology were quickly shown
to be false by the ideological political protest movements of the 1960s. The
demise of the short-term profit-oriented owner was shown to be exagger-
ated in the 1980s and 1990s. Nevertheless, diluted or implicit technocratic
51
TECHNOCRACY
ideas have been widespread in government agencies and in social theory. In

a society tremendously dependent on technology and technological develop-
ment, with large corporations and government dependent on economists
and other social scientists such as marketing psychologists, survey-takers,
and pollsters, the technocratic tendencies of society continue even if they
are widely condemned rather than praised. One of the issues raised by the
technocracy thesis is whether the only form of rigorous and useful rea-
soning is scientific and technological reasoning, or whether there are non-
technical forms of reasoning appropriate and applicable to social issues and
the problems of everyday life. We discuss this issue in the next chapter.
Study questions
1 Is technocracy desirable? Why or why not?

2 Is the “subtle” version of technocracy, Galbraith’s technostructure, true
of your society? That is, do leading politicians and corporate leaders
have their decisions pre-framed by technical advisors to the extent that
their decisions are directed by the lower level input?
3 Does the shift of our economy from a manufacturing economy to a
“service economy” justify the claim that it is becoming a technocracy?
What sort of jobs count as “service” jobs? Are all or most of these rel-
evant to the high technology economy?
4 Adolph Berle in the 1930s and J. K. Galbraith in the 1960s claimed that in
the modern corporation there is a separation of ownership from control.
That is, the corporations are owned by stockholders who do not oversee
the day-to-day operations of the corporation. Management, which does
not own the corporation, controls its operations. Do you think that this
accurately describes today’s corporations? Does it apply to all, some, or
none of them?
52
RATIONALITY, TECHNOLOGICAL RATIONALITY, AND REASON
4
Rationality, Technological
Rationality, and Reason
An issue that divides boosters and detractors of technology and the techno-
logical society is the nature of rationality. Science is generally taken as the
prime model or paradigm of rationality in our society. Technology (usually
construed as applied science) is likewise seen as part of the rationality of
modern society.
Technocrats see themselves as advocates of the rule of reason. Unlike
Plato, however, they understand reason to mean technological/scientific
reason. Analytical critics of the technological pessimists or dystopians dis-
trust the grand theses of European figures such as Heidegger and Ellul.
Technocrats and most analytical philosophers of technology advocate a piece-
meal evaluation of technology, one project at a time (Pitt, 2000, chapters 5,
6). In this, ironically, they agree with the recent continental philosophy
influenced American philosophers of technology (Ihde, Feenberg, Haraway).
These philosophers are skeptical of the claim that technology has an essence
or general character that can be morally or culturally assessed as a whole
(Achterhuis, 2001, pp. 5–6). Here analytical philosophers and postmodernists
(odd bedfellows, indeed) agree. Many analytical philosophers and almost all
technocratic opponents of grand theses and narratives of technological pes-
simism generally use risk/benefit analysis to do the evaluation (see below).
It is a major question whether the mathematical calculations of risk and
benefit can incorporate, or do justice to, the moral and aesthetic values of
the people who live with the technology, as we shall see toward the end of
this chapter.
Many students of the rise of modern society, beginning with the early
twentieth-century German sociologist Max Weber, have portrayed the rise
of modern, Western society as the rise of rationality. Weber spoke of the
53
“rationalization” of various areas of society, including, of course, econom-

ics and science, but extending through all areas of society and culture. By
rationalization Weber meant systematization and organization by means of
rational principles. Weber included in his extraordinarily wide-ranging
study of rationalization not only bureaucracy, but also theology (in Judaism,
Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism). He even included, as an
extensive example of rationalization in music, the history of the develop-
ment of the piano (Weber, 1914, 1920, 1920/1a, b, c).
Jacques Ellul’s “technique” has many parallels to Weber’s “rationalization.”
(Oddly, Ellul in The Technological Society (1954), his first and most famous
work, which introduces the notion of technique, does not mention this
concept of Weber.) Recall that Ellul is a prime advocate of the notion of
technology as primarily a matter of rules rather than of hardware (see chap-
ter 2). Technological rules constitute his “technique.” Ellul’s “technical phe-
nomenon” is the application of technique to all aspects of life and society, and
corresponds to the complete triumph of Weber’s process of rationalization.
In late twentieth-century theories of technocracy and post-industrial soci-
ety the application of scientific rationality to various areas of social predic-
tion and planning was seen as an admirable culmination of the rise of reason.
The application of such techniques as operations analysis, cost/benefit and
risk/benefit analysis, rational choice theory, and the general application of
economic models to apparently non-economic aspects of society, such as
politics, and even mate choice, is seen as a positive step. Applied social
science becomes “social engineering” of a sort far more complex and sophis-
ticated than the Progressive Movement forerunners of the technocracy move-
ment envisaged (see chapter 3).
In contrast to the technocrats and technological optimists, those who
have been pessimistic about the dominance of technology in our society
have often contrasted a higher or genuine rationality with technological
rationality, or “instrumental rationality” (see below). Technological ration-
ality is seen as a lower form of rationality that needs to be supplemented and
overseen by genuine philosophical, dialectical, or other higher rationality.
This is particularly true in the German tradition that comes from Immanuel
Kant (1724–1804) and Georg Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) in the late eight-
eenth and early nineteenth centuries. This contrast of dialectical and instru-
mental reason is taken up in twentieth-century critical theory.
One traditional model for rationality in the West since the time of Plato
in ancient Greece has been mathematics (see chapter 3). Mathematics is
generally considered to have the features of universality, necessity, rigor,
54
and certainty. Mathematics has universality with respect to individuals as

well as cultures. Mathematical results are such that anyone correctly follow-
ing the calculation techniques will get the same result. There is no subject-
ive individual variation in correct answers to a well set problem. Likewise,
there is no cultural variation in the results of a proof or a problem even if
there is cultural variation in notation or symbols. The “Pythagorean theo-
rem” (concerning the squares of the sides of a triangle containing a right
angle) was independently discovered in the ancient Near East and in China,
but the result is not relative to the different cultures that have discovered
and used it (some students of ethno-mathematics will dispute the generaliza-
tion of this claim; see chapter 10). The logic of mathematical proof has a
compelling necessity. If one follows the proof, step-by-step, one is inexor-
ably led to the conclusion. The necessary conclusions have certainty. They
cannot reasonably be doubted. Mathematical algorithms show this necessity
and certainty with particularly clarity. An algorithm is a procedure that gives
rules that if followed will lead mechanically to the correct result. Math-
ematical results are precise and not vague. Even mathematics that deals in
probabilities and statistics gives precise probabilities and distributions.
These features of mathematics have led many philosophers and theorists
of society to see mathematics as the paradigm of rationality. Many Western
philosophers have thought that rationality in general should aspire to the
universality, necessity, certainty, and precision believed to be exhibited by
mathematics. The seventeenth-century philosophical movement now known
as rationalism, whose main representatives were the French mathematician-
philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), inventor of analytic geometry, the
German mathematician-philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), co-
inventor of the differential and integral calculus, and the Dutch philosopher
Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), who worked as a lens grinder to support himself,
aspired to make all philosophical reasoning conform to the necessity and
rigor of mathematics. Spinoza cast his book Ethics in the logical form of a
geometry treatise, with axioms, theorems, and proofs. Even philosophers
who believed that our reasoning in science and in ethics fell short of the
mathematical ideal used the mathematical ideal as the standard by which to
measure reasoning in other fields. John Locke (1632–1704) claimed that nat-
ural philosophy (physics) could not be a science because we do not know the
essences of the submicroscopic construction of bodies (1689, p. 645), while
ethics might be a science because it is based on logical derivations from
definitions! Although Locke is often considered the founder of empiricism,
this evaluation of physics and ethics is the opposite of that of later logical
55
positivism and much contemporary educated (or half-educated) common

sense.
This mathematical ideal of reasoning has led in recent centuries to com-
putational models in ethics. The British philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–
1832) claimed that ethics was a matter of adding units of pleasure and
subtracting units of pain (as negative of pleasure). Actions and policies that
maximized pleasure and minimized pain for all concerned (computed this
way be simple arithmetic) were the best acts and policies. Bentham called
this theory of ethics utilitarianism. Rational choice theorists in twentieth-
century political science have modeled political and military strategies on an
economic model of costs and benefits. Risk/benefit analysts evaluate the
worthwhileness of technological projects by adding benefits and subtracting
risks in a manner similar to Bentham’s utilitarianism.
Scientific rationality is broader than mathematical rationality. Science
involves mathematics, but it also involves observation and experiment. The
support or confirmation of scientific hypotheses and theories by evidence
does not involve the necessity and certainty of a mathematical proof or
algorithm. Scientific hypotheses and theories are not certain, but are, at best,
probable. Even the estimation of the probability or degree of support or
justified belief in scientific statements is not mechanical. Science involves
guesswork and judgment.
Nevertheless, many philosophers of science, inductive logicians, and lo-
gical positivists during the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries
pursued a mechanical version of the scientific method and an algorithm for
automatically and exactly computing the probabilities of scientific theories.
This was the ideal of Rudolf Carnap’s work in formal inductive logic. All but
a very few philosophers of science by the later decades of the twentieth
century concluded from the failure of this enterprise that this was an illusory
goal, and that scientific method cannot be made mechanical and algorithmic.
A number of thinkers in recent decades, particularly philosophers of sci-
ence, persuaded of the failure of algorithmic models of science, particularly
the failure of the program for a formal inductive logic, have embraced a
wider conception of rationality that involves judgment (Putnam, 1981, 174–
200; Brown, 1988). Judgment involves the sizing up of a situation, assess-
ment of evidence, and deciding on a path of action without following rules.
Aristotle, in his Ethics (c.240 BCE), emphasized the role of judgment. Immanuel
Kant, especially in his Third Critique, The Critique of Judgment (1791), also
emphasized the role of the power of judgment, and claimed that judgment
is not characterizable by rules. If there were rules for judgments, there
56
would have to be rules for the application of judgment, and rules for those
rules, ad infinitum. Even though judgment does not follow rules it is not
arbitrary (Arendt, 1958). Considered judgments in law, medicine, science,
and technology are treated as reasonable although they do not follow some
formula or recipe.
Nonetheless, a version of rationality, in large part based on science and
technology, has won widespread favor in the twentieth century. This is
what Weber and others have called instrumental rationality. Instrumental
rationality is means–end rationality. It involves the search for the most effi-
cient means to reach a given end. Instrumental rationality and the search for
efficiency are rightly identified with the technological approach. (Ellul’s “tech-
nique,” with its emphasis on efficiency and the search for efficient means,
strongly resembles Weber’s instrumental rationality.)
Instrumental rationality also has a close tie with science. August Comte
identified the goal of science, not with explanation in terms of essences or
natures that the old, metaphysical approach attempted, but with prediction.
Predictions are based on causal laws. If a certain thing happens then a cer-
tain result will follow. If one strikes a match (provided it is dry) it will light.
Instrumental rationality depends on the causal sequences or “if–then” con-
nections of science. If one wishes to reach a certain goal, then one must
follow a certain procedure. If one wishes to light a match one must strike it.
Means and end mirror cause and effect (Putnam, 1981, p. 175).
One feature of instrumental rationality is that, although it focuses on
fitting means to ends, or finding efficient means to reach given goals, it does
not evaluate the ends themselves. The choice of ends is itself treated as
arbitrary and irrational, or, at least, non-rational. This is in turn tied to the
notion that one cannot reason about values and that value judgments are
subjective and arbitrary. This viewpoint, popular in our culture, was given
classic formulation early in the twentieth century by Max Weber. According
to Weber Western culture is being rationalized. More and more areas of
traditional thought and action are being structured by instrumental reason.
However, the goals or values about which the means are rationally struc-
tured are based on irrational decision. There can be no genuine reasoning
about values. Here Weber agrees with the existentialists, and sees choice of
values as an arbitrary, irrational decision.
Critics of instrumental reason or instrumental rationality disagree with
this conclusion. Many of the critics would claim that it is possible to reason
about ethics. Classical philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle disagree with
Weber and existentialism here.
57
With a very different approach, the American pragmatist John Dewey

(1859–1952) would claim we can reason about values, but his own mode of
reasoning is itself means–end reasoning. Ends do justify the means, but not
every end is sufficient to justify its means. Ends and means must be fitted to
one another.
Against the positivist claim that scientific predictive and possibly causal
reasoning is the only form of legitimate reasoning and meaningful discourse,
some critics of instrumental rationality would appeal to traditional, meta-
physical reasoning. This higher form of reasoning has been characterized in
various ways, though these ways are related. Plato claimed that although
mathematical reasoning from assumptions or axioms was the training for
the philosopher rulers, mathematical reasoning was lower than dialectical
reasoning that questioned the fundamental assumptions. Dialectical reason-
ing examined the forms of values such as justice. (See the discussion of
Plato’s educational plan for philosopher rulers in chapter 3.)
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Kant, Hegel, and a
number of other German philosophers in between contrasted reason with
understanding in various ways. In Kant (1781) understanding is the faculty
of both common sense reasoning and scientific reasoning about things and
causes. Understanding deals with objects, entities that are delimited in space
and time. Objects are finite and have boundaries. They are set against a
larger background of space and time, which is supplied by the forms of our
perceptual intuition. Things as they are in themselves are not accessible to
perception and understanding. However, things as they are for us, things as
experienced, are grasped as structured by our perception and understanding.
We know that the thing in itself exists, but not what it is. We only know
things as we have organized them perceptually and conceptually. We can-
not step outside of our senses or mind to see what things are like when we
are not perceiving them, or to think about what things are like independent
of our thinking about them.
Reason is the faculty of reasoning concerning notions that are beyond the
reach of understanding, such as self, God, and the universe. These latter
objects, Ideas of the totality of the universe, and the Ideal of God, are not
delimited in space and time, and hence not graspable as objects by reason.
They are limits or asymptotes of the sequences of our reasoning, but they
are pseudo-objects.
Reason, in Kant’s sense here, is the extrapolation to infinity of the notions
that understanding applies to finite objects. The immortal soul is infinite
relative to time. God is traditionally described as infinite in power,
58
knowledge, goodness, and many other respects. The universe may or may
not be infinite in space or in time. Reason in its theoretical form leads to
contradiction. Reason, as understanding without the input of empirical experi-
ence, is spinning its wheels, so to speak. In this form, when dealing with
entities that are not delimited objects or objects of experience, such as God,
the soul, and the universe as a whole, reason is the understanding attempt-
ing to go beyond its own limits and falling into paradox. Kant calls these
contradictions with respect to the universe as a whole the Cosmological
Antinomies. Thus, according to Kant, one can refute the notion of the infin-
ite universe, showing contradictions and apparently defending the finite
universe. However, one can also refute the notion of a finite universe,
showing its contradictions, apparently defending an infinite universe. (The
paradoxes of infinite “naive” set theory in mathematics strongly resemble
Kant’s Antinomies of Reason.)
Similarly, freedom and determinism can both be refuted at a purely
theoretical level. However, in a further twist, according to Kant, in the
practical, not purely theoretical, realm of ethics, practical reason is able to
grasp notions such as freedom that are paradoxical for purely theoretical
reason.
Hegel (1770–1831) gave the dialectic of theoretical reason a more posit-
ive role. The contradictions that reason reaches lead to new formulations
that surpass and synthesize the opposing notions that had contradicted one
another. For this process, Hegel used a German term (aufheben) that means
both to abolish and to raise to a new level (sometimes the Latinized term
“sublation” is used for it, from the past participle of the verb tollo, “to lift”).
In contrast to Kant’s contradictions of reason, which act as barriers, Hegel’s
contradictions are the motor that drives reason onward. Although a bit
inaccurate, Hegel’s dialectic is generally portrayed as starting with a thesis
(an idea or position), it being countered by an antithesis (an opposing,
opposite idea), and the two being both absorbed and transcended in a syn-
thesis that incorporates the best of each and at the same time raises their
fusion to a higher level. Hegel claims that to grasp the limits of reason, as
Kant claimed to have done, is in some sense to be able to pass beyond those
limits in order to grasp them. This dialectical reasoning shows that reason
has no limits of the sort that Kant believed existed. (The slogan of Buzz
Lightyear in the Disney cartoon Toy Story, “To infinity and beyond,” could
also be the motto of Hegel and of mathematical theorists of infinite sets, but
would be denied by Kant, Aristotle, and mathematicians who demand that
all proofs be based on concrete computations.)
59
Note that the dialectic is also no longer an interchange of conversation or

a process of thought alone, as in Plato and Kant, but is the very process of
reality. Marx, in turn, took over this Hegelian version of dialectic. For Hegel
and for Marx society and history are in dialectical process, while for Hegel
and Marx’s sidekick Friedrich Engels, nature itself is a dialectical process.
The twentieth-century German critical theorists, such as Herbert Marcuse
(1898–1979) and Jürgen Habermas (1929–), took up the notions of Kant,
Hegel, and Marx. They attempted to develop a dialectical approach to the
criticism of modern industrial, capitalist, technological society. They saw
modern technological society as in the thrall of instrumental reason. Tech-
nocratic and positivist notions of superiority of scientific/technological
reason and the meaninglessness of traditional metaphysics and ethics are
the ideology of modern society. The pushing of questions of ends and
values out of the realm of rational investigation and discourse serves to
prevent criticism of the implicitly ruling values and the values of the
rulers. Marcuse contrasts the traditional metaphysical reasoning of Plato
and Aristotle with the limited universe of positivist reasoning and sees
the latter as the implicit doctrine of the military industrial bureaucracy.
Marcuse sees Weber’s sharp distinction between instrumental rationality
and consideration of values as an implicit justification of capitalism and
bureaucracy. He claims that Max Weber’s decisionism, subjectivity with
respect to values, and emphasis on social rationalization implicitly serve
ultra-conservative ends (Marcuse, 1965). Marcuse even hints that Weber’s
emphasis on arbitrary decision and charismatic leadership of the ruler points
toward fascism, despite Weber’s own anti-socialist liberalism. Marcuse even
draws parallels between the analytical philosopher’s debunking of meta-
physical reasoning and the witch-hunting government investigators claim-
ing not to understand the language of their politically radical targets (Marcuse,
1964, p. 192). Marcuse would replace or constrain instrumental rationality
with dialectical or philosophical rationality, perhaps even replacing tradi-
tional science and technology with a new “liberated” science and techno-
logy that serves human values.
Habermas (1987), likewise, sees instrumental rationality as flawed and
inadequate as a basis for a good society. Habermas, however, thinks that
instrumental rationality is perfectly adequate and appropriate for science
and technology. Habermas sees the error not in the application of instru-
mental rationality to technology but in the extension of instrumental ration-
ality to other areas, such as politics and the family. According to Habermas,
scientism and technocracy are the theoretical and political manifestations of
60
this illegitimate extension. Habermas contrasts instrumental rationality as

appropriate for the manipulation of things by the individual subject or knower
with communicative rationality, in which two or more humans interact.
Borrowing from the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, Habermas calls this
realm of everyday human interaction the “lifeworld” (see chapter 5). What
Habermas calls the “colonization of the lifeworld” is the application of tech-
nological approaches and instrumental rationality to the realm of human
communication. The use of cost/benefit and rational choice approaches to
politics replacing the communicative discourse concerning meaning and goals
in politics or the replacement of childrearing and education with supposedly
scientific behavioral engineering would be examples of this colonization.
Habermas’s claims as to the dangers of instrumental reason are more mod-
est than those of Marcuse, and concern illegitimate extension and extrapola-
tion of instrumental rationality, not instrumental rationality itself.
Some feminist critics, such as Nancy Fraser, see Habermas’s concern for
the integrity of authority in the traditional family, immune from interven-
tion by the welfare system and the educational system, as a reactionary
position. They see Habermas as in effect defending traditional patriarchy
and denying the rights of children against religiously dogmatic or abusive
parents (Fraser, 1987). Habermas, on the contrary, himself sees those “essen-
tialist” strands of feminism, which attempt to defend values associated with
face-to-face communication, nurturing and childcare, and concern for future
generations, as perhaps the most radical contemporary challenge to bureau-
cratic technocracy.
One problem that both followers of traditional Marxism and devotees of
technology studies see in Habermas is his sharp separation of instrumental
reason and labor from communication and understanding. Traditional Marx-
ists claim that Marx’s concept of social labor is not devoid of human com-
munication (though Marx’s account of the role of communication within
social labor is hardly fleshed out). Students of technology studies also wish
to deny that technological reasoning can be totally separated as instrumental
action from the communicative realm of politics or everyday life. Habermas’s
legitimate concerns about the application of pseudo-scientific and or crudely
mechanistic, scientistic social theories to the management and control of
social life (“social engineering”) are based on a mistaken absolute dualism of
labor and communication and of instrumental reason versus communicat-
ive understanding. Perhaps it is not surprising that Habermas never analyzes
particular examples of technological projects. Indeed, Andrew Feenberg points
out that the word “technology” does not occur in the index of the two
61
volumes of his huge Theory of Communicative Action. An examination of the

interaction of personal values and meanings, political power and persuasion,
and the technical, instrumental aspect of technology might undermine his
sharp dichotomy (Feenberg, 1995, pp. 78–87).
One source of Habermas’s denial of the communicative understanding
dimension to technology is his reliance on the logical positivist and Popperian
accounts of natural science. Habermas’s original accounts of science, tech-
nology, and instrumental reason were not cognizant of the post-positivistic
treatments of science in American writers such as Thomas Kuhn (1962) and
Stephan Toulmin (1961) (see chapter 1). The later Habermas was certainly
aware of this work but never did incorporate it into the image of science and
technology assumed by his basic schema of instrumental versus communic-
ative action.
It is interesting that Habermas (1970, pp. 50–5) early denied that scientific
facts and theories could find a place in the lifeworld. He did this specifically
in rejecting the writer Aldous Huxley’s appeal for the incorporation of scient-
ific facts and theories into literature (something Huxley had already done in
a number of novels). Post-positivistic philosophies of science emphasize the
role of paradigms, models, and presuppositions of science. These can func-
tion as ideologies and myths in the thought patterns of the lifeworld.
Numerous studies of art and science over the past few decades have shown
how concepts borrowed from science and technology have been incorpor-
ated into imaginative literature and the lifeworld, from non-Euclidean ge-
ometry and X-rays in early abstract painting (Henderson, 1983, 1998) to the
interest in chaos theory among literary postmodernists (Hayles, 1990, 1991).
Habermas’s more moderate position largely replaced Marcuse’s utopian
but unarticulated call for a new, emancipatory science and technology among
practitioners of critical theory. This was in part because Habermas accepted
science and technology as they are, and incorporated a number of develop-
ments in mid-twentieth-century philosophy and social science. However,
it seems reasonable to reject Habermas’s strict separation of instrumental
action from communicative action and his acceptance of technology as totally
value-neutral without having to speculate about a wholly different science
that would replace the science we have today. Instead, following the ana-
lyses of more recent technology studies, it seems correct to recognize the role
of both technical-instrumental reason and political and social values in the
social development of technology (Feenberg, 2002, chapter 7). The broader
conception of reason, which includes, but goes beyond, the purely formal
and algorithmic procedures of mathematics and logic to include contextual
62
judgment, can incorporate reasoning about both the formal-technical as-

pects of technology and the social and political judgments that are involved
in the development of technological systems.
Risk/Benefit Analysis
Risk/benefit analysis is a quantitative means of evaluating technological

projects. In structure it strongly resembles Bentham’s utilitarianism, in that
it sums up positive elements and subtracts negative elements. While
Bentham’s utilitarianism sums pleasures and pains, risk/benefit analysis sums
up benefits and risks. The benefits and risks are generally measured in mon-
etary terms. This is convenient but introduces certain biases into the evalu-
ation. Also, risk/benefit analysis weighs the benefits and particularly the
risks by probabilities. A risk is a product of a loss measured in monetary
terms multiplied by the probability of the loss occurring. Industrial accidents
and the likelihood of individuals getting cancer are examples of the sort of
thing that is probabilistically weighted in risk/benefit analysis. In the ana-
lysis, one sums up the benefits weighted by the probability of their being
accrued and subtracts the risks (the losses times the probability of their
being accrued). Risk/benefit approaches are a prime example of technolo-
gical rationality being applied to the evaluation of technology. The techno-
cratic approach is sympathetic to the apparent rigor and objectivity of risk/
benefit analyses (see chapter 3).
There are a number of issues and controversies concerning the applicabil-
ity and accuracy of risk/benefit analysis. Because of the structure resembling
that of Bentham’s utilitarianism, some of the problems of the former apply
to risk/benefit approaches. The evaluation is solely in terms of consequences.
Just as Bentham’s utilitarianism does not accept the wrongness of acts or
policies on bases other than their consequences (for pleasure in Bentham or
for monetary gain and loss in the usual form of risk/benefit), objections by
ethicists to consequentialist approaches to ethics and of simple utilitarian-
ism apply to risk/benefit analysis.
Some of the problems of risk/benefit analysis are technical and scientific.
Estimating the probabilities of accidents is often difficult and speculative.
Many complex engineering analyses such as fault trees have been devel-
oped. Fault trees represent individual failures and their probabilities and are
used to calculate the probabilities of sequences of failures in a technological
system that might lead to a catastrophic accident, as in nuclear power plant
63
meltdown (Roberts, 1987), and in Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA),
with more focus on manufactured goods (McDermott et al., 1996).
Other problems for risk/benefit analysis are not purely empirical and
technical like those above, but more philosophical. Generally the economic
benefits of a project are relatively straightforward to assess, but this is not so
for the risks. Many forms of harm or risks do not easily or straightforwardly
lend themselves to economic evaluation or pricing. One notable example of
this is the value of human life. Some risk/benefit analyses use estimated
future income. This leads to putting a lower value on the death of poor
people (with less income) or of older people (with fewer future years of
income). One analysis of harm to exposed older asbestos workers downplayed
the risk, as these were mostly retired workers who had no future years of
job income. Other approaches to valuing life use insurance company actu-
arial estimates. Here, again, lower income individuals would be likely to
buy little or no insurance and thus the value of their life would be very low.
Furthermore, some religious and ethical approaches would deny that one
could put a comparative monetary value on life at all. If one considers every
individual life to be of infinite worth (as some Christian and Kantian ap-
proaches would claim), then no monetary benefit of any project, no matter
how high, would justify even a low probability of the loss of a single life.
(Infinity multiplied by any finite number, even a very small one, is infinity.)
However, defenders of risk/benefit analysis say in reply that we have to
make some sort of estimate of the value a technological project, even if it
involves, as many do, some small probability of loss of life because of cancer
caused by emissions or pollution, injury to workers, or large-scale cata-
strophic accidents. Thus one must make use of income, insurance, or some
other means of valuing life. Advocates of risk/benefit ask how we are to
make rational decisions if we reject these sorts of calculations.
Besides the value (or de-valuing?) of human life lost, there are a number
of other negative consequences of projects that are difficult to balance against
positive monetary benefits. One of these is the aesthetic (or beauty) value of
natural scenery lessened by the project. For instance, a power plant may
cause air pollution in a national park, lessening some of the scenic views.
Nonetheless, some construction firms and government regulators using elabor-
ate models have attempted to assign monetary value to natural scenic beauty.
Another loss difficult to evaluate in monetary terms is the loss of wildlife
or of non-commercial species of living things. If one takes the simplest ap-
proach, endangered species or living things with no commercial use simply
have zero value and their loss counts for nothing. If one takes the most
64
simple and straightforward approach to the commercial value of wildlife,

their value may be very low. David Stockman, US budget advisor to Pre-
sident Ronald Reagan, once dismissed the effect of acid rain produced
by Midwestern power plants on fish in the Adirondack Mountains of New
York by saying that the value of fishing licenses, bait sales, and motel or
campground fees for fishermen was very small. This conclusion would seem
to be at the opposite end of the scale of valuing nature from the deep
ecologists (see chapter 11). Clearly, more complex, indirect ways of estimat-
ing the value of wildlife must be used if wildlife and habitat loss is to count
for anything in a risk/benefit analysis.
Another area of difficulty or at least complexity for risk/benefit analysis is
in considerations of justice. This is also a difficulty for simple Benthamite act
utilitarianism. Small benefits to a very large number of people can outweigh
huge losses, including that of life (if loss of life is calculated in terms of finite
amount of pain) to one or to a small number of people. Manfacturers often
calculate the expected amount of money lost in lawsuits to families of
injured or dead consumers versus the cost of more extensive testing of the
product or modification of the product. The Ford Pinto case is a classic
example of this, in which the manufacturer did a cost/benefit analysis of
manufacturing new gas tanks, less likely to explode on impact, versus the
cost of lawsuits concerning injured or dead Pinto riders. Drug companies
traditionally calculated the minimum of the sum of the curves of the cost of
more frequent testing of samples of the product, and the cost of lawsuits
from injuries or illness caused by defective instances of the product.
Often the recipients of the benefits and the sufferers of the losses involved
in the risks are different groups of people. The investor recipients of eco-
nomic profits or the consumer benefits of electric power or manufactured
goods from a power plant or a factory often live far from the location of the
plant or factory, while the sufferers from pollution, radiation, or other risks
live near the power plant. Critics of multiple, mercury preservative laden
vaccinations for young children object to the alleged cost in autism for a few
children, despite the benefits of protection from disease for many. A simple
summation of total risks and benefits ignores the problem of distributive
justice. Some analysts have supplemented risk/benefit analysis with distri-
bution considerations.
Some opponents of risk/benefit analysis note that the practitioners and
advocates of risk/benefit approaches generally use them to justify the tech-
nological projects that are analyzed. Risk/benefit advocates are often claimed
to be overwhelmingly also advocates of reduced government regulation of
65
the enterprises examined. Furthermore, the rhetoric of “risk taking” is used

in advertisements claiming that “rugged individualist” American pioneers
were risk takers, while modern consumers are cowardly in their risk avoid-
ance. Of course, this rhetoric falsely equates voluntarily and knowingly ac-
cepted risks of travel by pioneers into unknown territory with the involuntary
and often unknowingly suffered risks of pollution, radiation, or poorly made
and defective products.That corporate advertisers have sometimes made
use of this misleading rhetorical praise of risk does not, of course, in itself
say that technical risk/benefit analysis is mistaken.
Often it is argued that the risk of the pollution or radiation being exam-
ined is less than some more mundane and commonly accepted activity that
has a generally unrecognized risk (such as exposure to radiation from fre-
quent high altitude airplane travel or household radon exposure in some
regions). Furthermore, it is noted that the proponents of risk/benefit often
castigate the public as “irrational” in their fear of, say, nuclear power, and
their acceptance of other low-level radiation sources. Risk/benefit pro-
ponents also use research on the inaccurate probability evaluations that
people in general make in everyday situations (Kahneman and Tversky, 1973).
Implicit in much of this criticism of the irrationality of the general public is
the suggestion that only the scientists, engineers and risk/benefit analysts are
qualified to make reasonable judgments about acceptability of technological
projects (Perrow, 1984, pp. 307–15). That is, the contrast of the ignorant and
irrational public with the cool and rational risk/benefit analysts implicitly
supports technocracy (see chapter 3). However, Kahneman and Tversky
find that, in their informal assessments of probability in real life situations,
even experts in probability theory commit the same sort of fallacies as do
ordinary people.
In fact, many proponents of risk/benefit have themselves accepted re-
search on or have themselves investigated the psychological dimensions of
risk and found patterns of evaluation behind the supposedly “irrational”
judgments of the public that justify some of those judgments. For instance,
involuntary risks are considered less tolerable than voluntary risks. Unknown
or unfamiliar risks are less tolerable than known or familiar ones. Risks with
catastrophic potential (potential for a major disaster) are considered less
acceptable than risks that cause scattered harm or loss of life spread widely
over time and space. Finally, risks that unfairly or inequitably distribute the
risks and benefits (to different groups or putting the risk on future genera-
tions) are less acceptable than risks that are equally distributed over the
population (Lowrance, 1976, pp. 86–94; Slovik et al., 1981). Traditional pure
66
risk/benefit analysis would consider all these considerations to be irrelevant

to risk as such.
Some analysts contrast “perceived risk” with “real risk,” and some say
that popular perceptions of risk, even if unscientific, have to be taken into
account politically. However, it is not self-evident that consideration of the
inequity, catastrophe potential, or involuntary nature of a risk is irrelevant
to the “real risk” measured, say, purely in terms of decrease of average life-
span. Some would distinguish between calculation of risk as such and the
judgment as to the “acceptability” of the risk. The latter can reasonably
consider issues such as the voluntary nature or inequity of the risk.
Regardless of one’s evaluation of the degree of “rationality” of taking
into consideration the above factors in considering the acceptability of risk,
one can argue that policy decisions concerning societal risks are necessarily
political. In policy decisions we are dealing with societal decision-making,
not the psychology of single individuals. Community consensus building is
necessary for social decisions. This process itself necessarily has a political
element. The group decision-making devices are its politics (Rescher, 1983,
pp. 152–6).
Social constructionists (see chapter 12) claim that all risk evaluation is
socially constructed. It is claimed that power relations, negotiations, and
political ideologies permeate the entire risk/benefit analysis. Considerations
such as those noted above, concerning the apologetic uses of comparisons
of everyday risks with risks of high technology projects and concerning
the technocratic tendency toward denigration of the rationality of popular
estimates of risk, support the social constructionist position. However, the
social constructivist goes further and claims that the entirety of the methods
and data involved in risk analyses is socially constructed and pervaded with
political bias. The leading anthropologist Mary Douglas, in concert with the
neo-conservative policy analyst Adam Wildavsky, goes as far as to claim that
fears about air pollution are simply primitive taboos concerning pollution
and purity, and have no relation to physical reality (Douglas and Wildavsky,
1982).
One way of attempting to disentangle the scientific aspects of risk/benefit
calculations from political or social judgments concerning opposing or sup-
porting technological artifacts or projects based on these analyses is to dis-
tinguish “risk/benefit analysis” from “risk management.” This would sharply
distinguish the “scientific” from the “political” aspects of risk evaluation.
The relationship of social views or political biases to risk/benefit analysis is
more complicated than this, however.
67
It is true that not just in policy decisions but also within the risk/benefit
analysis itself there are areas into which one’s social biases can enter. Judg-
ments must be made concerning which low probabilities to discount as
“effectively zero,” which threshold levels of statistical evaluation to use,
which models of extrapolation to humans from experiments on animals to
use, as well as many others. One’s biases, whether to play down risks or
accentuate them in any particular case study, can affect decisions made
concerning risk calculations. Thus one cannot isolate politics within the
policy decision aspects of risk management and keep the science pure and
unaffected by social attitudes. However, this is not to say that there is no
place for scientific objectivity in risk analysis. As we have seen in our survey
of the philosophy of science, a mechanical or algorithmic approach to induc-
tion or science is not viable (see chapter 1). We find that a purely mechan-
ical method of risk analysis is impossible and that, just because social attitudes
can affect scientific judgments at crucial points, this does not mean that the
risk analysis is totally arbitrary or the complete hostage of social biases.
Once one realizes where judgments concerning thresholds and extrapola-
tions need to be made, one can examine what biases may have entered the
calculations and criticize them. Thus, while the totally unbiased and mech-
anical evaluation of “real risks” is unrealistic, the social constructionist
exaggerates the extent to which risk evaluation must be simply an expres-
sion of bias and prejudice (Mayo and Hollander, 1991).
Conclusion
We have seen a number of different sorts of reason. The formalistic version

identifies reason with deductive logic. Euclid’s geometry was the model
both for Plato and for the seventeenth-century rationalists. Some later iden-
tified reason with a formal inductive logic, which in Carnap approaches, in
its a priori structure, a deductive system. Others identify reason with instru-
mental or technological reasoning, the adaptation of means to end. Kant
and Hegel, in different ways, contrasted ordinary logic with transcendental
logic, and reason with the more lowly understanding. In its romantic ex-
tremes, this transcendental reason can become a quasi-divine intuition or the
aesthetic judgment of an artist. Economic, calculative reason is the reason
appealed to by risk/benefit analysts. Formalistic, economic, and instru-
mental reason all underestimate the need for non-rule-bound judgments.
68
Critical theorists contrast transcendental and dialectical reason with formal-

istic, quantitative, and technological, manipulative, instrumental reason.
Study questions
1 Does formal (mathematical–technological) rationality completely cap-

ture what it means to be rational?
2 Is there “metaphysical” or “dialectical” rationality above and beyond
instrumental or technical rationality?
3 Is risk/benefit analysis acceptable as a means of evaluating technological
projects, or is it to be rejected because of its neglect of rights and justice
except in terms of monetary consequences?
4 Is the valuing of life (as well as non-human living things and natural
scenery) in monetary terms to be rejected, or must we use it because it
is the only method for balancing lives (and species or scenery) lost against
the benefits of technological projects?
69
PHENOMENOLOGY, HERMENEUTICS, AND TECHNOLOGY
5
Phenomenology,
Hermeneutics, and
Technology
The logical-linguistic analytical approach and the phenomenological

approach are two major trends in twentieth-century philosophy. Originally
the logical analytic mode originated in and dominated English-speaking philo-
sophy (although the Austrian logical positivists, Berlin logical empiricists, and
Polish logicians were a central part of this trend), while the phenomenological
approach dominated “continental” philosophy (particularly French and Ger-
man). The very term “continental” (for the mainland of Europe, in contrast
to Britain and Ireland) shows that this way of putting the dichotomy is due
to British philosophers and their American followers. In recent decades
there has been a great deal of “bridging” of the Anglo-American/continental
split, with analytical and pragmatic philosophy growing in Germany while a
substantial minority of American and British philosophers are making use
of French and German philosophy. Furthermore, some versions of French
structuralism and postmodernism have conceptual resemblances to Anglo-
American linguistic philosophy, even if styles, rhetoric, and attitudes are so
different as to make communication difficult.
Phenomenology is the description of experience. Phenomenology attempts
to describe pure experience, avoiding the common tendency to attribute
features to our experience that we “know” (or think we know) are in the
object. (This tendency is what William James called “the psychologists’ fal-
lacy.”) We might compare the phenomenologist to the impressionist painter,
who paints objects as perceived in a particular light, time of day, or shadow,
not the objects with the colors that they are “supposed to have” in standard
conditions of bright sunlight.
The original phenomenology was that of the German Edmund Husserl
(1859–1938). He was trained in both mathematics and psychology, and thus
70
was more sympathetic to, and knowledgeable about, science than most
of his immediate disciples. Husserl claimed to describe experience with-
out theory or presuppositions affecting the description. For Husserl and
other phenomenologists all consciousness is consciousness-of-something.
This feature, the directness of consciousness, is called intentionality (the
phenomenologists’ emphasis on intentionality puts them in strong oppo-
sition to both logical positivists in philosophy and behaviorists in psycho-
logy). The question of the existence of the objects of experience was “put
in brackets” or suspended by a so-called “phenomenological reduction.”
The phenomenological description of experience includes both perceptual
experience and the conceptual aspects of experience. Husserl and his close
followers claimed to extract “essences” of experience through what Husserl
calls “eidetic intuition.” (Eidos is Greek for Platonic form. See the discussion
of essences in chapter 2 and of Plato in chapters 2 and 3.)
Husserl’s most influential student, and soon his competitor for intel-
lectual dominance of German (and later French) philosophy, was Martin
Heidegger (1895–1976). Heidegger’s version of phenomenology emphasized
lived existence and claimed to avoid the Platonistic formalism of Husserl, as
well as the spectator-like approach to knowledge that Husserl shared with
Descartes, the British empiricists, and much of traditional Western philo-
sophy. Heidegger rejected the ostensively detached and neutral standpoint of
Husserl’s phenomenological reduction. Furthermore, Heidegger replaced
Husserl’s rather Platonic–Aristotelian notion of essences and eidetic intu-
ition with an interpretive involvement in the world. Heidegger replaced the
abstract categories of former philosophy with “existentials,” and used some-
thing akin to moods rather than formal abstractions as the fundamental
orienting structures of human experience.
Husserl developed and modified or supplemented his phenomenology in
his later work. In his The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenom-
enology (1936), Husserl discussed Galileo and the founding of modern phys-
ical science. Husserl added the notion of the “lifeworld,” the world of ordinary
lived experience that is in the background of scientific abstraction. Some
claim that this work was itself an attempt to respond to criticisms and develop-
ments of phenomenology by his student Martin Heidegger. Heidegger
rejected Husserl’s presuppositionless phenomenology.
In the 1960s American followers of the French philosophers influenced by
Heidegger’s phenomenology ( Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
in their writings in the period of the 1940s and 1950s) dubbed the new
movement “existential phenomenology.” Although this label misses some
71
of the subtleties and complexities of Heidegger’s thought, it does give a

rough characterization of the dominant new approach to phenomenology.
Existentialism, to use Sartre’s slogan, takes existence as prior to essence. It
emphasizes the concrete, unique individual rather than general forms or
natures. In this it resembles nominalism and empiricism despite the great
difference in style and topics. Existentialism focuses on personal life, while
empircism mainly focused on empirical science. But all these trends reject
Plato’s forms and extreme rationalism. Existential phenomenology is more
concrete than the original form of Husserl’s phenomenology. Heidegger’s
own work is more properly called “hermeneutic phenomenology,” because
it incorporates insights from the theory of interpretation of texts and culture
(see more on hermeneutics below).
Husserl himself in Crisis applied phenomenology to the sciences. In his earl-
iest work he had applied phenomenology to logic and arithmetic. A number
of Husserl’s immediate followers applied phenomenology to mathematical
physics, to psychology, and to medical diagnosis. Husserl emphasized that
the abstractions of science are an idealization of the concepts of lived exper-
ience (the lifeworld). Points and perfectly straight lines in mathematical
physics are idealizations produced by successive approximation from the
ordinary volumes and shapes of experience. The British-American process
philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) in his “method of extens-
ive abstraction” developed around 1920, and even the mid-nineteenth-
century British empiricist John Stuart Mill (1806–73) in a little-noticed passage
in his A System of Logic (1843), developed similar methods of idealization (see
the discussion of process philosophy in the section on actor-network theory
in chapter 12). For Husserl, the claim that the idealizations of mathematical
physics are real and that ordinary experience is somehow illusory com-
pletely inverts the relationship between the life world and science. The
fundamental starting point is lived experience. The abstractions of science
are constructs that allow us to predict and control but are not, somehow,
more real than the objects of ordinary experience (Whitehead called this
“the fallacy of misplaced concreteness”). Both the objects of ordinary experi-
ence and the objects of science are objects of experience that can be de-
scribed phenomenologically.
Hermeneutics means “interpretation.” Hermeneutics started in the inter-
pretation of Biblical texts. German theologian and philosopher Friedrich
Schleiermacher in the early nineteenth century developed hermeneutics into
the discipline of interpretation of texts in general. German philosopher
Wilhelm Dilthey in the late nineteenth century expanded hermeneutics to
72
encompass understanding of human behavior and culture. Heidegger incorp-

orated notions from hermeneutics into his own version of phenomenology
(hermeneutic phenomenology). Hans-Georg Gadamer greatly developed the
hermeneutic side of Heidegger’s endeavor. Hermeneutics, in sharp contrast to
the early version of Husserl’s phenomenology, does not claim to approach
matters from a presuppositionless standpoint. Instead, hermeneutics claims
that we approach a text with “prejudices” (to use Gadamer’s term) or pre-
understandings. These enable us to interpret the text, and in turn allow us
to examine those preliminary orientations. This is the so-called “hermeneutic
circle.” Although one depends on one’s initial understandings to interpret the
text, the subsequent interpretation helps us to readjust those understandings.
Hermeneutics has only in the past few decades been applied to the nat-
ural sciences. Patrick Heelan (1983) and Don Ihde (1998) are two American
philosophers who have engaged in this task. Previously hermeneutics of
science had meant cultural interpretation of science, but Ihde has developed
a hermeneutics in science; that is, an account of the interpretive activity of
scientists in instrument reading.
Don Ihde’s Technology and Lifeworld and

Expanding Hermeneutics
The most lucid and easily understandable application of phenomenology to

technology is to be found in the works of the contemporary American philo-
sopher of technology, Don Ihde. In his Technology and the Lifeworld (1990)
and other works, Ihde has concentrated on the role of scientific instruments
in observation. Phenomenology of perception is the starting point of the
analysis, but Ihde emphasizes that technological devices mediate scientific
perception. Ihde embraces and incorporates the work of the instrumental
realists (see chapter 1). Like the instrumental realists, he does not wish to
claim that those objects of science that are not directly observed in everyday
perception are somehow “theoretical entities” that lack reality or have an
abstract reality different from that of ordinary objects. Instead, unlike many
continental philosophers, Ihde claims that the objects of the most technical
science are objects of perception (albeit a technologically extended percep-
tion) just like common sense objects.
Ihde notes that there are two different modes of instrumental perception.
In one the observer and instrument are united in contrast to the object of
science. He illustrates it by:
73
(I – instrument) – object; as in (I – telephone) – you
In the other the observer is reading the instrument–object complex. The

former describes the phenomenology of instruments as being incorporated
into our embodiment. The latter describes the situation in hermeneutics.
Ihde illustrates this situation as:
I – (instrument – object); as in engineer – (instruments – atomic pile)
In the instrument reading situation, the object is “read” through the instru-
ment. It is not literally “seen” as through a microscope or telescope; instead,
the instrumental readout allows us to interpret the object.
Recall that traditional hermeneutics started with the interpretation of
sacred texts and expanded to the interpretation of texts in general
(Schleiermacher) and then to culture and history in general (Dilthey). How-
ever, even in its later generalization (which held from the late nineteenth
century until the late twentieth century), hermeneutics was (and still mainly
is) conceived of as a purely humanistic discipline. Dilthey held to the distinc-
tion between the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) and the natural sci-
ences (Naturwissenschaften). The two kinds of science were contrasted in
terms of (interpretive) “understanding” in the human sciences and (causal or
formal) “explanation” in the natural sciences. Other late nineteenth-century
figures, the Southwest German school of followers of Immanuel Kant
(Windelband and Rickert) contrasted the sciences of the individual (idio-
graphic) with the sciences of the lawful (nomothetic) and identified this with
the split between the humanities and natural sciences. The idiographic and
hermeneutic approaches, focusing on the unique individual and its interpre-
tation, were appropriate to history and the humanities, but the natural
sciences involve deduction of descriptions from universal laws.
One of the developments of late twentieth-century thought was to break
down this sharp dichotomy. With the rise of post-positivistic philosophy of
science, most famously with Thomas Kuhn, but also with Michael Polanyi,
Norwood Hanson, Stephen Toulmin, and a host of others since the late
1950s and 1960s, the image of science as a purely formal, deductive machine,
cranking out predictions from universal, formal laws, was replaced by
images of science involving informal paradigms and tacit presuppositions,
models and context-dependent inferences (see chapter 1). Thus the “nomo-
thetic” image, accepted as the accurate description of natural science by the
hermeneutic and neo-Kantian traditions as well as by the logical positivists,
74
Box 5.1
Heidegger and technology
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was one of the most influential philo-
sophers of the twentieth century, probably the most influential philosopher
from continental Europe. Heidegger, particularly in his later writings,
had a central concern with technology. Students of Heidegger such as
Hannah Arendt (1906–75), Hans Jonas (1903–93), and the Marxist Herbert
Marcuse (1898–1979) were among the other major philosophers of tech-
nology of the mid-twentieth century.
Early in his first major writing, Being and Time (1927), Heidegger
analyzes our comportment to objects in terms of two modes of being,
ready-to-hand and present-to-hand. The ready-to-hand mode is that of
tool use. The object exists in its role in our action. This mode resembles
the approach of pragmatism in American philosophy. This contrasts to
the present-to-hand mode, which is the usual notion of objects as sub-
stantial entities observed or thought of as independent and over and
against us. Traditional philosophy treated all objects as present-to-hand.
Objects are perceived by the senses (by empiricists) or conceived by the
intellect (by rationalists) as separate and distinct from us. In contrast the
ready-to-hand object of use is not perceived as an independent entity but
is instead the means through which we work and act. The ready-to-hand
object such as a tool is transparent to us when we use it properly. Only
when it fails to operate properly or breaks do we become aware of it as
present-to-hand. Heidegger famously uses the example of the hammer.
When we are using it to drive nails, our focus is on the successful driving
of nails into wood. Only when the hammer breaks do we focus our
attention on the hammer itself, rather than the result for which it is
normally used.
The tool-like mode of existence was central to Heidegger’s earlier
philosophy. In his later philosophy technology itself becomes a subject
of reflection. Heidegger claims that modern technology defines the present
epoch of humanity just as religion defined the orientation to the world
of the Middle Ages. Modern technology differs from previous crafts
(although it grows out of them) insofar as it “enframes” or “stamps” every-
thing with its orientation. All of nature becomes a “standing reserve,” a
source of resources, in particular a source of energy. This enframing cuts
us off from appreciating non-technological ways of apprehending the world
75
and also obscures the character of the all-encompassing technological

enframing itself. That is, we become so entangled in the technological
way of thinking or the technological attitude that alternative ways of
thinking, those of archaic, pre-industrial peoples, become inaccessible to
us. Furthermore, we become so immersed in technological approaches
to the world that we are not even aware that the technological attitude is
one approach of many. It is assumed to be identical with sound or correct
thinking.
For Heidegger, humans are not in control of technology. Instead, tech-
nology is the destiny of humans in our age. Heidegger describes our
present relation to technology in the same way proponents of autonom-
ous technology describe it (see chapter 7). Technology is not in human
control. For people to demand to “get in control” of technology simply
reinforces the technological attitude. For technology’s approach to nature
is to control it. Technology is so definitive of our age as to preclude any
attempt to retreat to a pre-technological society or culture.
Heidegger does think that it is possible to achieve a “free relation to
technology.” Exactly what this is is disputed. He thinks it is possible to
gain an understanding of the essence of technology, something not
achieved by traditional philosophy or Christian religion. Once one grasps
the essence of technology it is possible to use technology without being
caught up in it.
In much of his work Heidegger contrasts traditional crafts and the
peasant way of life with work and life in modern technological society,
much to the detriment of the latter. He uses examples of a Greek temple,
a silver chalice, and a traditional wooden bridge, contrasting them with a
modern power plant or superhighway. Heidegger’s preference for and
praise of rural, peasant life and dislike of cities suggests that he is an anti-
technological romantic. It seems that in rural and non-technological set-
tings we grasp the genuine meaning of things. But this is misleading,
given that he claims that technology characterizes our age and we cannot
return to pre-technological ways. In some passages Heidegger claims that
technological artifacts themselves can be occasions for us to grasp being.
Heidegger uses a pitcher and an old bridge as examples of the nexus of
unification of earth and sky, humans and gods, in their making and their
use. However, at one point, contrary to his usual use of archaic and rural
examples, he claims that the modern highway interchange can also func-
tion in this way as a focus of aspects of being.
76
has, for many philosophers of science, been replaced by another image of

science more amenable to and similar to hermeneutic interpretation.
Hermeneutic interpretation of the history of science and science as a
cultural phenomenon goes beyond the work of the early hermeneutic think-
ers but is not inconsistent with their approach. However, a more radical
expansion of hermeneutics that Ihde defends is a hermeneutics of the objects
of science, not simply the culture, history, and psychology of scientists. That
is, science itself can be seen as having an interpretive dimension to which
the early tradition of cultural hermeneutics was blind.
As suggested by the second schema of Ihde above, the “reading” of
instruments, including the implicit interpretation of those readings within a
theoretical framework, is a form of hermeneutics of the objects of science.
Dreyfus and the Critique of Artificial Intelligence
Hubert Dreyfus, an American follower of Heidegger, has given what is

perhaps the most influential application of the phenomenological approach
to technology in his critique of artificial intelligence. Despite initially highly
negative reactions from some members of the artificial intelligence research
community, including attempts to prevent publication of some of his early
writings on this topic, Dreyfus’s work, unlike much philosophy of tech-
nology, has had a direct influence on a number of computer scientist practi-
tioners and has led to modifications of their strategies.
In his early RAND Corporation report Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence
(1965) and in his What Computers Can’t Do (1972), later revised as What
Computers Still Can’t Do (1992), Dreyfus argued that classical AI (artificial
intelligence) was based on mistaken assumptions about thinking and mean-
ing that were shared by early modern philosophers such as Descartes and
the British empiricists. At the time of Dreyfus’s first writings, the “classical”
or symbolic processing approach to AI was the only one. Since then, with
the popularity of neural network theory, symbolic processing AI has been
called “classical.” Nowadays it is sometimes called GOFAI or “good old
fashioned artificial intelligence.” In the classical approach, thinking is claimed
to deal with combinations of discrete bits, and reasoning to consist of the
manipulation of symbols according to explicit rules. Dreyfus claimed that
although the symbolic processing approach is appropriate for formal logic
and mathematics, for areas such as understanding natural language, classical
AI does not appropriately model perception and everyday reasoning.
77
Thinking and judging without explicit rules

Dreyfus argues, following Heidegger, but also the later philosophy of Ludwig
Wittgenstein (a source of most ordinary language philosophy in Britain and
the USA), that the rules at the basis of thinking cannot be fully formalized or
made fully explicit. Behind our capacity to judge and reason are tacit or pre-
reflective orientations. Traditional rationalism, deriving from Plato, assumes
that all reasoning can be made explicit and mathematically formalized (see
chapter 4). A few philosophers, a definite minority, dissented from this tradi-
tion. Aristotle, considering ethical judgment, said that ethics cannot have
the exactitude of mathematics, and that judgment is necessary in practical
wisdom. Blaise Pascal (1623–62), a mathematician turned religious devotee
and enemy of Descartes, famously said, “The heart has reasons that reason
does not know.” Pascal contrasted the “geometric spirit” with the “spirit
of finesse” that uses non-formal intuitions of appropriateness. The early
twentieth-century French physicist-philosopher-historian Pierre Duhem agreed
with Pascal and claimed the inductive and deductive methods of science
were inadequate to account for decisions as to whether to reject or to slightly
modify their theories in the face of counter-evidence (see chapter 1). How-
ever, Pascal and Duhem were outside the mainstream and largely ignored
on this issue until the past few decades (see chapter 4 on the rehabilitation of
the role of judgment in Aristotle and Kant in recent accounts of rationality).
Dreyfus claims that human rationality involves the ability to apply rules
to particular contexts in a manner that cannot be fully formalized. If one
assumes rules to apply the rules, one is driven to assume further rules to
apply these rules and into an infinite regress. What the Hungarian-British
chemist, social theorist, and philosopher Michael Polanyi (1958) called “tacit
knowing” or what the American pragmatist John Dewey (1931) called “the
context of thought” must be involved in human judgment.
Holism, the field of consciousness, gestalt, and horizons

Husserl and the phenomenologists follow the so-called gestalt psycholo-
gists in claiming that perceptual experience is structured in terms of figure
and ground relationships (a gestalt is an organized figure or shape). The
ground is the background within which we experience a particular delimited
object, shape, or figure. This ground, which is often out of conscious atten-
tion, or “tacit” (in Michael Polanyi’s terms), structures our perception of the
figure that occupies our “focal” awareness. Our perception and cognition
78
has for Husserl “horizons.” There is the “outer horizon” of the indefinite
distance in perception or the indefinite iteration of some operation in cogni-
tion. There is also the “inner horizon” of the un-focused-upon aspects of our
focal objects. Consciousness is not simply a display of equally explicit fea-
tures and facts, but has a holistic structure (see the discussion of holism in
chapters 1 and 11).
The field of consciousness with its outer and inner horizons and its
internal structure and organization is not simply an assembly of bits or of
atomic sense data. Instead it is a holistic entity, in which the background
structures and situates figures that are the center of attention, and receding
horizons of possibly indefinite extension of perception or unending reitera-
tion of rules of conception are part of experience itself. In this way con-
sciousness as described by phenomenology differs from consciousness or
perception as described by traditional AI, or the British empiricist tradition
for that matter. Even the Austrian logical positivist Rudolf Carnap, in his
earliest major work, The Logical Construction of the World (1928), based his
constructions on gestalt perceptions rather than the impressions of Hume,
elements of Ernst Mach (1838–1916), or sense data of Bertrand Russell. How-
ever, the Anglo-American development of positivism dropped this aspect of
the early Carnap.
Embodied thought and the lived body

According to Dreyfus, thought and intention assume a body, not the me-
chanical body, as described by physics and chemistry, but a “lived body,” in
the sense of Maurice Merleau Ponty (1907–61), a follower and developer of
the ideas of the later Husserl. The “lived body” is a notion different from
that of the pure mind as a spiritual or mental entity, and also different from
the body considered as a mechanical body of physics. The lived body is
experienced “from within” as an intrinsic part of our orientation to the
world and objects. It contrasts with the body studied by biology and medi-
cine “from without” as an external object confronting us. Descartes, who in
the seventeenth century formulated mind/body dualism, considered the body
a mechanical apparatus and the mind a purely spiritual substance or entity
different in nature from the body. The lived body falls outside of either
member of Descartes’s dichotomy. Dreyfus claims that the intellectualism
of traditional AI and some of the philosophy associated with it considers
thought something that can be done by a disembodied thinking apparatus.
In Dreyfus’s account, perceiving organized wholes is a bodily practice and
79
skill. The relations of the temporal rhythms of the body to the recognition
of melodies and the coordination of the body in relation to its surroundings
involved in eye movements in seeing are examples of this.
The upshot is that we orient ourselves to objects or experiences through
our embodiment. Our bodily dispositions, with their propensity for action,
organize our experience. Similarly, our emotions, attitudes, and goals struc-
ture our experience. The problem with classical AI implicitly assumes that
perception and thinking are simply arrays of discrete qualities, attributes or
features of objects, and facts, manipulated or processed according to explicit
rules.
Neural networks or connectionism to the rescue?

Many in the AI community saw the revival of neural network theory or
connectionism in the 1980s as a solution to the problems into which clas-
sical or symbolic processing AI had run.
The use of neural nets or connectionism to model perception, as exempli-
fied by the perceptrons of Arturo Rosenblatt, was quite an active field in the
early 1950s and 1960s. An alleged proof of the impossibility of neural nets
working beyond a certain level of complexity by Marvin Minsky and Seymour
Papert (1969) dampened interest, until the problems of symbolic processing
AI led to a revival of connectionism.
Connectionism does not involve modeling thought as representation.
Neural networks, as their name suggests, were inspired by modeling to some
extent the neural systems of the brain, rather than modeling the rationalist-
deductive model of thought. Devices called perceptrons, attempting to
model the function of the retina and brain, and having a set of connections
from the electronic sensors to the recording and storage device, randomly
form connections that are reinforced by success in training. Dreyfus is sym-
pathetic to this aspect of neural nets. Dreyfus is quite favorable toward neural
network modeling, although insofar as it involves conceptualization of
thinking as processing of information he is critical of it.
Neural networks and connectionism have been quite successful with per-
ceptual recognition, but have been much less so with deductive reasoning,
the strong point of symbolic processing AI (which, however, has been quite
weak on perceptual recognition and related tasks). Dreyfus notes that the
training that neural networks undergo is often highly focused by the selec-
tion of relevant attributes by the human trainer. Sometimes when not hav-
ing a pre-selected set of attributes to train upon, the neural nets “learn” to
80
Box 5.2
The tangled roots of neural network theory: philosophical and
psychological
The basic idea of neural networks has been around since the late 1940s.
The neurophysiological model for the early version of neural networks
was suggested by the work of psychologist Donald O. Hebb (1949). Hebb
described “reverberating circuits” in the brain as the basis of explanation
of thought. There was a less well known philosophical generalization of
Hebb’s work by the otherwise famous, Austrian, free market, conserva-
tive economist-philosopher Friedrich Hayek (1952). Hayek attempted to
eliminate phenomenal sensory qualities by reducing them to a system of
relations, rather along the lines of Mach and Carnap (see chapter 1).
Hayek conceived of the mind as without a central organizing principle,
but made up of competing neural elements, rather the way Adam Smith’s
(1776) economic “invisible hand” of the market emerges out of individual
competition.
Warren S. McCulloch and Walter H. Pitts developed the logical theory
of neural networks. Interestingly for philosophers, and perhaps surpris-
ingly for cognitive scientists, McCulloch was a follower of the medieval
scholastic philosopher John Duns Scotus (McCulloch, 1961, pp. 5–7). The
realist theory of universals of Duns Scotus was followed by the American
pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Peirce. (In a little-noticed turn of
twentieth-century philosophy, Martin Heidegger (1916), the German
hermeneutic phenomenologist, and Peirce (1869), the pioneer of sym-
bolic logic, were both early influenced by a work on “speculative gram-
mar” purporting to be by Duns Scotus (Bursill-Hall, 1972). The
scholasticism of Duns Scotus’s seventeenth-century followers was so
rejected and ridiculed by early modern philosophers such as Bacon that
“Duns” was the origin of our term “dunce,” for fool, yet his views lie
behind two major branches of philosophy of language in the twentieth
century.) Walter Pitts, McCulloch’s mathematical amanuensis, was living
as a 13-year-old runaway in Chicago when he ran into a library to hide
from bullies. Next to his hiding place was Bertrand Russell’s three-
volume Principia Mathematica, deriving mathematics from logic, which
Pitts read in a few days. He wrote to Russell in England with criticisms
and corrections. According to one account Pitts happened later to meet Rus-
sell in a Chicago park (where he initially took the then somewhat seedy
81
looking Russell for a fellow street person), and attended a lecture of

Russell’s in Chicago. Russell recommended Pitts to the Vienna Circle
logical positivist Rudolf Carnap at the University of Chicago. Pitts then
went to MIT and worked with Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), himself an
ex-prodigy (Heims, 1980), on cybernetics feedback mathematics, as well
as with Jerome Lettvin, who wrote, among many articles with Pitts and
McCulloch, a brilliant analysis of the visual system of the frog (Lettvin
et al., 1959).
Pitts, looking for an absent father figure, was everyone’s son at MIT
and did the detailed mathematical working out of everyone else’s ideas.
Later, Wiener’s wife accused Pitts and Lettvin of sleeping with her daugh-
ter (a lie), as she was jealous of Wiener’s connection with these fellows.
She also disliked McCulloch’s drinking and extramarital sex life. The group
broke up at the moment of its greatest promise, without Pitts or
McCulloch ever learning the reason for Wiener’s rejection of them
(Conway and Siegelman, 2005, chapter 11). Partly out of despair at
Wiener’s unexplained rejection, Pitts later drank and drugged himself to
death in a flophouse in Cambridge (Heims, 1991, pp. 154–5). This tragic
death and loss of a treasured colleague led Lettvin to engage in public
debates with Timothy Leary, the devotee of LSD, wherein Lettvin op-
posed encouragement of personal experiment with LSD.
solve a recognition problem by using what turns out to be a trivial and

irrelevant attribute that happens to work in the particular examples on which
they are being trained.
“Heideggerian AI”
Dreyfus’s critique of AI research has had genuine impact on some programs
and investigators in the AI field. Despite the initially highly negative reac-
tion at MIT and Pittsburgh to Dreyfus’s original debunking of failed AI
predictions, some researchers have in recent decades engaged in
“Heideggerian AI.” Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores (1986) have advoc-
ated an approach to AI taking into account Heideggerian phenomenology
and hermeneutics. Philip Agre and David Chapman (Agre and Chapman,
1991; Agre, 1997) in their interactive programming have also incorporated
Heideggerian insights into everyday coping and orientation toward the world
in their research.
82
Conclusion
These examples, the work of Don Ihde and of Herbert Dreyfus in particular,
show that the phenomenological and hermeneutic approach to technology
has much to contribute to the description and understanding of technolo-
gical practice, and even to the improvement of technology itself.
Study questions
1 Do you think that description of our perceptions and intuitions is an

effective way to understand technology? Is it sufficient? If not, what
more is needed? Do you think that logical proof and argument is a better
or worse approach? Should the two supplement each other?
2 Do you think that scientific instruments are extensions of human bodily
perception? Are instrumental observations incorporated into our bodily
experience?
3 When we read a meter or dial in a scientific instrument, are we in effect
“reading nature,” or is our dial-reading and intellectual act separated off
from nature?
4 Do you think that digital computers can perceive and be conscious?
Does a computer need a body in order to be aware?
5 Is Dreyfus’s denial of the prospects of success of the project of artificial
intelligence refuted by the development of neural network theory?
6 Do you think that we can achieve “a free relation to technology” as
Heidegger asserts? What would this be like?
83
TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM
6
Technological Determinism
Technological determinism is the claim that technology causes or deter-

mines the structure of the rest of society and culture. Autonomous techno-
logy is the claim that technology is not in human control, that it develops
with a logic of its own. The two theses are related. Autonomous technology
generally presupposes technological determinism. If technology determines
the rest of culture, then culture and society cannot affect the direction of
technology. Technological determinism does not, on the face of it, presup-
pose autonomous technology. It could be that free, creative inventors
devise technology, but that this technology determines the rest of society and
culture. This would leave the inventors outside of the deterministic system
as free agents. However, if science has a logic of its own, as Heilbroner
claims in defending technological determinism, and technology is applied
science, then the inventors are not free to develop technology as they see fit,
and we are back to autonomous technology.
According to technological determinism, as technology develops and
changes, the institutions in the rest of society change, as does the art and
religion of the society. For instance, the computer has changed the nature
of jobs and work. The telephone led to the decline of letter writing, but
the Internet has changed the nature of interpersonal communication again,
leaving written records unlike the telephone. The automobile affected the
distributing of the population by leading people to move from the city to the
suburbs and leaving central cities impoverished. The auto in the 1920s and
1930s even changed sexual habits of youth by making available the privacy
of the auto outside the house. A juvenile court judge called the auto a
“house of prostitution on wheels,” and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called
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early tourist courts (motels) “little more than camouflaged brothels”

( Jeansonne, 1974, p. 19).
A set of technological determinist claims about earlier history involves
the rise and fall of feudalism; that is, the social system of the Middle Ages.
The introduction of the stirrup from central Asia to Europe made possible
the mounted armored knight. Without the stirrup the charging warrior
was knocked from his horse by the impact of his lance hitting an opponent.
The support of the knight (devoting his time to military practice), the horse,
the more and more elaborate armor for both, and the knight’s retainers
was expensive. The feudal system of peasants providing a part of their agri-
cultural produce in exchange for protection supported the expense of the
horse and armor of the knights (White, 1962). The feudal knights further
developed the ethic of chivalry and courtly love. The whole system, military,
economic, and cultural, is claimed by to have collapsed because of the later
introduction of another Asian technology, gunpowder from China. The
armored knight fell to the shots of guns and the castle became prey to
bombardment by the cannon. (Needless to say, various historians have criti-
cized the details of this neat technological determinist account.)
I think we shall see that one should apply technological determinism and
cultural determinism on a case-by-case basis. In some situations the technical
and physical aspects of the technology propagate major changes in culture.
In other situations the cultural and value orientations of the society drive
and select the development of technologies. In most cases there is an inextric-
able feedback from technology to culture and from culture to technology.
Definitions of determinism can get extremely technical. But we can start
with the notion of universal causality. This principle is that “every event has
a cause,” or every event is an effect of some cause or set of causes. Deter-
minism also involves the notion of “same cause, same effect.” That is, not
just is there some cause for each event, but there is a lawful regularity of
the relation of causes and effects. Determinism involves predictability, but is
not identifiable with it. For instance, one might have, by accident or by
some divine prophetic insight, the ability to prophesy things that happen by
knowing the future, but there is no determinism (for this reason some philo-
sophers define prediction as involving a theory, to distinguish it from prophecy).
However, if there is determinism, it has in the past been considered to
follow in-principle predictability. That is, if there is a causal connection then
science, by describing it, can predict the effect. Unfortunately, recent chaos
theory seems to decouple determinism and predictability, but part of this
depends on what is meant by “in-principle” predictability (see box 6.1).
85
Furthermore, the notion of human freedom is claimed by many to limit phys-

ical determinism with respect to human action (see box 6.2).
There are subclasses of the more general notion of determinism. Various
more specific claims as to central causal factors in human life are called
determinisms, though proponents of them often do not hold to the ex-
treme of universal determinism. Technological determinism is one kind of
determinism.
Another kind of determinism is genetic or biological determinism. This
claims that what we are is wholly determined by our genetic makeup. Walter
Gilbert, who tried to patent the human genome and called the sequencing
of the human genome “the Holy Grail,” claimed he can hold your essence
(your genetic sequence) on a CD-ROM and say “Here is a human being; it’s
me!” (Gilbert, 1996, 96). Lewis Wolpert (1994) claims that we can “compute
the embryo” from its DNA code, although other biologists have denied this
is possible. Richard Dawkins, in his The Selfish Gene (1976), claims we are
“robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve selfish molecules known as
genes.” This extreme genetic determinism is often used to justify the import-
ance of biotechnology, claiming that we shall be able to totally control the
characteristics of agricultural plants and animals as well as ourselves by
genetic engineering.
In contrast, the environmental determinism of behaviorist psychology
in its original form claims that environmental inputs determine all character-
istics of the individual. John B. Watson (1878–1958), founder of behaviorism
(and later Vice President at J. Walter Thompson advertising agency), claimed:
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specific world

to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train
him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist,
merchant-chief and, yes, even into beggar-man and thief regardless of his
talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors.
(Watson, 1926, p. 65)
Four decades later, behaviorist B. F. Skinner in his Walden II (1966) por-

trayed a utopian community in which psychologists have totally conditioned
the inhabitants to do good, and in which all the residents are perfectly
happy. A few years later in his Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) he con-
trasted deterministic conditioning of behavior with freedom, dignity, and
autonomy, which he rejected as mistaken and old-fashioned notions (see
box 6.2).
86
Box 6.1
Laplacian determinism and its limits
An extreme form of determinism is Laplacian determinism, so called
because the physicist Pierre Simon de Laplace formulated it in his Philo-
sophical Essay on Probabilities (1813). Laplace thought that probabilities
were solely a measure of our ignorance, and that every event is precisely,
causally determined. Laplace envisions a gigantic intellect or spirit. This
spirit is able to know the position and state of motion of every particle in
the universe and to perform very complicated and long calculations. This
spirit, according to Laplace, is then able to predict every future event,
including all human behavior and social changes (under the assumption
that human behavior is physically caused). Laplace’s spirit could predict
what you would be doing tomorrow morning or twenty years from now.
God would be an example of such a spirit, but, ironically, Laplace himself
was an atheist. When asked by Napoleon why God did not appear in his
celestial mechanics, Laplace said, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”
Laplace thought that he had proven the stability of the solar system. He
had not (Hanson, 1964). Since Newton had left it to God to occasionally
intervene miraculously to readjust the planets, Laplace’s purported proof
was the basis of his legendary comment to Napoleon about having no
need of God in his celestial mechanics.
One of the great, unsolved problems of mechanics is to find a general
solution to the problem of three or more bodies of arbitrary masses in
arbitrary initial positions attracting one another by gravitational force.
The exact calculation and prediction of the motion of the planets in
relation to the sun (including the weaker attraction of the planets for
each other) is an example of and motivation for this problem. In the late
nineteenth century King Oscar II of Sweden and Norway became dis-
turbed about the possibility that the solar system might fall apart, and,
with goading from interested mathematicians, offered a prize in 1889 for
a proof of stability, to be awarded on his birthday (Diacu and Holmes,
1996, pp. 23–7). The French mathematician and physicist Jules Henri
Poincaré (1854–1912), in his work on this many-body problem of the
long-term orbits of the planets, invented aspects of what is now called
chaos theory. He showed that the solar system might be stable but
that stable and unstable orbits are interwoven infinitely close to one
another in an infinitely complicated braided pattern. Chaotic systems are
87
deterministic but unpredictable. They can and do arise in classical mech-

anics and are independent of the Heisenberg considerations (see below).
They are mainly caused by non-linear equations (equations that have
squares or powers of variables or higher order derivatives) that give rise to
“sensitive dependence on initial conditions.”
In an ordinary linear system, a slight shift in the initial positions of the
objects yields a slight shift of the end positions. However, in a chaotic
system, an infinitesimal shift in the initial conditions yields a big shift in
the results. Newton’s laws of motion are expressed by non-linear equa-
tions. Since we cannot measure with infinitesimal accuracy but only with
finite accuracy (even forgetting the Heisenberg principle, just sticking to
Newton), we cannot predict chaotic systems, even though the math is
deterministic.
A common error in the “Science Wars” (see chapter 1) and of romantic
or New Age objections to mechanism, even if justified on other grounds
(See Chapter 11), is that they assume that since Newton’s laws are old
fashioned, and that “linear” is boring, Newton’s equations are linear.
Ironically, it is the newer and more exciting quantum mechanics that is
linear (superposition principle), while the older, supposedly less exciting,
Newtonian mechanics is non-linear.
Even more severe problems arise for Laplacian determinism from sub-
atomic physics. According to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it is
impossible in principle to simultaneously measure exactly the position
and momentum of a subatomic particle (Heisenberg, 1958). Other pairs
of variables, such as the energy and the time interval of a process, and
particle spin on different axes, also obey the relations. The mathematics
of the uncertainty principle is built into the laws of quantum mechanics,
which is the best theory we have of the structure of matter. According to
Heisenberg’s principle, even Laplace’s demon couldn’t know the simul-
taneous position and motion of one particle, let alone of all of them. This is
not a matter of our inaccuracy of measurement, but is built right into the
equations of the theory. The operators differ in the value of the product,
depending on the order in which one multiplies them (to use mathemat-
ical jargon, they are non-commutative). The difference between AB and
BA, for these operators, equals the limit of accuracy, related to a funda-
mental constant of physics (Planck’s constant). Despite Heisenberg un-
certainty at the atomic level, we can have statistical determinism in many
systems, where we cannot predict exactly, but can predict within a range
88
of error. Surprisingly, the teenage Heisenberg first learned of the idea of

geometric structures of atoms from reading Plato, before he was disap-
pointed by the crude materialism of the tinker-toy models in his chemis-
try text. His opposition to materialism was in part tied to the fact that he
was defending his laboratory against Marxist revolutionaries, and read
Plato’s theory of the creation of the universe in Greek for relaxation on
the military college roof at lunchtime (Heisenberg, 1971, pp. 7–8).
Heisenberg later claimed to have been stimulated by Plato’s concept of
the receptacle (matrix, or mother), a spatial principle leading to fuzziness
or inexactness when the perfect forms shape real objects in space. Despite
this early interest in Plato’s metaphysics, when Heisenberg first presented
the mathematical skeleton of his quantum mechanics, he understood it in
a strictly instrumentalist and positivist manner, claiming that the math-
ematics was merely a tool for making predictions, not a picture of reality
(see chapter 1). Later in life, Heisenberg understood his theory in terms
of Aristotle’s theory of potentiality and actuality. For Heisenberg, the
abstract, mathematical states are objective, but potential in nature, while
the physical observations are subjective but actual, turning the usual
notions of reality on their head.
Many people think that randomness occurs in the behavior of indi-
viduals (perhaps due to free will), but that statistical regularity of
populations is true in the social sciences, such as sociology. The social
sciences often in practice use statistics when they are attempting to be
rigorously mathematical. Laplacian determinism would claim that prob-
ability is just a matter of our ignorance, our lack of exact knowledge.
Chaos theory and quantum mechanical indeterminacy suggest that for
complicated systems of many particles, such as a human being or a soci-
ety, such statistical methods may be necessary, and not replaceable with
exact methods even in principle. It is perhaps on analogy to this situation
that the notion of statistical determinism in the social sciences, called by
Mesthene and Heilbroner “soft determinism,” is sometimes conceived.
Though the Heisenberg principle applies to the subatomic level, its
operation is usually effectively so minuscule as to be unnoticeable in
larger, many-particle systems. However, there are significant places where
it has been suggested the subatomic indeterminacy may be “magnified”
to have effects on the macroscopic level. These include certain biological
mutations involving small changes (of a single atomic bond) of the gen-
etic material that controls biological heredity (Stamos, 2001). Another,
89
more speculative, example is in the firing of individual tiny dendrites or

fibers in a neuron in the brain, where the chemical changes are on a small
enough scale for the Heisenberg principle to be applicable (Eccles, 1953,
chapter 8). More recently, physicist Roger Penrose has suggested that
collapse of the quantum wave function in the microtubules of the brain is
responsible for the non-mechanistic aspect of thought (Penrose, 1994,
chapter 7).
Thus determinism has been challenged within physics from at least
two directions. Chaos theory suggests that even the in-theory, determin-
istic mathematics of Newtonian mechanics can yield situations in which
practical prediction is impossible. Quantum mechanics produces an even
stronger, in principle, objection to universal determinism, in that the
indeterminism is built right into the mathematical core of the theory.
Free will is an older, more concretely human problem in relation to
determinism (see box 6.2).
Box 6.2
Freedom and determinism
Whether one thinks that humans are enmeshed in a deterministic tech-
nological system that controls their actions, or whether one thinks that
humans freely construct their technology and society, implicit positions
on the problem of freedom versus determinism are assumed.
One of the traditional philosophical problems is that of freedom versus
determinism. In the Middle Ages the conflict was formulated in relation
to the idea that God, who was omnipotent (all-powerful) and omniscient
(all knowing), could foresee and control all, but let Adam sin. If God
knew that Adam and Eve would fall when they were created, were they
really free? Predestination (the doctrine that God predetermined at crea-
tion who will be saved or damned) also conflicts with freedom. Figures
such as St Augustine (354–430) and the mathematician/philosopher
Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) claimed to have reconciled these conflicts.
With the rise of scientific laws and determinist ideas the conflict with
freedom took a new form. If everything we do is physically causally deter-
mined, can we be free? (See the discussion of Laplacian determinism in
box 6.1.) In this dispute determinists say no, while so-called libertarians,
who are believers in metaphysically free will (not the same as political
90
libertarians, who support minimal government), say yes, we really are

free. There are two senses of freedom here. One is the contra-causal
sense, the one that conflicts with determinism. In this sense of freedom,
acts of free will counter physical causes. That is, acts of free will are said
to somehow break or go against the chains of physical, causal determin-
ism. The other is the sense of freedom as responsibility, which need not
conflict with physical determinism.
Compatibilists attempt to reconcile freedom and determinism. A way
to accomplish this is to say that we are responsible for our acts even
though we are determined. One can try to claim that responsibility has
nothing to do with the contra-causal sense of freedom. One way of claim-
ing that freedom and determinism are compatible is to say that free acts
are simply the ones that issue from us in some sense. Even though all acts
are ultimately determined, we can distinguish between acts that, in some
sense, issue from us, and acts that are produced by external physical
causes (such as being blown off a roof and falling on someone) or ex-
ternal human coercion (such as being threatened at gunpoint). This is
an approach commonly taken in various forms by British empiricist philo-
sophers such as John Locke (1632–1704) and John Stuart Mill (1806–73).
Another way to combine freedom and determinism is to claim that the
physical world is completely deterministic, but that the mind or soul is a
different sort of non-physical stuff and is free. This is the dualism of the
seventeenth-century philosopher-mathematician René Descartes (1596–
1650). This is a substance dualism, in that Descartes claimed that there
are two kinds of entities (substances), material substance and mental sub-
stance. That is, matter or physical stuff and mind or mental stuff are
totally distinct from one another. The problem that arises from this is: if
these substances are so different in nature, how can one affect the other,
how can the non-physical mind affect the body? This is called the mind–
body problem.
Because of its difficulties few philosophers hold this Cartesian dualism
or causal interactionism today. Nevertheless, several Nobel Prize win-
ning brain scientists, including Sir Charles Sherrington (1857–1952),
Sir John Eccles of Australia (1903–97), Wilder Penfield of Canada (1891–
1976), and Richard Sperry of the USA (1913–94), held this position in the
late twentieth century. Their dualism cannot be dismissed as based on
ignorance of brain science, since they were its leaders. It arose from the
mystery of how experienced consciousness is related to the physical brain.
91
(As mentioned concerning the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, Sir John

Eccles, like the astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington (1934, pp. 88–9, 302–
3), appealed to the effect of quantum indeterminacy on the brain cells.
However, even if this could yield random actions, we wouldn’t necessar-
ily consider them freely chosen actions.)
Another, and somewhat less problematical, way of reconciling free-
dom and determinism is in terms of two standpoints theory, the solu-
tion of the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant
claims each individual has a dignity that is of infinite worth. Kant believes
that we are genuinely free. He also claims that the world is completely
deterministic. From the point of view of knowledge and science we struc-
ture the world in terms of deterministic laws, and can only understand it
in these terms. We search for laws and see things in terms of causal laws.
However, from the point of view of morality we consider ourselves as
free. Moral acts are based on a moral law that we freely legislate to
ourselves. Acting in terms of the moral law, we freely choose. Thus Kant
reconciles freedom and determinism by a kind of dualism of standpoints
or perspectives, rather than a dualism of soul and body. That is, we can
describe human behavior from the standpoint of science and causal laws,
and we can describe human behavior in terms of moral responsibility for
our acts. These two approaches are different but do not conflict. They
are mutually applicable. In the twentieth century there have been vari-
ations on this sort of reconciliation of freedom and determinism based on
different uses of language that have been popular. One such approach
distinguishes principled rational reasons for acting from causes of acting
and claims that the language of human reasons and the language of phys-
ical causes are quite distinct. Other philosophers disagree with this and
claim that reasons do function as causes of action, thus undermining the
two languages approach to reconciling freedom and determinism.
The conflict of the claims of determinism and freedom has been one of
the great issues of philosophy since the Christian writers of the Roman
Empire. The development of the concept of laws of nature set the prob-
lem within a new framework, but did not eliminate most of the tradi-
tional issues. The interplay of freedom and determinism occurs within
society and throughout the history of technology. Some attempt recon-
ciliation of the competing claims in terms of a “soft determinism.” Others
found their accounts on the total freedom of the active subject in social
constructivism. Still others eliminate the role of freedom for the impact
92
of events on the passive subject in some forms of structuralism. Yet

others claim to solve the dilemma by eliminating the subject altogether,
as in some forms of postmodernism. Various positions on freedom and
determinism lie in the background of debates about the nature of
humans in a technological society.
Biological determinists sometimes say we are lumbering robots control-

led by our genes. Behavioral, environmental conditioners such as Skinner
say we are controlled by the inputs from our environment. Technological
determinists and economic determinists claim that technique or the eco-
nomic system determines political and cultural phenomena such as art and
religion.
Some theorists of technology, such as the founder of the first university
based technology and society program, Emmanuel Mesthene, and the eco-
nomist Robert Heilbroner, use the term soft determinism. This is to be
contrasted with hard determinism. They get this term from the 1900 philo-
sopher and psychologist William James. James meant by soft determinism
compatibilism (see box 6.2). (By hard determinism, James meant a determin-
ism that excluded freedom.) But Heilbroner and Mesthene use it to mean
something more like statistical determinism – that there is freedom, but
that there also are larger statistical trends. French sociologist Emile Durkheim
(1858–1917), in his book Suicide (1897), used this sort of notion to claim that
there were social regularities concerning rates of suicide even if one couldn’t
predict whether a given individual would commit suicide. Catholics com-
mitted suicide less than Protestants, peasants less than city dwellers.
Marx and Heilbroner on Technological Determinism
Karl Marx in the preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy

(1859) presented in a short passage the briefest, clearest summary of his
theory of social change. Marx may have made it so neutral and objective to
get by the censor. This passage, unlike Marx’s earlier humanistic discussion
of alienation, which was not rediscovered for seven decades, was soon pub-
lished and well known to socialists and communists. It was highly influential
on the later socialist and communist movements. It influenced later techno-
logical determinism not only of Marxists, but also of twentieth-century neo-
conservative technocrats (see chapter 3).
93
Marx distinguishes between the foundation (base) and the superstructure

in an architectural or civil engineering metaphor. The foundation is eco-
nomic in a broader institutional sense than contemporary microeconomics,
and contains two major components. The first, the forces of production,
include energy sources, including human labor, and technology. Emphasis
on this part of Marx’s theory of society legitimates technological determin-
ism. The economic base also includes the relations of production, which
are the power relations within production, such as slave-owner versus slave
in slave society, lord versus peasant in feudal society, and owner versus
wageworker in capitalist society.
The economic base determines or causes the superstructure, which in-
cludes legal relations (which codify the relations of production), politics, and
more ideational realms such as religion, philosophy, and art. Marx claims
that the religion and philosophy of a society are determined by the eco-
nomic foundation, those forces and relations of production. Notice that the
place of science is ambiguous in this. It “seems to float between base and
superstructure” (Mills, 1962, p. 105). Via technology, science is a force of
production. At the same time, influenced by theories of the nature of reality
(metaphysics) and of method, in turn influenced by social worldviews, sci-
ence is an intellectual ideology like philosophy and religion.
Social change occurs because the foundation changes more rapidly than
the superstructure. Sociologist William F. Ogburn (1886–1959) later called
this “cultural lag” (Ogburn, 1922, p. 196). The political and religious super-
structure becomes dysfunctional to the economic foundation. For instance,
in eighteenth-century France there was a growing capitalist, factory techno-
logy. Nobles and priests ruled the country, while a new class of capitalists
was growing, but not a part of the government. The laws were medieval,
while capitalist property was growing. Eventually, the whole superstructure
collapsed and reorganized to adapt to the base.
Marx used this scheme to explain the French Revolution of 1789–1815.
Marx distinguishes between the real economic forces and the ideals of reli-
gion and politics in terms of which people fought out the conflict. The
French revolutionaries thought they were reviving the Roman Republic and
Empire. The English Puritans of the Puritan Revolution of the 1640s thought
they were reviving the society of the biblical Old Testament. Both French
and British revolutionaries ended up creating capitalism behind their own
backs (Marx, 1852, pp. 5–17). This is what Marx meant by ideology. It is for
him the false consciousness in politics, religion, and philosophy that serves
the ruling class. Emphasis on forces of production (energy sources) leads to
94
technological determinism such as the USSR version of Marxism supported.

On the other hand, emphasis on relations of production, claiming that class
power relations determine which technologies get used, was supported by
Maoist Chinese Marxism as well as many late twentieth-century non-
communist Marxist writers.
Robert Heilbroner is an American institutional economist who wrote the
very popular history of economic thought The Worldly Philosophers (1952). At
the opening of his essay “Do machines make history?” Heilbroner (1967,
p. 335) quotes Marx: “The hand mill gives you the feudal lord. The steam mill
gives you the modern capitalist.” Heilbroner notes that the models of sci-
ence as cumulative and linear, and of technology as applied science, support
the idea of technological determinism. That is, if there is a single necessary
path for science, and technology is the straightforward application of that
science, then there is a single linear path for the development of technology.
The direction of technology is not swayed by other cultural factors.
Heilbroner cites Robert K. Merton (1910–2003), who summarized the
frequency of multiple simultaneous discoveries. Simultaneous discoveries
or “multiples” are independent discoveries by several people at the same
time. Examples include: Newton and Leibniz discovering the mathematics
of rates of change (the differential and integral calculus); Darwin and Wallace
both discovering natural selection; and some six people independently hit-
ting upon the principle of the conservation of energy. This frequency of
simultaneous discovery suggests that science isn’t just an arbitrary product
of geniuses, but that ideas develop in sequence. (Of course, someone sup-
porting the cultural determination of science could claim that the shared
social situation accounts for the multiple discovery, such as both Darwin
and Wallace reading Malthus on population and modeling biology on cap-
italist competition.) Heilbroner examines “inventions ahead of their time,”
such as the ancient Greek steam engine in Alexandria, Egypt, and Babbage’s
design for a huge gear and board programmable computer with the basic
architecture of a modern computer in 1830s England. A technological deter-
minist explanation of this is that metallurgy wasn’t up to making iron that
would resist the strong pressures needed to build a large steam engine.
(Though not noted by Heilbroner, a similar explanation partially accounts
for the non-appearance of Babbage’s computer: that metalworking wasn’t
up to building accurate enough gears for Babbage to avoid analogue error
multiplication.) In contrast, a Marxist “relations of production” explanation
might be that Greek slave-owners wouldn’t like their galley slaves being
replaced by a steamboat or mining slaves replaced by a steam pump. The
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machines would make the majority of the slaves, and hence the present
wealth of the slave-owner, superfluous. This assumes that the slave-owners
were insufficiently far sighted to envisage turning themselves into capital-
ists, becoming owners of the machines, and dispensing with the majority of
their slave property in order to acquire machine capital.
Modern western technocrats and theorists of post-industrial society reject
Marx’s claim that socialism and communism would replace capitalism, but
they do hold to a technological determinism of the sort described above.
They claim that because of electronics and communication technology soci-
ety is evolving from an industrial society centered on manufacture to a post-
industrial society centered on information and services. This transition is
similar to the earlier replacement of agricultural society by industrial soci-
ety. The changed technology brings changes in work and in the politics of
the society. For technocrats the post-industrial society shifts power from
traditional capitalists to technocrats. Different versions of this theory claim
that owner-capitalists are replaced by managers as the controllers of indus-
try and/or that in government politicians cede power to technocrats, includ-
ing technologists and social scientists who supply the information on which
politicians act and the options among which they decide.
Forms of Information: A Communications Version of

Technological Determnism
Modern technocrats and theorists of what has been variously characterized

as the information society, service economy, post-industrial society, and
“second industrial revolution” emphasize information rather than energy in
their technological determinist accounts of contemporary society (see chap-
ter 3). Marshall McLuhan, whose most famous slogan is “the medium is the
message,” developed a theory of communication media and their effect on
human consciousness and culture.
McLuhan’s account resembles Marx’s broad historical sequence scheme
in one respect. It involves an early communal stage of society (in Marx
primitive communism, and in McLuhan oral society), a later alienated
one (in Marx capitalism, and in McLuhan print culture), and a return to
the happy communal stage again (in Marx communism, and in McLuhan
television-centered society) (Quinton, 1967). Both McLuhan’s and Marx’s
schemes resemble the biblical one of the Garden of Eden, initial innocence, a
fall into sin and expulsion, then eventual salvation.
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In archaic society or non-civilized society communication is oral. Every-

thing has to be memorized and handed down orally. Chanting, poetry, song,
and rhythm help people to remember long epics or genealogies. The bard or
chanter speaks surrounded by the local community. With writing this no
longer becomes necessary. Writing is visual, not oral. Reading is private, not
communal like a recitation. Writing separates the author’s personal pres-
ence from the work. Writer and reader are separated from one another,
unlike the oral storyteller and communal audience.
Despite the separation of author from physical printed work, print allows
the author to become important. In the oral tradition, although the bard
was greatly respected, the bard was not the source of the story (even if good
bards considerably elaborated on and improved it). The story was sup-
posedly a traditional myth. With the printed work, the author is generally
thought to be the source of the text.
Engineering diagrams and anatomical drawings can be accurately repro-
duced in printed works. Multiple copies and cheap printings allow knowledge
to be available outside the monastery or castle. The printing of the Bible led
to the Reformation, as the priest no longer had monopoly on the text or
interpretation.
McLuhan’s account is not unique. A number of scholars in history,
the classics, and rhetoric developed the contrast between oral and
literate culture. Writers in communications theory (Ong, 1958) and in
classics (Havelock, 1963) had developed similar ideas, but without the
grandiose sweep and popularization of McLuhan. McLuhan extended the
series of contrasts of communication media to include twentieth-century
television.
According to McLuhan, the new electronic media changed human experi-
ence and culture once again. McLuhan strangely calls radio a “hot” or emo-
tional medium. Radio brings back the voice and personality of the speaker,
which had been eliminated in print. (Many critics rejected McLuhan’s treat-
ment of radio as “hot” when his book first appeared, but the development of
angry political radio talk show hosts and angry audiences of what has been
called “hate radio,” as well as an attempt at liberal imitation of this discourse
on Air America, suggest McLuhan was on to something.) Television brings
in visual context and experience, which McLuhan claims makes television a
“cool” medium. Television makes people more primitive, into what McLuhan
called “the global village.” For McLuhan, while print corresponded to Marx’s
alienation, television will save us by returning us to a primitive communism
or Garden of Eden.
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Some German theorists of media, such as “critical theorists” T. W. Adorno

and M. Horkheimer, exposed to Hitler’s dictatorship and propaganda fol-
lowed by exile in Hollywood, were less favorable than McLuhan to the
electronic media. They went as far as to claim a resemblance between fas-
cism and twentieth-century mass media such as cartoons and television.
Hitler, significantly, was the first politician to make highly successful use of
the radio (and the first political campaigner to make use of the airplane).
The view is given support by more recent developments, such as the cen-
tralization of modern television and radio owned by half a dozen major
corporations (Bagdigian, 2004), the emotional nature of television news, the
angry hosts of the television news commentary, and the sometimes obscene
hosts of news-oriented comedy shows encourage a kind of reactionary emo-
tionalism. The centralization of television can allow a kind of mass brain-
washing by propaganda. Adorno, in his “How to watch television,” called
television “reverse psychoanalysis” (Adorno, 1998). Rather than making us
consciously aware of our primal urges and neuroses, as psychoanalysis is
supposed to do, television makes us become unconscious and infantile.
McLuhan and Adorno agree on the resulting primitivism, but differ in their
evaluations of it.
Probably the truth lies somewhere far from McLuhan’s uncritical praise
but also considerably short of the critical theorists’ blanket condemnation.
Studies of the extent to which cartoon violence on television encourages or
conditions actual violence in children who watch it have been criticized and
debated, because of the artificial environment of many of the experiments,
but seem to show an effect. However one evaluates the results of television
watching, the claim that television technology has affected the psychology
and culture of its viewers cannot be doubted.
The Internet developed after McLuhan’s time but lends itself to analysis
of the effect of communication media on experience and culture. The Internet
is decentralized and contrasts with television in this respect. In addition, it
includes print along with music and videos. The Internet is interactive, while
television is one-directional from a broadcasting center that depends on
huge financing. At the turn of the twenty-first century a huge consolidation
of US media has occurred, in which the major television networks are owned
in large part by a half dozen or so large corporations, including ones such
as Westinghouse and General Electric with many other interests, such as
nuclear power (Bagdigian, 2004). If the Internet remains and increases in
decentralization and is not captured by commercial firms, service providers,
and cable companies, it may counter the centralization and passivity that
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television encourages. However, increased fees for access to virtual informa-

tion and censorship of it may decrease the democratic and anarchistic aspect
of the Internet. There has been privatization and commercialization of some
formerly free services and resources on the net, but free downloads, indi-
vidual websites, and the explosion of blogs have maintained much of the
net’s libertarian character.
Writers such as Dreyfus (1999), ingeniously using the categories of the
aesthetic way of life from the Danish existentialist Kierkegaard, and, in a
more critical but less negative way, Borgmann (1995, 1999) (see chapter 5),
have criticized the Internet as devaluing education with mindless surfing,
and alienating the individual by swamping her with an overload of meaning-
less information. Like Adorno’s horrified critique of radio and television,
these criticisms have a grain of truth, but tend to underplay the positive
aspects of the net. The Internet has vastly expanded accessibility to technical
information for people at non-elite educational institutions and academics in
developing nations, though it is accessible only to a minority in the develop-
ing nations. Even in the affluent nations, not all neighborhoods have an exit
on the “information highway.” It also has the potential to increase democrat-
ization, even if to a lesser extent than claimed by its most utopian partisans
(see box 6.3).
Cultural Determination of Technology
In recent decades technological determinism has come in for extensive criti-

cism from writers on technology. To criticize technological determinism
authors have presented examples that are claimed to show that society has
effects on the direction of or acceptance and rejection of technology. One
way of doing this is to show that alternative directions for the development
of technology were available and a socially influenced choice was made.
Often this is difficult to do, since once a technology has been settled on it
acts as a constraint on further directions of development. The technology
then appears in retrospect to be inevitable, and this supports belief in tech-
nological determinism.
One version of Marxism (the base and superstructure model, in which the
technological base determines the political and cultural superstructure) has
been taken by many as a classic formulation of technological determinism.
However, Marxists have given examples of social determination of techno-
logy. One is that in a society based largely on slave labor there is not the
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Box 6.3
Postmodernism and the mass media
Some have claimed that the approaches and theses of so-called
postmodernism may be a product of the growth of the mass media and
of the Internet. This implies that the information society is the source of
postmodernism. This is an example of the “forms of information” version
of technological determinism, in which different forms of communica-
tion media replace the Marxian forces of production as the determining
factors of culture. (see McLuhan’s theory of media as an earlier example
of such informational determinism). As one moves from oral, to print, to
radio and television, to the Internet, new forms of worldviews and the-
ories are caused by the new forms of media.
Postmodernism is a broad and diverse movement that has been influ-
ential in the recent decades in the humanities and social sciences, including
science and technology studies. Some major features of postmodernism
are: (a) emphasis on the language-structured nature of our grasp of reality;
(b) denial of the possibility of “grand theory” in terms of general meta-
physical, philosophical theories of the nature of reality, or grand social the-
ories and “grand narratives” that claim to account for the whole sweep of
history; (c) denial of a unified self that is the center of our understanding
of the world or a basis for politics; (d) denial of unifying essences or natures
of things; and (e) denial of overall human progress. Clearly postmodernism
rejects some of the assumptions of classical theories of figures such as
Plato and Aristotle, such as the reality of essences and the possibility of a
general metaphysical system. Postmodernism also rejects the views of
the rationalists of the early modern period, with their emphasis on the
capabilities of rational thought in science and philosophy to grasp the
nature of reality. Finally, postmodernism rejects eighteenth-, nineteenth-,
and early twentieth-century theories such as the Enlightenment, positiv-
ism, and Marxism, with their belief in science and human progress.
Lyotard (1979), in a central manifesto of postmodernism, rejects “grand
narratives” of history of the sort produced in the nineteenth century by
Comte and the positivists, Marx and Marxists, or Spencerian evolution-
ists. Lyotard opens his account by referring to computerized societies and
the “post-industrial age.” According to him the new electronic era dis-
credits and makes obsolete the narratives of progress, as well as those of
the growth of state regulation.
Postmodernism, among other things, emphasizes the role of language
and writing in the broadest sense. One of the features of postmodernism
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is the denial of a separate objective reality distinct from the symbolic or
linguistic presentations of it. The rejection of traditional objective con-
cepts of reality and science parallels the growth of the development of
and speculation about virtual reality in computer science and science
fiction. For example, one very idealistic Internet manifesto “A declaration
of independence of cyberspace,” by John Perry Barlow of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation (1996), claimed that denizens of the Internet were
independent of physical environment: “you weary giants of flesh and
steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. . . . Ours is a
world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies
live. . . . Your legal concepts . . . do not apply to us. They are based on
matter. There is no matter here” (Barlow, 1996; Ross, 1998). A major
postmodern sociologist, almost as if to unknowingly satirize the subject-
ivism of postmodernism, has claimed that the best way to deal with the
first Gulf War is to deny that it ever happened (Baudrillard, 1995; see also
Norris, 1992).
Postmodernism denies the possibility not only of general metaphysical
systems accounting for the universe as a whole but also of general
social theories such as Marxism. Postmodernism typically emphasizes
the fragmentation and lack of any unifying structure to society. It then
goes on to deny that universal theories (and “grand narratives” of history
such as the theories of progress of St Simon, Comte, Marx, and many
others) are possible as adequate accounts of society. The global
interconnectedness of television and the Internet undermines traditional
nationalities and local cultures and in turn generates reactions, such as
American Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and Hindu “fundamentalisms,” as
well as local separatist movements in Scotland, France, Indonesia, and
the Philippines. According to some postmodernist accounts, the weaken-
ing of national governments (though counteracted by wars and the milit-
ary) can strengthen local secession at the same time that the economy
and culture is globalized. The Internet facilitates international com-
munication in social movements. For instance, the Zapatista peasant rebels
in Chiapas, Mexico, could get international support via the Internet,
through the ingenuity in communication of their university-educated
spokesperson “Subcommander Marcos.” Anti-globalization protestors
who demonstrated at World Trade Organization, International Monetary
Fund, World Bank, and World Economic Forum gatherings commun-
icated via the Internet to organize protests opposing the very economic
globalization that the new telecommunications technology has played a
role in facilitating.
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drive to develop labor saving devices found in a society based on salaried

labor. This was briefly mentioned above. The ancient Greeks had scientific
knowledge superior to the societies that succeeded them up to the seven-
teenth century. Nonetheless, the Greeks did not develop machine techno-
logy. The Greeks had knowledge of gears and in Alexandria a model steam
engine was invented. Nevertheless, one does not find these innovations
applied to practical devices such as pumps or steamboats. These arose only
in the early modern period. The claim is made that once wage labor became
the dominant form of work there was a drive to save on wages by multiply-
ing the strength and speed of the individual worker through mechanical
devices.
During the Middle Ages peasants who paid their lord a fraction of
their crop had replaced slave labor. In monasteries there was a desire to
save labor so that monks could devote themselves to their religious duties.
Hence in monasteries there was a great deal of invention of mechanical
devices. Religious interests also affected invention. The mechanical clock was
developed to time the prayers that were to be said every few hours, espe-
cially those at night (Mumford, 1934).
In the twentieth century there were cases in which alternative solutions
to a technological problem were available, but one was chosen for social or
political reasons. David Noble (1984) claims that the numerically controlled
lathe is an example of this. An earlier, alternative approach was a lathe that
recorded the motions of a skilled worker on tape. The tape could be played
back to produce the pattern without the manual guidance of the worker.
This latter playback technology gave the lathe operator more control over
the process. New and better recordings could be made to replace the ori-
ginal one. However, the numerically controlled lathe came to replace the
playback device. Noble argues persuasively that the early numerically con-
trolled lathes were not more accurate or efficient than the playback lathe. In
fact, the numerically controlled lathes often malfunctioned and had to be
adjusted or overridden by the workers. Noble argues that management
preferred the numerical control technology because it put control of the
process in the hands of the engineers and managers, not of the lathe operators.
The desire for control on the factory floor trumped efficiency. The techno-
logy developed was not the inevitable result of the quest for engineering
speed and efficiency. Instead, it was a product of the desire to maintain
greater control over the workers.
Social constructionist students of technology also criticize technolo-
gical determinism (see chapter 12). Social constructionists claim that many
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interest groups influence the development of a technology. Various groups

prefer various alternatives. In Bijker’s (1995) study of the bicycle, different
early designs maximized speed at the expense of safety or maximized safety
with a sacrifice of speed. The early bicycles with a huge front wheel were built
for speed but were harder to balance and led to a rider’s fall from a greater
height if they tipped. The early versions of the smaller wheeled bicycles
were safer but less fast. Different users, those interested in racing and those
interested in leisurely recreational touring, preferred different designs. The
big wheeled, fast, but unstable models attracted primarily athletic young
men. The resulting standard bicycle was a product of the pushes and pulls of
the divergent interest groups.
Andrew Feenberg (1995, pp. 144–54) has described how consumers have
actively modified technological designs or plans because of their interests.
One example of this is the French minitel. Originally this device, introduced by
the telephone company, was meant primarily as a means to access informa-
tion: weather forecasts, stock market results, and news headlines. Users
hacked the device to modify it into a communication or messaging device.
Eventually this became the main use of the device, far eclipsing the informa-
tion access function for which it had been designed.
Another example that Feenberg (1995, pp. 96–120) uses is the influence of
AIDS patients on drug trial protocols. Since untreated AIDS is fatal, the sort
of double blind medical tests usually used were, in fact, sacrificing the lives
of those patients who were given placebos and told that they were getting
AIDS drugs. Patients rebelled against this situation. At first the medical
researchers saw the resistance as anti-scientific and irrational. However,
eventually researchers came to work with the patient advocacy groups.
The latter became extremely well informed scientifically and influenced the
drug testing procedures. Feenberg notes that the overly strict identification
of medicine with pure “science” neglects the normative elements of medical
treatment procedures. The attention and study given to experimental subjects
often offers the kind of personal care that chronic patients miss and value.
Arnold Pacey (1983, pp. 1–3) discusses how the snowmobile used by recre-
ational users in southern Canada and the northern USA is basically the
same device as used by Inuits in far northern Canada. However, the routine
of maintenance and use is very different. The recreational user in the popu-
lated southern areas generally does not go far from home. If a breakdown
occurs there are generally phone booths and gas stations to deal with the
problem. For the First Nations or Inuit user the snowmobile is a part of
survival in hunting and other activities. In the far north breakdown far from
103
any repair facilities could be deadly. The snowmobiles must be kept in shape
for long journeys, and carry extra gasoline. Some Native Americans in the
far north keep the snowmobile in their lodging to keep it warm. Although
the technological modifications for the cold north may be minimal, the
culture of maintenance leads to very different use of the technology.
The science and technology studies community, with its penchant for
social constructionism, generally rejects technological determinism as out-
dated. However, recent technology studies at times falls into the opposite
extreme of a thoroughgoing cultural determinism. This is partly due to the
fact that the social study of technology modeled itself on the field of socio-
logy of scientific knowledge (SSK). Theory is important in physical science
and the traditional philosophy of science. Because of this, SSK tended to
emphasize theory and the social construction of ideas rather than of tech-
nical apparatus. Despite the development of instrumental realism in philo-
sophy (see chapter 1) and the growing emphasis on experiment in SSK,
technology studies, as a latecomer, based itself on the earlier SSK.
Bruno Latour (1992, 1993) has criticized the overemphasis in social
constructivist sociology on culture producing technical objects and the
underemphasis on the role of objects in producing culture. Latour empha-
sizes that neither nature nor culture is primary, that objects should be treated
as “actants” symmetrically with people, and that the starting point for ana-
lysis should be the nature–culture hybrid. Donna Haraway, with her use of
the cyborg as symbol of the erasure of the nature–culture dichotomy, and
her more recent use of domesticated dogs as an example of the same, is
equally concerned with this issue. Andrew Pickering, likewise, has empha-
sized with his “mangle of practice” that physical objects and regularities, as
well as political and cultural considerations, act as constraints on the activity
of scientists and technologists (Pickering, 1995).
Study questions
1 Give an example of a technological determinist account of the effects of

some invention not discussed in the chapter.
2 Do you think that the existence of human free will shows technological
determinism to be false?
3 Does a “soft determinism” or statistical determinism hold despite human
free will?
4 Do “unintended consequences of human action” lead to a kind of tech-
nological determinism?
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AUTONOMOUS TECHNOLOGY
7
Autonomous
Technology
The claim that technology is autonomous is the claim that technology is

independent of human control or decision. Technology is claimed to have a
logic of its own or, more metaphorically, technology has a life of its own.
The notion of autonomous technology is associated with the French writer
Jacques Ellul and his Technological Society.
The claim seems paradoxical, as human beings invent, market, and use
technology. However, Ellul notes that the various groups of people that
would seem to have control of technology do not do so. The technologists
and engineers who develop technology lack understanding of the social
impact of technology and are often naive about the means of controlling it.
(Ellul claims that brilliant physicists, such as Einstein, Bohr, and Oppenheimer,
whose work is the basis of nuclear weapons, were often extremely naive
about the possibilities of disarmament and the sharing of American nuclear
knowledge with the Soviet Union.) Ellul is also contemptuous of the usually
benign portrayals of future society’s use of technologies that technical ex-
perts project.
After-dinner speeches concerning the future of technology traditionally
spoke of “man choosing” technologies, as if the choice was unconstrained
and mankind as whole rather than powerful interest groups made the choice.
The politicians and businesspeople who support research lack understand-
ing of the technical aspect of technology. Certainly Ellul is correct that
people, whether engineers, businesspeople, or politicians, do not grasp the
consequences of the technologies that they develop or advocate. While the
technologists are generally ignorant and naive about the social and political
issues surrounding a technology and the politicians are often abysmally ignor-
ant of the workings of the technology itself, Ellul claims that the public is
105
ignorant of both the technical and the social aspects of the technology. Ellul
further claims that the religious leaders who are supposed to deal with the
value issues of society’s use of the technology are ignorant of the technical
and social issues, while no one listens to the philosophers who evaluate
technologies. Autonomous technology is a special case of the unintended
consequences of human action that Max Weber discussed.
A common set of beliefs about scientific method and the nature of tech-
nology support the autonomy of technology (Heilbroner has used these
claims to support technological determinism, but they are even more rel-
evant to autonomous technology). If one thinks of scientific method as fairly
mechanical and cut and dried (such as the Baconian inductive method), and
thinks that the nature of reality, not human interpretations and theories, is
what determines the sequence of scientific discoveries, then the sequence of
scientific discoveries is predetermined and linear. If technology is simply
applied science, then the necessary logic of the linear sequence of scientific
discoveries predetermines the linear sequence of technological applications.
Very rarely is a technology withdrawn once it has been introduced. Japan
withdrew firearms because they undermined the heroic and knightly sam-
urai ethic and the feudal social structure of which it was the pinnacle. How-
ever, eventually Japan reintroduced them.
While Japan was isolated from the rest of the world the regime was able
to suppress firearms, but when in the nineteenth century foreign powers
were seen as a threat, Japan’s rulers embraced the gun and reinstituted arms
production (Perrin, 1979). If people rarely or never reject a technology, then
the sequence of technological inventions that society accepts unfolds auto-
matically from the nature of the world and the nature of scientific method.
Thus technology can be claimed to have a logic of its own, independent of
human desires.
Another feature of technology that supports the autonomous technology
thesis is its tendency to spawn more technology. Ellul notes, as have others,
that technologies constantly produce unanticipated problems. Generally the
solution to these problems is more technology, not the rejection of the
technology.
Moreover, society tends to adjust to the technology, rather than adjusting
the technology to society, claims Ellul. Ellul himself prefers the term “tech-
nique” to technology and identifies technique with a set of means–end rela-
tionships and rules for achieving maximum efficiency in the adjustment of
means to ends (without the ultimate ends ever being examined). Ellul’s
characterization of technique fits with the definition of technology as rules.
106
However, the system definition of technology, including human organiza-

tion and the marketing and maintenance of technological devices, can
support the autonomous technology thesis. In what Langdon Winner (1977)
calls “reverse adaptation” the technological system, particularly its social
components, adapts the society to technology rather than vice versa. The
marketing of technology persuades the public, through advertising of par-
ticular devices or propaganda for the acceptance of technologies in general,
to accept new technologies (Ellul has written extensively on propaganda
itself as a technology). This claim denies that technologies are simply freely
chosen by the public in the market place but emphasizes the ability of advert-
ising to sell the technologies to the public. In the case of large-scale tech-
nologies, government institutions, such as the nuclear weapons program or
the space program, influence governments to support and fund a techno-
logy. Once large investments of money and commitment have been made in
a technological project, it is more and more difficult to simply drop it, even
if problems and difficulties arise. (The Vietnam War is a prime example of
this sort of situation. The larger the commitment one has made, the more
difficult it is to withdraw. A possible exception to this was the superconduct-
ing supercollider (SSC), abandoned after two billion dollars was spent, but
this project did not engage the nationwide economic and political commit-
ments that a war does.)
Similarly, large corporations lobby the government to support the pro-
duction and public acceptance of the technologies that they manufacture.
An example of government and corporate pressure to support the nuclear
power industry is the US Price Anderson Act, which limits the insurance
that would be paid in the event of a nuclear catastrophe. If nuclear power
companies had to pay the full insurance rates to cover major nuclear acci-
dents the cost of insurance would be prohibitive, so an act was passed to
limit insurance payments to a tiny fraction of the cost of such an accident.
Thus, according to the doctrine of reverse adaptation, large-scale techno-
logies tied to powerful institutions and interest groups ride roughshod over
any social resistance.
Langdon Winner in his elaboration of the notion of autonomous techno-
logy emphasizes that the tool model of technology misleads people about
modern technological systems and supports naive and self-serving justifica-
tions of the present state and directions of technology. The notion that
“man controls technology” not only assumes a kind of collective person but
treats modern technology as a tool that could be manipulated by an indi-
vidual. An individual uses the tool for a particular purpose, to reach a
107
particular goal. The technological system, on the other hand, at best has its end
products utilized by consumers, but is not really used, in the sense of guided
toward a particular purpose by anyone. The consumer does not originate,
maintain, or understand the complex technology or complex socio-technology
of the system. However, even the inventors, engineers, maintenance people,
businesspeople, bureaucrats, politicians, and others involved in the system
lack overall intellectual grasp or strategic control of the system. They control
as well as understand only a small fragment of the system.
Indeed, discussing a technological system in terms of its manipulation to
reach a goal or serve a purpose is misleading, according to Ellul and Winner.
The goals of technology are fine sounding – prosperity, progress, happiness,
freedom – but often in practice rather empty of content. The goals become
abstract and empty, while the means become ever more complex and re-
fined. No one questions goals such as progress and wealth, but their content
is left vague. The focus is on the means of development. Through reverse
adaptation and similar mechanisms the goals themselves are given content
to fit the means available.
Winner suggests that autonomous technology, far from being carefully
controlled and directed by a technological elite, is really ruled or controlled
by no one. The complexity of the system, with its constraints and imperat-
ives, guides everyone serving it to behave in the appropriate manners and
carry out the appropriate rules. Even the state does not play the all-powerful
central planning role that many technocratic theories describe or advocate.
The various large technological systems follow their own rules and at times
conflict with one another, but are not truly controlled by the state.
Autonomous technology, with its emphasis on the incomprehensible com-
plexity of modern technological systems, rejects one of the theses of the
precursors of the social construction of technology notion. Vico and Hobbes
claimed that we truly know that which we make or construct (see box 12.1).
However, much that we make develops a complexity that outruns our abil-
ity to understand it. Many computer programs are so complex (and if they
involve learning or natural selection become ever more complex) that we
cannot grasp exactly how they operate. This is true of much artificial intel-
ligence utilizing neural networks or evolutionary computing.
Winner draws on writers such as Arendt (1964) on Adolph Eichmann, or
Albert Speer’s own justifications, to claim that individual responsibility is
eroded and eliminated in the technological system. The Nazi bureaucrat
Eichmann claimed that he was just doing his duty and following orders in
scheduling trains filled with people headed for the extermination camps.
108
The Nazi architect and administrator Albert Speer claimed that modern
technology, not his own morality, was the cause of his behavior. Everyone is
just doing his or her job. The complexity of modern technological systems
makes it progressively more difficult to assign responsibility for any particular
result. Numerous people at various levels and numerous complex devices
are responsible for any particular result. When we receive a misstated bank
balance the bank teller will usually attribute it to “computer error,” but who
or what was responsible for the error is rarely determined. With the use of
computer programs that learn and evolve on their own even the experts
cannot determine the detailed source of some results of the programs.
Criticisms of the Autonomous Technology Thesis
Although Ellul makes many valid particular points, one can raise doubts
about a number of Ellul’s sweeping conclusions. Ellul’s claims about the
general lack of competence of any one individual to master both the tech-
nical details of an advanced technology and the social, political, and ethical
issues that it raises still hold true. But since Ellul wrote his major work in the
1950s there has been a great deal more effort and activity attempting to deal
in an informed way with the social issues of technology. Even in the 1950s,
whether or not nuclear physicists such as Bohr and Oppenheimer were
politically naive, there were other technologists such as Edward Teller who
were politically shrewd (although the more politically adept ones were on
the side of supporting nuclear technology, not limiting it). In the case of the
Human Genome Project there has been a great deal more public discussion
of the social and ethical issues than in previous scientific and technological
projects. A portion of the funding for the project itself was specifically de-
voted to its ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI). Much of the work in this
area has involved collaboration of scientists, lawyers, and ethicists, partially
overcoming the areas of ignorance that Ellul claimed each group has. Cynics
have claimed that this was simply a move by the scientists to attempt to
cover themselves and defend against what they realized would be widespread
public fears about biotechnology in general and human genetic engineering
in particular. Nevertheless, panels of biologists, social scientists, lawyers, and
ethicists have been formed, issue reports, and affect public opinion.
We have seen that the view of science as automatically making a prede-
termined sequence of discoveries, determined solely by the nature of reality
and a mechanical scientific method, can be questioned. Scientific theories
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and foci of interest are often guided by more general climates of social
opinion. Interpretation of data is similarly influenced by social context. Sim-
ilarly, the view of technology as simply a matter of applying science can be
questioned. The application of science to technology is not simple and auto-
matic. Many technological discoveries involve an element of chance even
when imbedded within a framework of scientific knowledge. The topics to
which science is applied are often influenced by the desires and problems of
the society. How a technology is used and maintained is also influenced by
social context.
It is certainly true that big technological projects supported by powerful
political and economic interests can steamroller and intimidate or discredit
grassroots opposition and use the media to sway public opinion. Neverthe-
less, it is not always clear that they succeed. The difficulties and opposition
that the nuclear industry has encountered in Germany and the USA
(although not in St Simonian technocratic France and Russia) show that
cultural issues, attitudes toward nature, and public fears can influence large
economic projects that have government support. Similarly, the decline in
funding for space exploration after the end of the Cold War shows that the
technology alone does not automatically expand once the cultural context
has changed (in this case the decline of the nationalistic rivalry between the
USA and USSR). Although advertising is powerful in swaying consumers,
well funded and advertised products can fail to find buyers. A famous ex-
ample of this is the Edsel car, which was certainly well advertised by Ford,
but which flopped. As for the reverse adaptation thesis, one needs to separate
those social forces that are part of a particular technological system from
those in the larger society. Often it is not the technological system itself (for
instance, NASA in the case of the space program) but the national govern-
ment that influences the success or decline of the technological project.
Study questions
1 Does Winner’s notion of “reverse adaptation” accurately describe the

effect of major technological systems on society? That is, do technolo-
gical systems mold the opinion of politicians, consumers, and others to
support and further the aims of the system? Is Winner right about such
things as space exploration or military technology? Give an example or
counter-example different from those in the text.
2 Does Ellul’s claim that technologists are ignorant of politics, while poli-
ticians and business people are ignorant of technology, and citizens in
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general are ignorant of both the technical and social aspects of techno-
logy, still hold true today? Do computer and biotech startup firms run by
scientists and technologists refute his claim? Does the growth of popular
science and technology writing show that citizens are more informed
than Ellul claims?
3 Do the occasional failures of major marketing strategies (such as Ford
Motor Company’s Edsel car, which was widely advertised, but failed to
sell) show that Winner’s “reverse adaptation” thesis is wrong?
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HUMAN NATURE: TOOL-MAKING OR LANGUAGE?
8
Human Nature:
Tool-making or Language?
A number of characterizations of human nature in philosophy, history, eco-

nomics, and other fields in recent centuries have focused on tool-making,
placing technology as central to human nature. The major alternative
characterization of human nature in opposition to this tool-making or
technological characterization during the past century has been in terms of
language. Humans certainly are both tool- and language-using creatures.
Those philosophers of technology who are negative or pessimistic concerning
technology are usually those who define humans in terms of language in
order to reject the notion that technology is central to being human. Both
the tool-making and language views, in order to claim to be essential charac-
terizations of humans, must claim that human tool-making is different from
animal tool-making and that human language is qualitatively different from
animal communication systems.
In classical philosophy, using real definitions and theories of essences
or natures, there were attempts to characterize human nature. Aristotle
famously defined humans as rational animals. Some existentialists would
reject any such essential definition of humans. Jean-Paul Sartre claims that
human freedom precludes any characterization of human nature, as humans
may chose to reject any particular characteristic. Simone de Beauvoir has
encapsulated this view with the claim that a human is “a being whose es-
sence is not to have an essence.” Ortega y Gasset has claimed that humans
do not have a nature but have a history.
Nonetheless, many writers have attempted to characterize the human
essence. While some center their characterization on tool-making, others have
denied that tool-making is central to human nature, instead claiming that
mind, language, or symbolism is the most important characteristic of humans.
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Usually the side a writer takes on this debate (tools and technology or mind
and language) depends on the writers’ attitude to technology. Thinkers who
see technology as primarily beneficial take the position that humans are
primarily tool-makers. Thinkers who seem technology as a danger or a curse
tend to emphasize human mind (in earlier writers) or language (in twentieth-
century thinkers) to counter the pre-technology stance. Lewis Mumford,
Martin Heidegger, and Heidegger’s student, Hannah Arendt, emphasize
language and art as characterizing human nature or the human condition
in order to counter the dominance of technology in an understanding of the
nature of humanity.
Head versus Hand: Rationality versus Tool-making

as Human Essence
Some of the traditional characterizations of human nature and disputes about

such characterizations involve technology. Benjamin Franklin defined or
characterized humans as tool-using animals. Others have characterized
humans as tool-making animals. The debate about the priority of the mind
and a purely mental notion of rationality (recall Aristotle’s “Man is rational
animal”) goes back to the origins of Western thought.
Anaxagoras (c.500– 428 BCE) claimed that the development of the prehens-
ile hand preceded the development of the human mind. The later system-
atizers of ancient philosophy rejected this early idea of the priority of the
hand and of physical manipulation to mental contemplation. Aristotle in his
Parts of Animals (X 687a5) denied Anaxagoras’ claim as absurd and thought it
obvious that the hand is present to serve the mind. Plato in the Timaeus 44d,
his account of the creation of the universe, fancifully claimed that humans
were first made as heads alone. Part of the reason for this was that heads are
circular and the circle is the most perfect figure, the model for the paths of
stars and planets. However, these heads got stuck by rolling into ditches and
depressions in the ground and so the demiurge creator modified them by
adding limbs.
The ancient Greeks and Romans generally denigrated manual work
(see box 8.1). Since work was done largely by slaves, manual labor was
considered lowly and unworthy of a free man. Plato and Aristotle exalted
contemplation and pure theory. Philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy
were worthy objects of contemplation as they involved pure theory.
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Box 8.1
Ancient, medieval, and early modern attitudes to work and techno-
logy, East and West
Work is certainly central to technology. One recent text in the philo-
sophy of technology even goes as far as to define technology as “humanity
at work” (Pitt, 2000, p. 11). This approach is understandable, although it
omits the use of technological devices for games and sports. The central-
ity of use of tools and machines in work leads to such a characterization.
Likewise, work and the organization of work are central to thinking
about technology. However, it is useful to remember that the high valu-
ation of work in the modern Western world was not held universally.
Traditional Greek, Roman, and Chinese societies did not revere hard
manual work, but looked down upon it.
The tradition of growing very long fingernails in late traditional
Chinese society, even in the early twentieth century, was a symbol that
the bearer of such impractical fingernails did not have to do manual work
(which would be impossible in such conditions). This was despite the
amazingly high quality of ancient and medieval Chinese technology, which
in many areas was far ahead of that of Europe and in some cases (such as
hormone therapy and biological pest control) was even ahead of Europe
until the twentieth century (Needham, 1954). (See the section on China
in chapter 10 for more on this topic.) Despite the innovations of medieval
Chinese technology, the craftspeople responsible for this technology were
looked down upon throughout the Chinese Empire (from approximately
200 BCE). No school of Chinese philosophy except for the Mohists revered
technology. They are thought to have been military engineers, and in
some cases even slaves, who flourished during the period of contending
schools before the rise of the Empire imposed an official philosophy.
Even the early Taoists, who were responsible for chemical and medical
advances, in the works attributed to Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu spoke ill
of labor saving devices.
In ancient Greece and Rome, a similar situation prevailed from the
classical age of Greece around 400 BCE until the late Roman Empire around
400 CE. Before the rise of the massive use of slavery the early, pre-Socratic
Greek philosopher-scientists (so-called because they pre-dated Socrates)
used metaphors from technology in a positive way in their metaphysics.
For instance, Empedocles is said to have eliminated disease in his city
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through draining the swamps by diverting a river. However, by the time

of Plato and Aristotle and throughout the rest of the period of the Greeks
and Romans, manual labor was looked upon unfavorably. For Plato and
Aristotle the contemplative life was the highest form of life (see the dis-
cussion of Plato in chapter 3). Reflection on philosophy, astronomy, and
mathematics was the highest calling. Manual work was fit only for slaves,
and its association with slavery degraded its status. According to one
anecdote, Plato expelled two members of the Academy because they had
invented a curve-tracing device. Plato thought this mechanical way of
doing geometry was vulgar. The student should study the forms purely
by mental contemplation.
Plutarch in his Lives famously says of Archimedes that he focused on
abstract mathematical theory and distained to record his practical inven-
tions, which were the diversions of a mind at play. Despite the fact that
Archimedes developed numerous inventions, including most notably
military devices such as catapults, burning mirrors, and other weapons
in an attempt to stave off the siege of his home city Syracuse, he never
bothered to record these inventions (Farrington, 1964, p. 216). Further-
more, later Greeks, such as Plutarch, cite with approval Archimedes’ reluct-
ance to honor such technological devices by bothering to record them as
he did his more abstract mathematics and mathematical physics. Several
anecdotes, although somewhat garbled, note that Roman emperors
refused to reward labor-saving inventions and even punished some
inventors with death (Finley, 1983a, pp. 189, 192). Likewise, although the
Greeks were careful to record the inventors (real or mythical) of literary
devices and concepts, they hardly ever recorded the inventors of even the
most important technological devices (except for Prometheus’ mythical
gift of fire to humans).
With the decline of slavery and the dominance of Christianity in the
Middle Ages, work took on a more positive value. Although the story of
the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden in the Book of
Genesis (3: 16–17) in the Bible presents work “by the sweat of thy brow”
(along with Eve’s future labor in childbirth) as a punishment, medieval
society raised the status of work relative to that of traditional Greek,
Roman, and Chinese society.
The monastic Order of Saint Benedict, with its Rule, was one source of
the expression of the higher status of work (Boulding, 1968). The monks
in the medieval monasteries had to support themselves and do their own
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work. The monks developed a number of technological devices, including

pulleys (White, 1962). They allegedly even developed an alarm clock to
wake up monks for middle of the night prayers (Mumford, 1934, pp. 12–
18; but see also Landes, 1983). Whether by coincidence or world system
dynamics, Zen Buddhist monasteries in medieval China, thousands of
miles away from Europe, during the same decades of the late eighth
century, developed a similar Rule of Paijing, emphasizing work and mon-
astic self-sufficiency, which helped to gain sympathy and support from
the surrounding peasants during government suppression of Buddhism.
Work received higher value with the rise of Protestantism, particularly
Calvinism. Sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), in his The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), said that the notion that people were
predestined from creation to be either saved or damned created great
anxiety. It was thought that wealth and success in this world was an
outward sign that one was saved. Certainly the subjectivity and emphasis
on conscience of Protestantism also contributed to the individualism of
capitalism. Weber notes at the end of this book that although religious
motivation declined, the structures of capitalism remained, rather like a
snail that secreted a shell, and then the religious animal died, leaving the
shell, which, Weber suggested, might become our “iron cage” (Weber,
1904, p. 181).
Though these early views may seem primitive or even to many moderns
comical (in the case of Plato on human evolution), they foreshadow the
continuing debate about priority of theoretical thought or of practical tech-
nological action in the characterization of human nature.
Haeckel, Engels, and Paleoanthropologists on

Humans as Tool-makers
The debate concerning the priority of head and hand was renewed in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in anthropology. The German
evolutionist Ernst Haeckel (1868, 1869) claimed that the upright stance freed
the hands for manipulating the environment and this led to the evolution of
increased brain size. In “The part played by labor in the transition from ape
to man,” Friedrich Engels, Marx’s collaborator, followed Haeckel in this
116
claim. Engels further argued that the emphasis on the priority of the mind
was a product of the higher evaluation of mental over physical labor in
class-divided societies (Engels, 1882). The priests and administrators engaged
in mental labor and considered themselves superior to the peasants and
crafts workers. Engels tied the evolutionary priority of the hand over the
brain to a general theory of history in which manual labor is the basis of
human society and in which the development of technology, along with
class relations, drives human history.
The debate was, basically: did humans first get smart and then stand up,
free their hands, and make tools? Or did they first stand up and make tools
and then get smart?
At the turn of the twentieth century many British anthropologists, such
as Wood Jones and Grafton Elliott Smith, claimed that large brains came
before hands in human evolution (Landau 1991). They implicitly allied
themselves with the two millennia long classical notion of the priority of
the human mind over the hands and body that we saw originally formulated
in Plato and Aristotle. This theoretical bias contributed to the acceptance of
the fraud of Piltdown Man. Piltdown Man was a planted fossil consisting of
the cranium of a modern human attached to the jaw of an orangutan. This
supposed fossil gave credence to the belief that the earliest humans had
large brains but an ape-like body that later evolved the characteristics of the
human body. Because it supported their pet theory, a number of British
anthropologists in the early twentieth century were insufficiently critical of
Piltdown. Although Piltdown was “discovered” in 1913 and succeeding years,
it was not exposed as a hoax until the early 1950s (Weiner, 1955).
Twentieth-century anthropology has lent support to the thesis that, in
Sherwood Washburn’s words, “Large brains followed tools.” Technology
drove encephalization. Nevertheless, debate has continued as to whether
brain size increase led to tool-making or whether tool-making led to brain
size increase. In 2003, stone tools along with animal bones showing cuts
from stone tools were found that date to 2.6 million years ago (New York
Times, October 21, 2003, p. D3). This supports the view that tool-making
preceded brain size increase, but since the most likely pre-humans present at
this site were Australopithecines, it suggests that the tool-making definition
of humans would include proto-humans prior to the genus Homo.
The definition of humans as tool-makers has influenced the interpretation
of evidence for the emergence of humans and guided paleoanthropologists
(those who study of human fossils) in their identification of the line between
humans and non-humans. When Louis Leaky discovered very early stone
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tools, before even finding the skeletons of their makers, he designated the
maker as Homo habilis, or handy man. Leaky simply assumed that tool-making
characterized humans and that the first tool-maker was the first human.
Animal Technology as a Counter to the Uniqueness of

Humans as Tool-makers
Certainly humans have been involved in technology from the very begin-
ning. However, in the twentieth century, discovery of animal tool use has
been used against the claim that humans are the tool-using animals. Sphenx
wasps use a pebble to tamp down the soil on the hole in which they bury
their prey. Crabs use sponges for camouflage. One of Darwin’s finches uses
a blade of grass to poke into holes to draw out insects. Chimpanzees use
twigs to poke into holes in trees to extract termites to be eaten. Chimpan-
zees also break off twigs for catching insects and break off branches for
combat. Thus chimpanzees can also be considered tool-makers, if of only
the most rudimentary sort.
Lewis Mumford has noted that the overemphasis on hand tools and the
de-emphasis on container technology in the study of human society has led
to a minimalization of animal tool use and tool-making. The nests of birds
and of paper-making and mud-daubing wasps, the dams and lodges of
beavers, are treated as tools or products of tool-making.
Nonetheless, human tool-making has a characteristic that makes it differ-
ent from animal tool-making. Humans make tools to make tools. Human
language differs from animal language in its grammatical recursiveness, its
ability to be indefinitely extended by further substitutions. Human tool-
making also partakes of this recursiveness. There are tools that make tools
that make tools . . . It has even been suggested by Patricia Greenfield (1991)
that the part of the brain of apes used for digital manipulation by the hand
was taken over, in part, for language in the evolution of humans.
The Criticism of Man as Tool-maker in Twentieth-

century Philosophy of Technology
A number of twentieth-century writers on technology who are critical or

skeptical of the promise of technology have championed the claim that
language, not tool-making, is what is characteristic of humans. Language, as
118
the realm of meaning, is held up in opposition to technology. The claim

about language as characteristic of humans is often part of a strategy to de-
emphasize the centrality of technology to what is valuable about humans. A
number of these writers are generally thought to hold negative views of
technology. However, some, such as Lewis Mumford, favor an alternative,
decentralized technology to the dominant one, which they consider to en-
courage centralization, top-down rule, and anti-democratic tendencies.
Karl Marx on Human Nature, Technology, and Alienation
Karl Marx in his early writings presented a theory of human nature centered
on creative labor. In his later writings Marx presented a theory of society
and history centered on the role of labor in the reproduction of society.
Because of Marx’s emphasis on the role of technology as the basis of the
succession of forms of society throughout history, many philosophers of
technology have grappled with Marx’s ideas. Anti-Marxists as well as Marx-
ists have criticized his politics while borrowing one or another of his ideas.
One historian has claimed that his colleagues denounced Marx in the class-
room by day and ransacked his works for ideas for their own research by
night (Williams, 1964). Much of later European philosophy of technology,
like classical sociology, can be called “a debate with Marx’s ghost” (Zeitlin,
1968). Just as Whitehead called Western philosophy a series of footnotes to
Plato, so Robert Heilbroner (whom we met in chapter 6) has claimed, in
effect, that much of twentieth-century social science consisted largely of
footnotes to Marx (Heilbroner, 1978).
Joseph Schumpeter, the conservative Austrian-American economist, wrote
of Marx’s influence, even on those, like himself, who rejected his conclusions:
Most of the creations of the intellect or fancy pass away for good after a time
that varies between an after-dinner hour and a generation. Some, however,
do not. They suffer eclipses but they come back again, and they come back
not as unrecognizable elements of a cultural inheritance, but in their indi-
vidual garb and with their personal scars which people may see and touch.
These we may well call the great ones – it is no disadvantage of this definition
that it links greatness to vitality. (Schumpeter, 1950, p. 3)
The view of humans as tool-makers that we find in Engels and in much of

later Marxism is not Marx’s own view of human nature. Marx explicitly
119
presents his view of human nature mainly in his Early Writings (1963). Tech-
nology is central to Marx’s account of economics and human history, but
Marx, unlike Engels, never claimed that humans are primarily tool-making
animals. Marx’s complex, ambiguous, and possibly changing doctrine of
human nature in relation to technology reflects his belief that technology is
the key to human prosperity and liberation from drudgery in future com-
munism, even though at present technology is the means of exploitation
and oppression of workers under capitalism.
Although Karl Marx has been commonly described in the socialist and
communist movements as denying the existence of human nature, writers
influenced by his Early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (or 1844 Manu-
scripts) have described Marx’s theory of human nature. Part of the disagree-
ment about this theory is due to the fact that Marx’s published works, which
were for the most part his later works, often disparaged theories of human
nature held by traditional philosophers and by Marx’s economist contemp-
oraries. He ridiculed Benjamin Franklin’s and British historian and cultural
critic Thomas Carlyle’s (1795–1881) characterization of man as a tool-using
animal, along with Bentham’s account of humans as solely driven by pleas-
ure and pain, and what was later to be called the “economic man” model of
mainstream economists.
In the later works that were published during his lifetime, such as Contri-
bution to a Critique of Political Economy (1859) and volume 1 of Capital (1867),
Marx has few or no explicit comments about human nature. Marx, as well
as the later leftist tradition, has tended to emphasize the cultural and social
variability and mutability of human characteristics, institutions, and behavior.
“Orthodox” Marxists in the social democratic parties of the nineteenth cen-
tury and the communist parties of the twentieth century claimed that Marx
denied the existence of human nature. Marxists, as well as utopian radicals,
claimed that people under communism would lack many of the selfish and
greedy characteristics that conservatives, traditional economists, and cynical
“common sense” attribute to us. Because of this Marx’s followers tended to
deny and to claim that Marx denied any human nature. Part of the reason
for this is that the common-sense phrase “that’s human nature” tends to be
uttered with a shrug about undesirable characteristics of human behavior
and reinforces a kind of unreflective conservatism. Opponents of Marxism,
whether traditional religious writers, economic defenders of capitalism, or
defenders of biological theories of human nature (such as social Darwinism
or sociobiology), often agreed with orthodox Marxists in denying that Marx
had a doctrine of human nature. In the second half of the twentieth century
120
Marx’s biological determinist opponents have often claimed that his views
espouse an environmental determinism like that of Skinner (Wilson, 1978)
(see the early part of chapter 6 on determinisms).
The discovery and publication of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in 1931 (in the
original German) and around 1960 (in English) changed many people’s con-
ception of what Marx had said about human nature. In these early works,
unknown for almost ninety years, Marx speaks of human “species being,” an
obscure phrase that certainly seems to connote a human nature. Marx also
goes on at length about human needs and human characteristics and the
way that they are deformed and distorted by “alienation” under capitalism.
All this seems to support the view that Marx held a theory of human nature
as something that could be alienated. The psychologist and member of the
Frankfurt School Eric Fromm, when he published these works in English,
called the collection Marx’s Concept of Man (Fromm, 1961) and saw them as
contributing to a “Marxist humanism.” One of the first reviewers of Marx’s
early manuscripts when they first appeared in Germany was Herbert Marcuse,
who was highly influenced by them (Marcuse, 1932) (see the discussion of
Marcuse and the Frankfurt School in chapter 4).
Nevertheless, Marx’s views on human nature are complex and ambiguous
(Marx’s critics would say they are inconsistent and confused). Marx speaks
of human needs, but also writes (in a later, unpublished, draft of Capital)
that, as society develops, humans develop new needs. Human nature or
“species being,” whatever it is, does not seem to be an essence located
or instantiated within each individual, as many traditional Aristotelian
and rationalist views imply. In fact, in his “Theses on Feuerbach” (a frag-
ment slightly later than the 1844 Manuscripts but earlier than the books
published during his lifetime) Marx states that the human essence does not
reside within each individual, but that “man is an ensemble of social rela-
tions.” Many traditional Marxists claim that this shows Marx’s early break
with his “juvenile” humanism (Althusser, 1966). (The German Democratic
Republic’s Communist Party edition of the complete works of Marx placed
the early writings in an appended volume of “juvenilia,” whose publication
was delayed for decades.)
However, an emphasis on relations does not necessarily mean the denial
of essence or nature. Traditional essentialism centered on properties or qual-
ities of the individual object. Relations were treated as secondary to and
derivative from qualities in most traditional philosophy. With Hegel, con-
sequently with Marx, even more so in American pragmatism and process
philosophy, and independently in modern symbolic logic, relations came to
121
be treated as equal to, or even prior to, qualities of objects (see the discus-
sion of “process philosophy” in chapter 12). Marx’s “species being” may
itself be a relational complex, rather like the so-called biological species
concept, defined by evolutionary taxonomist Ernst Mayr (1905–2005) as a
potentially mutually interbreeding population (Mayr, 1957), without deny-
ing that one can characterize the human species.
Against the common claim that Marx thought human nature was so
infinitely malleable or manipulable, one can ask: why did Marx think that
something was wrong with capitalism? Indeed, the very concept of aliena-
tion involves the notion of a true self or nature from which one is alienated.
Kinds of alienation that Marx discusses include alienation from the product
of labor (lack of ownership and control over the product), alienation from
the labor process (lack of control over the conditions of work), alienation
from one’s own species being (including alienation both from oneself and
from external nature), and alienation from fellow humans. Some of Marx’s
characterizations of human beings seem to present a goal-oriented or tele-
ological account of human nature. Human nature is the characterization of
humans as they will essentially be in the future, when they have overcome
alienation. Nevertheless, some of the accounts Marx gives of human nature
emphasize attributes that are at least partially present in humans now. Marx
emphasizes that humans are active, praxis-oriented beings that transform
their environment. This activity is primarily manifest through human labor,
the means by which humans transform their world. This labor, when
unalienated, is creative and fulfilling. Marx in his later works, such as vol-
ume 3 of Capital, published after his death by Engels, seems to partially
retreat on this. He ridicules the utopian socialists for thinking that work can
be turned into play, and he claims that there will always be a residue of
necessary labor, which remains unfree. Hannah Arendt criticizes Marx’s
alleged multiple ambiguities about labor (see the section on Arendt below).
One major respect in which Marx differs from many later writers, such as
Ellul, Mumford, Heidegger, and Arendt, is that he does not see physical
technology as necessarily leading to alienation and the problems of the mod-
ern world. For Marx, capitalism is the problem. Marx is a theorist of capital-
ism, not, as were St Simon, Comte, and the technocrats, a theorist of industrial
society as such. The types of technology developed by capitalism and the
uses of technology for labor discipline under capitalism are the major prob-
lem according to Marx.
However, there are further ambiguities with Marx’s view concerning the
respective responsibilities of technology and of capitalism for exploitation
122
and alienation. In Capital, Marx distinguishes between the technological

division of labor and the social division of labor. The former is the division
of work tasks imposed by the nature of the machines used in the factory.
The latter is the division of labor imposed by capitalists for the purpose of
controlling the workers by centralizing planning, decision-making, and
knowledge of the overall production system in the foreman’s office. Thus
workers lack the knowledge and control of the production process that would
otherwise allow them to think they could run it themselves. Much late
twentieth-century Marxist analysis of the labor process, such as that of Harry
Braverman (1974) and Steve Marglin (1974), centers on this transfer of skills
and knowledge from the workers to the managers, what British writers
called “deskilling.” However, drawing the line between those aspects of the
division of labor due purely to the needs of production and those due to
the need for control of workers is difficult.
Engels late in life, writing against the anarchists in the article “On authority”
(Engels, 1874), argued that technology alone makes labor discipline necessary.
Indeed, technology as such produces “a veritable despotism independent of
all social organization.” In reacting to the anarchists’ demand for autonomy
of the workers, Engels gives up all consideration of alternative technologies
and alternative forms of factory organization that would be less authoritarian
than the present ones. Lenin makes much of Engels’s article to justify fac-
tory discipline in the USSR. Ironically, Lenin praised the American time and
motion studies advocate Frederick Taylor, and even claimed that Taylorism
was central to socialism. Thus, ironically, Lenin, seeing “society as one vast
factory,” using St Simon’s phrase, identified the most mind-numbing control
of the minute motions of the laborer with socialist liberation.
Late twentieth-century Marxism, more in the tradition of Braverman and
Marglin, above, has envisaged the possibility of different forms of factory
organization and different forms of technology that would make labor control
less authoritarian. Braverman notes the use of computer surveillance of various
sorts for the monitoring, disciplining, and speeding up of white-collar work.
Lewis Mumford against the Characterization of Humans

Primarily as Tool-makers
Some thinkers look at contemporary technology primarily as a bane rather

than a blessing. The American Lewis Mumford, the German philosopher
Martin Heidegger, and his student Hannah Arendt all counter the conception
123
of humans as tool-makers, laborers, and technological animals with the char-

acterization of humans as linguistic and symbol-creating creatures.
Lewis Mumford was a prolific writer on American architecture and world
cities, as well as on technology in general. An independent intellectual who
never held a permanent academic position, Mumford undertook interdis-
ciplinary work combining the history of technology, philosophy, literature
and art criticism, anthropology, and sociology. He moved from a more
positive evaluation of contemporary technology in the 1930s (Mumford,
1934) to a much more negative one in the 1960s (Mumford, 1967), influ-
enced in part by the nuclear standoff and threats of nuclear war in the Cold
War. Although critics have called him anti-technology, he claimed to be
advocating a more decentralized technology of human scale. He calls the
dominant form of technology authoritarian technics, tied to centralization,
top-down organization, and oppression, as opposed to an alternative that he
calls democratic technics, which is liberating and life-affirming. Mumford
was a follower of the Scottish biologist Patrick Geddes, who took an eco-
logical approach to the study of cities at the beginning of the twentieth
century. They advocated regional planning to integrate the city with its
rural surroundings, and garden cities (mixing green spaces with urban build-
ings). Mumford’s ideas were precursors of and have many affinities with the
ecology movement, bioregionalism, and the small technology movement.
Mumford imagines human society prior to the rise of the state as life-
affirming and egalitarian. Females participated centrally in the gathering and
storage of food. He sees the move from big game hunting to the more settled
Neolithic existence as leading to a desirable condition. Technologies devised
by women, such as baskets and pottery, were central to supporting human
communities. Womb-like containers and caves were as important as phallic
spears and arrows. Tools were used but did not dominate other aspects of
human life. The human body, its role in dance and ceremony, and as an
object of body painting, piercing, and decoration, was a central means of
creativity. Mumford claims that the most important “tool” of early humans
was the human body.
Mumford sees the aesthetic and metaphorical aspects of human thought
as the primary source of early human advance. In contrast to a picture of
increasing abstraction and rationality as the key to human advance, Mumford
suggests that dream-life, with its often wild associations of images and ideas,
despite its dangers, was the source of early innovation. He thinks that the
Australian aborigines’ “dreamtime” is representative of the source of cul-
tural advance in early humans.
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Mumford sees the overemphasis on the tool for understanding human

nature as contributing to a vision of technology-dominated humanity.
Mumford himself claims that the first “machines” were made not of wood
or metal but of large numbers of human bodies organized for work. The
earliest civilizations engaged in huge construction or irrigation products.
Egyptian pyramids, the Great Wall of China, the canals of the Tigris–
Euphrates, and the dams for flood control in China are examples of gigantic
construction efforts in the earliest civilizations. A God-King ruled these
first civilizations, a king identified with the gods, and a bureaucracy of priests
possessing secret knowledge, as in the case of the astronomer-priests of
ancient Egypt, China, and the Tigris–Euphrates valley (what is now Iraq).
Many of these states, such as the early Egyptians and the Assyrians, engaged
in brutal conquest and carved monuments to the murderous power of their
divine rulers. Mumford calls the first machine the “megamachine” (see the
discussion of technology without tools in chapter 2).
Mumford claims that twentieth-century society, with its totalitarian states
with absolute dictators and, even in the democratic nations, welfare bur-
eaucracies and huge military–industrial complexes with secret knowledge of
scientists and national security experts (instead of priests), more resembles
the first civilizations than it does the more decentralized, competitive,
market societies of the nineteenth century. He compares the death-oriented
calculations of modern experts on nuclear weapons and warfare to the sad-
istic boasts of the ancient empires’ God-King conquerors in their threats to
competing states.
MIT nuclear engineer Alvin Weinberg writes that there is a need for a
“nuclear priesthood” and a need to build huge monuments (Weinberg sug-
gested pyramids as a possible model) over nuclear waste storage areas to
warn future generations (Weinberg, 1966). This certainly fits Mumford’s
vision of the twentieth-century USA as a modern version of the Egypt of the
pharaohs. Mumford also compares the Cold War nuclear superpowers, the
USA and USSR, to the aggressive and secretive military empires, such as
that of ancient Assyria, in what is now Iraq. Mumford titles the second part
of his last magnum opus “The Pentagon of Power,” playing on the role of
the pentagon in witchcraft and the name of the administrative center of the
US military. For Mumford, talk of scientists as the “new priesthood” (Lapp,
1965) and nuclear strategists as the “wizards of Armageddon” (Kaplan, 1983)
is more than empty metaphors in book titles. Auguste Comte, with his
projected technocracy of priestly scientists, looked forward optimistically to
what Mumford sees as a negative, death-oriented military–industrial
125
complex with its corps of scientific advisors and spokespeople (see the
discussion of Comte in chapter 3).
In a positive vein, Mumford wishes to return to something closer to the
life-affirming technology of our Neolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors. He
envisages a more decentralized technology, “democratic technics” replacing
the centralized and bureaucratic technology of today. He thinks that demot-
ing the tool-centered conception of humanity and promoting understanding
humans as symbolic animals is a theoretical contribution to this transforma-
tion. Human beings for Mumford are not primarily tool-making animals but
are symbolic animals.
Martin Heidegger
The philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was probably the leading

and was certainly the most influential German philosopher of the twentieth
century. Heidegger was early struck by the problem of understanding Being
in Aristotle. He combined a concern for the classical problem of being in the
earliest Greek philosophers with an interest in the insights into the human
experience of anxiety and the human condition of nineteenth-century exist-
entialist philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Heidegger absorbed and considerably modified the phenomenological
method of his teacher Edmund Husserl with existential notions of human
life and with hermeneutics or interpretation of meaning (see chapter 5). His
philosophical approach led him to reject traditional attempts to define a
human essence in the manner of Aristotle or to describe humans primarily
in terms of mind or mental substance, as did the early modern philosophers,
but he did attempt to characterize the human condition.
Heidegger contrasts language as the realm of meaning, “the house of
Being,” with the technological realm. For Heidegger technology is the prim-
ary characteristic of our age, replacing the notions of biological growth,
artistic creation, or divine creation that characterized previous epochs. The
development of Western philosophy from the time of Plato, at least, has been
a trajectory toward the domination of the world by modern technology.
Despite the centrality of technology to the present epoch and the destiny
of Western Being, humans are not fundamentally tool-making animals
according to Heidegger. Furthermore, humans are not “rational animals.”
Indeed, humans are not animals, and an account of human being fails if it
is based on the evolution of humans and their rationality from animals. For
126
Heidegger, animals lack the world-openness and world-constructing char-

acter of humans. Since they are devoid of language in the full sense they
are incapable of understanding the world and things. Heidegger rejects
Aristotle’s definition of humans as rational animals, but his account of the
role of the human hand in relation to consciousness interestingly resembles
Aristotle’s. Just as Aristotle rejected Anaxagoras’ claim that the mind evolved
because of the development of the hand and claimed that the hands exist for
the sake of the mind (see above), Heidegger claims that the human hand
discloses things in a way that the animal paw does not. Work, tool use, and
tool-making only occur within the context of language, which animals lack.
Tools and even human hands are not “organs” of humans the way that
McLuhan and many others claim. Tools, in themselves, are ahistorical and
human hands are disclosive; that is, they reveal a human world.
Originally, some suggest, Heidegger saw the solution to the technological
age in an aesthetic relation to technology, in which technology would be-
come one with art (Zimmerman, 1990). Later he seems to have seen the
solution in replacing our “enchained” relation to technology with our achiev-
ing a “free relation” to technology. What exactly this free relation is has
been a matter of dispute among followers of and commentators on
Heidegger.
In Heidegger’s earlier thought the meaningful experiences of traditional
peasant culture (in craft work and agriculture) are contrasted with the mod-
ern technological attitude. Albert Borgmann, a present-day American philo-
sopher of technology, suggests that Heidegger’s rural and archaic references
can be replaced with “focal experiences” and communal celebrations in
contemporary life, such as preparing a meal or jogging. In Borgmann’s view
these meaningful focal experiences should be central to our values and only
served by technological means (Borgmann, 1984).
Dreyfus (in Dreyfus and Spinosa, 1997) suggests that new attitudes and ori-
entations that do not reject technology but also embrace non-technological,
traditional, or communal practices and attitudes become possible after one
recognizes that we are enmeshed in the technological understanding of being.
This understanding, or “releasement,” is not sufficient, but is a necessary
precondition for the embracing of other attitudes. Dreyfus uses the example
of Japan, where embrace of technology coexists with traditional cultural
practices. This apt example of Japan is also used by Feenberg (1995, chapters 8
and 9). Dreyfus also mentions Woodstock (which, admittedly, failed in its
highest ambitions to transform society), where the technology of music amp-
lification was put at the service of fostering a community. Dreyfus, in this
127
article, also endorses Heidegger’s claim of the need to replace calculative

with meditative thinking.
Dreyfus and Spinosa (1997) move even further away from Borgmann
than in Dreyfus’s earlier article when they characterize the “free relation” to
technology in terms of the decentering or pluralization of the self caused by
technology. They present a postmodern version of Heidegger’s “free rela-
tion,” claiming that we can live in a plurality of local “worlds” provided by
technology (see box 6.3). They use examples from Sherry Turkle’s Life on the
Screen (1995), describing the multiple identities serially assumed by users of
chat rooms on the Internet. They also refer to the temporary joining and
creative reinforcement of members of rock groups and technological re-
search groups and the subsequent separation of members to join other groups.
Andrew Feenberg, the critical theorist, follower of the Frankfurt School
(see Habermas, below, and chapter 4), criticizes both Borgman and Dreyfus
and Spinosa as excessively idealist in their solution to the problem of living
with technology. They understand the solution to reside in a new attitude,
and in the supplementing of technological existence with other communal
forms of existence, but they do not ever propose redesigning technologies
themselves. The environmental, military, and labor discipline effects of tech-
nology would remain, only to be supplemented by intimate or communal acts
that would allow an alternative perspective. (To be fair to Dreyfus, in his
earlier article he does say that work on environmental harms of technologies
should go on, but is less important than the change of fundamental attitude.)
After Heidegger, interpreters like Borgmann have emphasized the non-
technological experiences of meaning that help to allow us not to be
unreflectively engulfed in technology, while others, such as Dreyfus, have
emphasized the ability of postmodern selves to free themselves from any
predetermined characterization by making use of the resources of techno-
logy. It would seem that Heidegger’s own views reside somewhere between
the rather essentialistic and emphatically non-technological, ecstatic, focal
epiphanies of Borgmann, and the totally unmoored and rootless self-
transformations or morphings of Dreyfus.
Hannah Arendt on Work, Labor, and Action
Hannah Arendt, a German-American, was a student and lover of Martin

Heidegger. A Jew, she fled Nazi Germany, and eventually settled in the
USA. Her work on modern society is highly influenced by Heidegger and
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his vision of the dominance of technology in the modern era. Arendt, per-
haps even more so than Heidegger and Mumford, is totally negative about
the prospects of modern technology. Heidegger hints at a new attitude to
technology that will allow us to use technology while freeing us from dom-
ination by it. Mumford suggests an alternative, utopian, decentralized
biotechnics and democratic technology. However, Arendt offers no such
hope for future improvements of technological society.
Arendt called her 1958 book The Human Condition. She discusses the hu-
man condition rather than human nature, in part because of the influence of
Heidegger. Like Heidegger, and the existentialists noted at the beginning of
this chapter, she rejects the Aristotelian notion of an innate and unchanging
human essence. She also believes that human nature has to be a theolo-
gically based concept, and hence she rejects the concept, as she doesn’t ground
her views in religion. Arendt’s first book was Augustine’s Doctrine of Love
(1929). However, like Heidegger, following Nietzsche, she thinks Judeo-
Christianity is passé.
Arendt contrasts what she calls labor, work, and action. In the back-
ground of this distinction is what she claims is ambiguity in Marx’s notion of
labor. On the one hand, for Marx, unalienated labor is creative and positive.
Labor is what produces the human world and environment. Labor is for
Marx the “Heraceitian fire” of human personal creative energy. On the
other hand, labor is burdensome and exhausting. Labor as described in Cap-
ital is exploitative and dehumanizing. In the German Ideology Marx even ends
the major section by proposing the “abolition of labor.” Arendt claims that
Marx has two kinds of labor that are very different from one another. Fur-
thermore, Arendt claims, Marx tends to conflate political, revolutionary
activity and creative praxis with labor as creative activity, when labor and
political action are very different sorts of activities.
Arendt notes that Greek, Latin, French, German, and English have two
words, work and labor, that are generally used interchangeably. Arendt points
out that both work and labor can denote processes. However, “a work” (for
instance, “a work of art”) is a physical object, while “a labor” (such as one of
the labors of Hercules) is an activity. Arendt takes this difference to use labor
to designate a different activity from work. Labor is pure process, while
work culminates in an artifact.
In Arendt’s usage, labor also does not produce a permanent product, but
is the daily repeated activity of life maintenance, primarily household main-
tenance, including food preparation, cleaning, and bathing. Labor is a bio-
logical function in which both humans and animals, as in the search for
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food, must engage. Unlike action it does not institute something once and
for all, but must be repeated continually. In ancient Greece women and
slaves performed labor in the household. Arendt makes much of the con-
trast of public and private in ancient Greece. Women in ancient Greece
(with the exception of geisha-like heterai, entertainers and prostitutes) were
confined to the household and did not participate in the public realm. Free
(non-slave) men spent their time in the public arenas of the market place,
the law court, and the assembly. Arendt was not a feminist, but feminists
after Arendt have made much use of the public man–private woman di-
chotomy, usually without crediting Arendt and referring to other, more
recent, explicitly feminist theorists, some of whom probably borrowed the
account from Arendt.
Arendt also plays on the use of “labor” to designate childbirth. In the
Book of Genesis (3:16, 19) in the Bible, when God expels Adam and Eve
from the Garden of Eden for eating of the tree of knowledge of good and
evil, He condemns Eve to the pain of childbirth, parallel to the pain of
manual labor for Adam. (One inconsistency of Arendt’s here is that child-
birth labor does create something absolutely new, a new human. However,
it is true that reproduction is something humans share with all animals.)
Arendt notes that the Latin term animal laborans (laboring animal) iden-
tifies labor with an activity not fully human. In contrast, work, unlike labor,
is a distinctively human pursuit. Work produces objects and constructs the
world. While the products of labor disappear upon consumption (as in the
case of food), the products of work endure. The objects produced by work
are objective and public. Work is the activity of making or fabricating things,
as in the crafts. Work is the particular province of free craftspeople (though
slaves were also employed in the crafts). According to Arendt, work as
fabrication, the production of enduring material objects, existed in the an-
cient and early modern world, but has largely disappeared in the twentieth
century. Artists and individual craftspeople still pursue fabrication in the
advanced industrial societies, but this is often a luxury production for yuppies.
The vast majority of both assembly line workers in factories and data entry
workers in offices no longer work or fabricate in this sense.
For Arendt, action is primarily characterized by speech in the public or
political realm. Like labor, it produces no permanent physical product but is
truly characteristic of the highest form of human activity. In the world
before tape recorders and cameras even the most eloquent speech disappeared
into the air immediately after its utterance. In contrast to labor, however,
action is truly creative. Speech and political action create and institute truly
130
new things, new policies and institutions. At the same time the political and
speech acts that create these novelties are evanescent, impermanent.
In Arendt’s terminology Marx mistakenly reduced both work and action
to labor. Arendt claims that in the modern world action in the true sense has
all but disappeared. Genuine participatory discussion in the agora (market
place) and assembly hall has been replaced by political propaganda. Recall
that St Simon (see chapter 6) called artists “engineers of the spirit,” which
was echoed by Soviet dictator Stalin. In addition, Ellul wrote a whole book
called Propaganda (1962), and treats propaganda as a form of technology, not
communication, which dominates politics and the mass media (see discus-
sion of Ellul in chapters 2 and 7). Likewise, politics in the ancient Greek
sense of the term – that is, active, direct democratic participation by the
public – has also almost entirely disappeared. Direct participation was appro-
priate for small city-states, but large states have replaced participation
with representation at best. Mass media and bureaucracy undermine even
this less direct democracy. In the modern world only briefly in the initial
phase of political revolutions does participatory democracy and genuine
action emerge. Workers councils in Western European revolutions and the
original, briefly flourishing, soviets in the Soviet Union involved genuine
participatory democracy and action in Arendt’s sense. However, in Western
Europe the forces of the old regimes crushed the workers’ councils, while in
the Soviet Union they were subsumed under the totalitarian state with con-
trolled labor unions and totally lost their participatory nature.
Humans as active speaking animals have been almost completely replaced
by humans as laboring animals. Likewise, according to Arendt, work has
greatly shrunk in extent in the modern world. Work has turned into labor,
as the skilled activity of the individual craftsman has been replaced by the
repetitive production of parts of a product on the assembly line in the mod-
ern factory. The factory worker producing a single part or making a single
adjustment over and over again often has no understanding of the structure
of the overall product and cannot take pride in creation (the classic comic
portrayal of this is the opening of Charlie Chaplin’s silent movie Modern
Times (1936), in which Chaplin becomes deranged by working on an acceler-
ating assembly line). Planned obsolescence means that the products of work
become objects of consumption in the sense of being disposed of shortly
after use. Thus the assembly line, with interchangeable parts and factory
work yielding disposable items, is more like Arendt’s labor (repetitive, with
no visible product) than like the craft production of objects identifiable as
personal products by artisans.
131
Arendt’s bleak view of the human prospect projects Marx’s “metabolization

with nature” as a regression to an animal-like, pre-human condition. Aris-
totle had once joked that if looms could weave themselves, we should have
no need for slaves. He didn’t envisage modern machinery and power looms.
But Arendt claimed, in effect, that rather than technology yielding “Athens
without slaves” through the education and leisure permitted by automation,
we are left with “slaves without Athens,” a world where everyone is a
laborer in her sense, via slavery to the machine, and leisure degenerates into
mass culture, lacking the high culture of Athens (Robins and Webster, 1990).
Habermas on the Relation of Work to Human Nature
Another German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, contrasts communicative

action with instrumental action. Habermas is of the second generation of
the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (see chapter 4). Habermas began by
criticizing and attempting to reconstruct Marx’s views, with considerable
revisions. Habermas rejects the primacy of work and technology, which he
(not wholly accurately) ascribes to Marx, and which was present in most
“orthodox” Soviet Marxism. He claims that Marxism neglects the auto-
nomous role of the communication of meanings. Habermas ends up holding
a kind of dualism or dichotomy of technological labor and communicative
action. In his later works, he does not explicitly present a traditional theory
of human nature, but does in his earlier published work write of “species-
wide capacities” and similar notions. His unpublished dissertation on Schelling
grapples with an evolutionary theory of humans, but does not engage with
modern Darwinian natural selection. However, his recent writings on
biotechnology assume the truth of a simplistic genetic determinism counter-
poised to an anti-scientific “old humanism” ( just as he assumes a Marxist-
Leninist, mechanistic conception of labor in Marx in order to supplement it
with his communication theory). Lenny Moss, a philosopher of biology with
a degree in biochemistry, has recently criticized and attempted to revitalize
Habermas’s early evolutionary anthropology in terms of modern, non-
reductive theories of the relation of genetics and the environment (Moss,
2004a, b), using the criticism of reductionistic genetic determinism from
Moss’s What Genes Can’t Do (a title borrowed from Dreyfus’s What Com-
puters Can’t Do, discussed in chapter 5).
Like Heidegger, Mumford, and Arendt, Habermas rejects the primacy of
technology, but he thinks that technology is of equal importance to symbolic
132
communication in the description of human life. Habermas sees similarities

in his communicative aspect of human nature to Arendt’s notion of action.
In his Knowledge and Human Interests (1970), Habermas presents his theory
of “knowledge-constitutive” or knowledge-guiding interests. These “interests
of reason” lie behind and motivate the different forms and functions of
reason. They are the interest in manipulation and control of nature, the
interest in communication and understanding of meaning, and the interest
in freedom (the emancipatory interest). Work and interaction are two central
activities tied to specific forms of knowledge. Habermas identifies positivist
philosophy with a position that implicitly makes the technical-manipulative
interest the sole interest of reason (see chapter 3 on the early positivism of
Comte and chapter 1 on logical positivism). Habermas identifies hermeneutics
with a philosophy that concentrates solely upon the communicative inter-
est. He claims that an adequate philosophy needs to incorporate both
approaches. It needs to deal with both causality and meaning.
In Habermas’s later terminology of his Theory of Communicative Action
(1987), work consists of instrumental action, which involves means–end
activity. According to Habermas, instrumental action characterizes natural
science and technology. Communicative action involves language, symbolic
activity, and interpretation. Communicative action is present in the lifeworld
of immediate experience (everyday conversation) and in debate and discus-
sion within democratic politics. According to Habermas in his later writings
technocracy attempts to “colonize the lifeworld” with the authority of tech-
nocracy and a technocratic way of thinking about human problems. That is,
areas previously consisting of informal face-to-face interaction and tradi-
tional knowledge are replaced by the intervention of supposed experts from
the social sciences (Habermas, 1987). Education and the family life are im-
pacted by social scientists and social workers, and shift from the private
realm to the domain of state intervention and social engineering by tech-
nocrats. Habermas claims that Marx and Marxism erred in attempting to
reduce communicative action to instrumental action, making work the key
to the reorganization of society and downplaying the communicative dimen-
sion of politics.
Habermas clearly wishes to include both the instrumental-technological
and the symbolic-communicative dimensions as part of the characterization
of humans. Thus his position could be seen as a compromise between the
tool-making and linguistic theories of human nature, although he empha-
sizes the inadequacy of the tool-making theory (instrumental rationality) as
a total approach for understanding human society, an approach he attributes
133
to Marx. Unlike Heidegger, Mumford, and Arendt, Habermas does not reject
tool-making and technology as characteristic of human being, but presents it
as one of two (or three in his earlier work, including the “emancipatory
interest”) “equiprimordial” species characteristics of humans.
Conclusion
There has been a debate about the place of technology in the theory of
human nature. The early Greek philosopher Anaxagoras claimed that
manipulation of surroundings with the hands led to the growth of mind.
However, Plato, Aristotle, and most of the tradition for the next 2200 years
claimed that the rational, contemplative, and spiritual mind was what is
characteristic of human beings and human nature. Aristotle claimed that
humans are, in essence, rational animals.
In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Benjamin Franklin and
others revived the emphasis on action rather than contemplation, and claimed
that humans are tool-using animals. Marx emphasized work and technology
in understanding human history and our present condition. Engels went
further in characterizing humans as laboring animals and tool-makers.
A number of twentieth-century philosophers have reacted against the
notion that humans are essentially tool-makers and that technology is the
key to human evolution. Twentieth-century philosophy shifted away from
mind to language and symbolism as the key to understanding rationality.
Thinkers such as Mumford, Heidegger, and Arendt have emphasized lan-
guage and symbol-making rather than the traditional, spiritual mind or
mental substance of Plato or early modern philosophy. Part of the motivation
of those who have emphasized language and meaning rather than technology
as the key to understanding the special place of humans has been a pessim-
istic attitude to technology in general, or, in Mumford, at least the technology
that has hitherto existed.
Technological optimists such as Franklin and Engels saw tools as the key
to the special qualities of humans. Technological pessimists have claimed
that language, not technology, is what makes humans special, and even that
technology has suppressed and degraded the special capacity of humans for
communication and mutual understanding of meanings. Those thinkers,
such as Marx himself (as opposed to Engels and technological determinist
Marxists) and Habermas, who wish to emphasize both the liberating and the
oppressive capacities of technology have characterized human beings in their
134
highest capacities, not only as active, laboring creatures, but also as crea-
tures of creative political action or of communication.
Study questions
1 Do you see human tool-making and language as part of a quantitative

continuum with animal tool-making and animal communication, or do
you see a qualitative break between the human and animal capacities
here?
2 What is your own judgment as to which, if either, is more fundamental
to human nature, tool-making or language?
3 If we distinguish alienated labor from non-alienated labor, is Arendt’s
claim that Marx has more than one concept of labor or an ambiguous
concept of labor still valid?
4 Does the recursiveness of human tool-making (producing tools to make
tools to make tools . . . ) show a genuine difference from animal tool-
making, or do the discoveries of animal tool-making destroy the charac-
terization of humans as tool-makers?
5 Does Arendt’s analysis of work, labor, and action still hold in the com-
puterized factory after the transition from the industrial to the post-
industrial or information age? Does the Internet reinvent the political
space that Arendt claims disappeared in the modern world?
6 Does the rise of information technology and electronic communication
undermine Habermas’s dualism between instrumental, technological
action and communicative action? If so, how? Consider a society in
which production of information rather than physical objects is the central
activity. Does this blur the distinction between action and work, or does
information become merely another artifact?
135
WOMEN, FEMINISM, AND TECHNOLOGY
9
Women, Feminism, and
Technology
A Woman’s Work Is Never Done

I saw a man the other day,
As savage as a Turk,
And he was grumbling at his wife
And said she did no work . . .
He said: You lazy huzzy!
Indeed you must confess;
For I’m a-tired of keeping you
In all your idleness.
The woman she made answer:
I work as hard as you,
And I will just run through the list
What a woman has to do.
So men, if you would happy be,
Don’t grumble at your wife so;
For no man can imagine
What a woman has to do.
Lesley Nelson-Burns (c.1850)
A woman’s place is in the wrong.

James Thurber (c.1950)
Feminist philosophy of technology is part of the larger movement and project

of feminist philosophy in general. Feminist philosophy started in applied
ethics (Alcoff and Potter, 1993), where issues of gender with respect to
abortion, child rearing, sexist language, and general issues of male power
136
and dominance are most obvious. However, as feminist philosophy devel-

oped, feminist philosophers moved to deal with foundational issues in theory
of knowledge and metaphysics. During the 1970s, as a part of so-called
second wave feminism (the First Wave being the fight for women’s suf-
frage), feminist philosophy of science and technology arose, with writers
such as Evelyn Fox Keller, Donna Haraway, and Sandra Harding. Feminist
approaches to the theory of knowledge are often made in contrast with in
and opposition to the standard positivistic, objectivistic and technocratic
ones (see chapters 1 and 3).
A number of philosophical tendencies in the latter part of the twentieth
century were exploited, developed, and extended by feminist epistemolog-
ists (theorists of knowledge) and philosophers of science and technology.
Criticism of logical positivism and the psychologically and socially oriented
post-positivist philosophies, such as those of Thomas Kuhn (as well as
Stephen Toulmin, Paul Feyerabend, and Michael Polanyi), opened issues
and topics concerning social and psychological biases in science for feminist
philosophers (Tuana, 1996). Likewise, phenomenological and hermeneutic
approaches from continental philosophy that eventually were assimilated in
US philosophy gave an entrée to feminists to introduce the role of context,
personal feelings, and social situation into the philosophy of science. Criti-
cism of uncritical celebration of technological progress and futurological
fantasies of total control of nature, raised by the ecology movement as well
as earlier German and English Romanticism in philosophy (see chapter 11),
opened the way for feminists to point out masculine aspects of the dominat-
ing attitude to nature. Pragmatic and existential critiques of the notion of
the detached observer, with the “view from nowhere,” to use Thomas Nagel’s
phrase, were assimilated by some feminists to criticize the notion of scient-
ific and technological objectivity (Heldke, 1988). W. V. O. Quine’s prag-
matic criticism of the notion of decisive refutation of theories and of a sharp
distinction between the empirical and the definitional truths in science led
some feminist theorists of knowledge to reject the whole foundational ap-
proach to the theory of knowledge, which bases knowledge on the intuitive
apprehension of indubitable truths by individual knowers (Nelson, 1990).
There are several areas of investigation of technology in relation to
women. Among these are: (a) women’s generally overlooked contribu-
tions to technology and invention; (b) the effect of technology on women,
including household technology and reproductive technology; (c) gendered
descriptions and gender metaphors of technology and nature and their role
in society.
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Women’s Contributions to Technology and Invention
One area of research is that showing the often underrated contributions of

women to technology and invention. From prehistoric food gathering and
storage to the development of the COBOL business computer language
women have contributed substantially to technology (Stanley, 1995). How-
ever, what is classified as technology has often biased the account to exclude
or downplay women’s contributions. Even the most eloquent and influen-
tial American historian of technological systems includes few women in his
recent survey (Hughes, 2004).
For instance, the anthropology of the 1960s found a unifying theory of
the development of modern Homo sapiens in the “Man the Hunter” theory.
Big game hunting was seen as central to the development of human intelli-
gence and social cooperation. Because men were predominant in big game
hunting, this meant that men were responsible for the social advance of
humanity. As Ruth Hubbard asked rhetorically in another context, “Have
only men evolved?” (Hubbard, 1983). During the late 1970s under the influ-
ence of feminism a number of female anthropologists developed the “Woman
the Gatherer” theory or account to emphasize the contributions of women
to the food supply. Some of these accounts noted that the gathering of
plants, nuts, and seeds and the trapping of small game was more important
to general nutrition than the occasional big game hunt.
Lewis Mumford had earlier noted how the identification of technology
with machines and weapons had overemphasized the male role in inven-
tion, and the importance of container and storage technology was often
overlooked (we noted this in our discussion of animal technology in chapter
8). Mumford noted that although the extension of the leg in transportation
devices and the extension of the arm in projectiles have been emphasized, a
kind of prudery has led historians of technology to ignore the extension of
the womb and the breast as storage or incubation devices (Mumford, 1966,
pp. 140–2; Rothschild, 1983, p. xx). During the Middle Ages the invention of
the quern or hand-cranked grain mill, a part of women’s work, introduced
the crank to mechanics (White, 1978).
In more recent centuries the assumption that women have not been in-
ventors, as claimed by Voltaire (Stanley in Rothschild, 1983, p. 5), has led the
stories of women inventors to be ignored, covered up or misinterpreted.
Often it is assumed that if women made any inventions they concerned
“women’s work,” i.e. housework. One women inventor of a design for a
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river dam had her patent application misinterpreted as a design for a “dam”
in a kitchen sink! As in other areas, such as literature, the production or
invention of women was attributed to their husbands. The frequently dis-
puted case of Catherine Green’s contribution to the invention of Eli Whitney’s
cotton gin is a famous example. Green probably suggested the use of a brush
to remove the cotton lint that stuck to the teeth of the cylinder (Stanley,
1995, p. 546). Emily Davenport made crucial contributions to Thomas
Davenport’s small electric motor. Ann Harned Manning jointly invented a
mechanical reaper with her husband William Manning before McCormick
invented his, but it is the husband William who generally is given credit.
Technology and Its Effects, Particularly on Women
Two areas that most obviously have had effects specifically on women are
household technology and reproductive technology.
Household technology
During the twentieth century a number of mechanical inventions changed
the nature of housework. The washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, the
gas, electric, and microwave ovens, and frozen food are examples. Indoor
plumbing and the automobile also had great effects on household work and
the allocation of time.
Surprisingly, the introduction of these household devices has not short-
ened the hours spent by house workers and mothers (Cowan, 1983). For
upper-class women the decline of use of servants offset the greater efficiency
of the washing machine, vacuum cleaner, and oven. For less affluent house-
wives the increased efficiency of these household devices increased out-
put but did not decrease work. The washing machine saved time and effort
over hand washing, but the use of both hired laundresses and professional
laundries declined. The greater efficiency of the washing machine also led
people to change their clothes and hence wash their clothes more frequently.
The vacuum cleaner led to houses being much cleaner, but house size grew
during the suburban boom of the 1950s. There were more areas to clean.
Thus clothes and houses were both much cleaner, but cleaning houses and
washing clothes was more frequent and extensive. The new ovens and pre-
pared and frozen foods decreased food preparation time, but other activities
took its place. Furthermore, the disappearance of many of the physically
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exhausting and obviously skilled activities involved in food preparation and

cleaning often led to a decline in the respect husbands held for their spouse’s
housework. The widespread myth from at least the 1950s was that house-
wives had hardly any work to do.
The availability of the automobile changed the activities of housewives.
Previously milk, bread, ice, and most groceries were delivered to the house-
hold door and physicians made house calls. With the automobile trips to the
store and to the doctor became more frequent. Indirect effects of the develop-
ment of the automobile system led to the spread of the suburbs, the
growth of malls and supermarkets, and the decline of local mom and pop
stores, all increasing the amount of travel needed for food shopping. The
decline of public transportation, in part due to the dominance of the auto-
mobile, also means larger demands on the auto for transportation. Much
time is spent transporting children to and from various activities.
Despite the improvements in household technology over three decades in
(what used to be called) the “actually existing socialist” or Soviet style coun-
tries of Eastern Europe, the answer to the question “Does socialism liberate
women?” seemed to be a qualified “No.” In the Soviet Union, although
women early worked full time, they were also expected by their spouses to
do all the housework. There were some early experiments with collective
laundry, and even cooking, but these were not sufficiently widespread or
long lasting to ease the burden on women (Scott, 1974).
In the development of household technology there is a gender split
between the designers (almost entirely male) and the consumers (mostly
female). The central house vacuum is sold in Sweden by appealing prim-
arily to the female user but also to the male as purchaser, lint dumper, and
repairperson (Smeds et al., 1994). The microwave oven in Britain began as a
“gee whiz” gizmo sold in stereo and electronics shops. Only later did it shift
to be treated as an ordinary household appliance sold in appliance shops. In
this latter placement sales techniques are focused on women’s fears of com-
plex technology and of the danger to health from insufficiently cooked items
causing food poisoning (Ormrod, 1994).
Reproductive technology
A second area of technology that has obviously influenced women’s lives is
reproductive technology.
During the first years of second wave feminism in the early 1970s Shulamith
Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970) proposed that only separating women
140
from pregnancy and childbirth through artificial wombs could achieve full
equality of women. This technological fix approach was soon rejected by
most feminists, who tended to emphasize women becoming more involved
in and in control of their pregnancies. Later feminists, who emphasized the
less desirable aspects of artificial reproduction technology as a means of
power of male physicians over women, also rejected it.
Contraceptive and abortion technology is about delaying or avoiding
pregnancy. Artificial insemination, embryo transplant, and other new repro-
ductive technologies are about achieving pregnancy. Feminists have been
concerned to extend the availability to women of contraception and abor-
tion so that women are in control of whether and when they become
pregnant. Feminist critics have focused on the alleged lack of concern for
women’s health in contraception research and development and the relative
lack of research into chemical forms of male contraception. The case of
Depo-Provera is an example. Depo is a contraceptive injection that lasts for
three months. Because it doesn’t involve the need to remember to use a
physical contraceptive or to frequently take a pill, it was the contraceptive
commonly given to Third World women, to aborigines in Australia, Maori
in New Zealand, and women of color in Britain. It is claimed that US AID
(Agency for International Development) channeled funds to the Interna-
tional Planned Parenthood Federation to distribute Depo worldwide. Data
from studies in New Zealand by its manufacturer, Upjohn, were sent to
company headquarters for statistical analysis and not released publicly.
Critics have claimed that the published claims concerning the drug down-
play side-effects such as cancer and bleeding (Bunkle, 1984).
An apparently surreptitious campaign during the 1950s and 1960s of mas-
sive sterilization of poor, Hispanic women in Puerto Rico without informed
consent of the subjects is another example of direct reproductive control of
Third World women.
The proponents of reproductive technology have emphasized the increase
in freedom of choice that the new reproductive technologies have offered
women. Contraception, in vitro fertilization, embryo implantation, and gen-
etic screening are among these technologies. The ability to prevent preg-
nancy, the ability of previously infertile women to bear children, and the
ability to screen for and abort fetuses with genetic defects are presented in
terms of extended capability and free choice. Feminist critics of the new
reproductive technologies, on the other hand, have noted that the new
possibilities have imposed subtle pressures and constraints on women. Infer-
tile women are expected to make use of the new reproductive technologies
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to be able to reproduce. Women are expected to screen for and abort “de-
fective” fetuses. A woman who does not make use of genetic screening or
who elects to give birth to a child with a genetic defect is considered morally
derelict by those who accept abortion and the new technology (Rothman,
1986). Critics in the disability rights movement have also noted that the
eagerness to eliminate “defective” embryos shows society’s negative atti-
tude to the disabled. Racial, ethnic, and class issues also enter into eagerness
to abort the potentially disabled (Saxton, 1984, 1998).
Radical feminist critics of the new reproductive technologies have claimed
that they are a means for the mostly male physicians to control the one
human act (pregnancy and childbirth) that men are unable to do. In early
societies there was a religious mystique about the reproductive powers of
women. In the Renaissance and early modern period one of the dreams of
the alchemists was to produce the homunculus or little person by purely
chemical means. This would allow male alchemists to achieve the one ordin-
ary human task of which they had previously been incapable. Some fem-
inist theorists of technology have seen modern reproductive technology as a
fulfillment of this age-old dream of male capability and power. Feminist
critics have seen contemporary genetic engineering and test tube babies as a
fulfillment of the homunculus fantasies of alchemists, such as Michael Maier’s
Atalanta Fugiens (1617, emblems 2–5, 20, see Allen and Hubbs, 1980).
Maier, with his highly sexually charged and often misogynist symbolism,
was a favorite alchemist of Isaac Newton, who rejected contact with women
(Dobbs, 1991, n123). Maier was evidently also involved in the conquest of
Native Americans. On his visit to England he was an associate of at least
three members of the Virginia Company, planning to settle America, two of
whom associated this project with alchemical ideas, including those of Maier.
Maier’s own Atalanta may have been, in turn, partly inspired by anticipation
of a colony in Virginia (Heisler, 1989).
The replacement of female midwives with male surgeons in the early
modern period was a shift in who had knowledge of and power over child-
birth. The early surgeons’ takeover was facilitated by the development of a
simple technology, the medical forceps, introduced in the 1730s. Despite the
fact that in this early period the surgeons killed more than they cured, often
overusing the forceps, damaging both infant and mother, they were able to
present themselves as experts more worthy of respect than the midwives
(Wajcman, 1991).
Later, more technologically sophisticated and successful developments in
obstetrics, including anesthetics, along with the move of birthing from the
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home into the hospital, completed the medicalization of pregnancy and

childbirth. Pregnancy became pathology rather than a natural process and
part of human life. Caesarian sections were performed more often than
necessary (sometimes for the convenience of the physician, who then did
not have to wait during hours or days of labor). This, along with induction
of childbirth and episiotomy, led to the management and control of preg-
nancy, and control shifting from the mother and midwives to the male
physicians.
Within the new reproductive technologies, techniques of sex selection
have the most direct and obvious effect on gender discrimination. Because
of the valuation of male offspring over female offspring in traditional soci-
eties, China and India have been involved in extensive selection of male
embryos and abortion of female embryos.
One area that shows the complexity and ambivalence of the new tech-
nologies is ultrasound imaging. Although this has become a routine part of
medical management of pregnancy, several studies have cast doubt on the
value of routine ultrasound imaging on the improved health of fetuses and
offspring. The ultrasound image allows the physician to be in control of
knowledge of pregnancy that is superior to that of the mother. It also shifts
the kind of knowledge involved. Traditionally the mother’s feeling of quick-
ening and of kicking in the womb was the means of sensing the fetus. This
has been replaced by the visual imagery of the ultrasound image. Many
writers since Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) have noted that visual percep-
tion is a more detached, “distanced” kind of perception than that of the
other senses (Jay, 1993). During the past few centuries visual perception has
been given priority over other senses, such as touch and smell. The visual is
linked to the geometrical and objective account of the world of modern
science. The mother’s feeling of the fetus is part of the mothers’ own bodily
sensations, while the visual image is an image from the “outside.” The
attention is on the screen, not on the mother’s body. The ultrasound images
show the fetus as if isolated in space, ignoring the bodily medium in which
it is suspended, giving the impression of independence of the fetus from the
mother. They are similar to the floating or flying fetus in the final scene of
2001: A Space Odyssey, thereby eliminating the presence of the mother, and
associating the fetus with high medical technology rather than human gesta-
tion (Arditti et al., 1984, p. 114).
Ultrasound has been claimed to change the very notions of “inside” and
“outside” with respect to mother and fetus. One writer calls the ultrasound
a kind of “panoptics of the womb,” along the lines of Michel Foucault’s
143
(1977) notion of universal surveillance. Life magazine, in one of the earliest

popular accounts of ultrasound, claimed it works “precisely the same way a
Navy surface ship homes in on an enemy submarine” (1965, quoted in
Petchesky, 1987, p. 69). One physician writing in a major medical journal
used phrases very much in the Baconian mode (see the section on metaphor
below), such as “the prying eye of the ultrasonogram,” “stripping the veil of
mystery from the dark inner sanctum,” and “letting the light of scientific
observation fall on the shy and secretive fetus.” Indeed, Harrison calls the
fetus a “born-again patient” (quoted in Hubbard, 1983, pp. 348–9). The anti-
abortion movie Silent Scream makes use of medical imaging (with acceleration
of the speed of the images, and an unrealistically large model of the fetus) to
persuade the viewer that the fetus is a person. In several US states, laws have
been proposed to require viewing of ultrasound images of the fetus by women
seeking an abortion. The ultrasound scan, a technology with numerous
undoubted medical advantages, can be used as a weapon to present the
“fetus in situ” (now treating the woman as a mere lab vessel), as if independ-
ent of the mother bearing it. The imaging can be, alternatively, an extension
of the age-old voyeurism of the male “gaze,” with women objectified and
depersonalized, similar to the images of pornography in this respect.
Workplace technologies and women

Not all the technologies that have affected women are specifically oriented
toward women’s traditional roles as mother or as housewife. Industrial tech-
nologies have affected women’s occupations. One debated example is the
typewriter in relation to women entering the clerical workforce.
Earlier accounts of the development of the role of secretary as populated
by women rather than men by the 1920s tended toward a technological
determinist account, linking the shift in gender identification of the job to
the rise of the typewriter. It has been noted, however, that Japan developed
a largely female clerical force without the use of the typewriter. Indeed, the
increase of women in secretarial and clerical jobs in the USA began during
the Civil War, a decade and a half before the typewriter was more than a
rarity. The design of the typewriter as a cross between a piano and a sewing
machine seemed appropriate to women. Women had occupied the low-
wage job of hand copying, and the typewriter was widely used for copying.
The development of stenographic writing to take dictation led to the training
of women typists in stenography, which was originally a male field. As women
were trained and credentialed in typing and stenography at secretarial schools,
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stenography became women’s work. For small businessmen the power over
a woman assistant gave a sense of authority and prestige. Given the low
wages of female copyists, and their successors, the typist-stenographers,
the job became less attractive to men. The typist-stenographer role was a
bridgehead to being hired in other clerical jobs, leading to the new charac-
terization of clerical work as female rather than male by the 1920s and 1930s
(Srole, 1987).
Technology as “Male,” Nature as “Female”: Metaphors

of Nature and Technology
There is a rhetoric of “Man and Technology” and of “Man’s Domination of

Nature.” It has been noted by a number of feminist writers that nature is
generally portrayed as female, as in Mother Nature or virgin lands. Scientists
and technologists are generally portrayed as male. This convention goes far
back in time. Ecologists like to cite the earth goddess Gaia, and James
Lovelock has used her name to designate his theory of a self-adjusting bio-
sphere, including both chemicals, such as atmospheric gases, and organisms.
With the rise of early modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries there was, according to Carolyn Merchant and others, a down-
grading of the status of the earth mother (Merchant, 1980). This was associ-
ated in part with the rise of exploitation of nature. Miners who lacked
reverence for the earth, and saw it not as a living thing but as an inorganic,
lifeless mass, would be less restrained in their excavations and extraction.
Much early thought on nature, such as that of the early Greek natural
philosophers, treated matter as alive (hylozoism). However, in the seven-
teenth century, the mechanistic view in its original form treated matter as
wholly passive and inert. Aristotle had treated matter as passive in analogy
to the female and form as active in analogy to the male. However, the early
atomists and mechanists further emphasized the passivity and deadness of
matter. Thinkers in the hermetic tradition treated the forces and powers of
matter as active, but in opposition to them the early mechanists such as
Descartes denied any active powers to matter. Newton realized that, con-
trary to Descartes, forces were necessary to produce an effective theory of
physics, but Newton denied that the forces resided in matter. He claimed
that they were a separate form of “active principle.”
Although Newton borrowed ideas from alchemy in developing his concept
of force, he degraded the female principle in theory of matter and had a
145
pathological aversion to social contact with women. Newton became angered

at his friend John Locke and refused to speak to him because Newton thought
that Locke was attempting to involve him with women. One of his alchem-
ical metaphors was “ye menstruum of [your] sordid whore.” More than
other alchemists, Newton was fascinated by “the net,” a chemical associated
with the net by which Vulcan traps Mars and Venus when they are caught
in flagrante delicto (Westfall, 1980, pp. 529–30, 296; Dusek, 1999, p. 185).
Not only were feminine qualities downgraded or dismissed in the theory
and metaphors of matter, but the new natural philosophy was also seen as
masculine. Henry Oldenburg, the correspondent for the Royal Society, ar-
gued for a “masculine philosophy.” Joseph Glanville, a historian of the Royal
Society, also demanded a “manly sense” and advocated avoiding the deceit
of “the woman in use” (Easlea, 1980, p. 214). Oldenberg not only advocated
a “manly philosophy” but demanded that “what is feminine . . . be excluded”
from the philosophy of the Royal Society. Thomas Spratt, who wrote an
early history of the Royal Society, likewise identified the intelligence of the
crafts as masculine (Keller, 1985, pp. 54, 56; Dusek, 1999, pp. 128–36).
Francis Bacon (whom we have encountered both in the discussion of
the philosophy of science as proponent of inductive methods in science and
in the discussion of technocracy as forerunner of technocracy and booster
of the value of natural knowledge in the prosperity of society) used a variety
of gender images for the relationship of the (male) scientist with (female)
nature. He used the image of marriage. He also used the imagery of voy-
eurism and seduction of nature. He associates the male investigator of nature
with the probing of secret places and the forcing of nature to reveal her
secrets. The quotation in Bacon that has caused the most controversy is:
For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings
and you will be able when you like to lead and drive her afterwards to the
same place again. Neither ought a man make a scruple of entering and pen-
etrating those holes and corners when the inquisition of truth is his whole
object. (Harding, 1991, p. 43)
Feminist writers have associated this passage with the fact that Bacon dedic-
ated his work to King James I, who was active in investigating and perse-
cuting witches. This passage is notorious, but there are many other gendered
treatments of nature as slave and object of capture (Farrington, 1964, pp. 62,
93, 96, 99, 129, 130).
Feminist critics of Bacon have seen the relationship of male experimenter
to nature as a kind of forceful seduction, verging on date rape. Allen Soble
146
(1995), in his defense of Bacon, identifies the relation of investigator and

nature with marriage and argues that marital rape was legal in Bacon’s day
(and for a long time afterward). He also claims that one cannot find a “smok-
ing gun,” by which Bacon directly linked experiment with the rape of
nature, or associated the investigation of nature with the torture of witches.
Nevertheless, the passage cited above and many others show that Bacon
places his consideration of the investigation and manipulation of nature
within a gendered context.
One may say against this analysis of the metaphors of early modern
science and technology that they are not essential to the science and techno-
logy themselves. The experiments, laws of nature, and mechanical inventions
stand by themselves and the metaphor is only exterior decoration. However,
the imagery of male gender in the investigation of nature is so pervasive,
continuing to our time, that one may argue that such images and meta-
phors have an effect on the image of science and technology that plays a role
in the recruitment and motivation of scientists and engineers.
Evelyn Fox Keller (1985) and others, using psychological object relations
theory (Chodorow, 1978), have claimed that the very norm of detachment
and objectivity in science and technology is associated with the male model.
According to object relations theory, boys have to break with their mothers
in the formation of their identity in a way that girls do not. The masculine
stereotypes of lack of emotion, detachment, and objectivity fit with the
image of science. These popular images of science and technology influence
the recruitment of students into the fields. Girls in middle and high school
who have talents for science and technology are discouraged from pursuing
advanced technical subjects by the popular images of scientist and engineer.
These images of nerd, on the one hand, or aggressive controller of nature,
on the other, conflict with the “feminine” personality traits that society
encourages girls to develop. Girls also fear that even excessive intelligence
or talent for technical subjects will discourage boys’ interest in them.
David Noble in his A World without Women (1992) has emphasized that
priests and monks who were not married and supposed not to have sexual
relations with women carried out medieval scholarship. The academic world
grew from the medieval universities, such as Oxford, Cambridge, Paris,
Padua, and elsewhere, which had clerical origins and solely male inhabit-
ants. Women were not admitted to major universities until the nineteenth
century. Many eminent US men’s undergraduate universities, such as Yale,
did not become coeducational until around 1970. Women could not pursue
advanced work at the major universities until the nineteenth century in
147
Russia and the twentieth century in parts of Western Europe. When the
mathematics faculty of Göttingen, Germany, resisted accepting one of the
world’s leading experts on algebra because she was a woman, the mathem-
atician David Hilbert asked in exasperation, “Is this a university or a Turkish
bath?” (Reid, 1970). The exclusion of the feminine was not simply in im-
agery and psychology but in the institutional structure of academic science
and technology.
The debate concerning the issue of relevance of metaphors to science and
technology is related to the positivistic and post-positivistic philosophies of
science, as well as to the definition of technology in terms solely of hard-
ware or of rules, versus the technological systems definition, which includes
social relations within technology (discussed in chapter 2).
According to the positivistic view, science consists of the formal deduct-
ive apparatus of the theory and the observational data. Models, metaphors,
and heuristic guidelines for discovery are not part of the “logic” of science
but part of its “psychology.” For the most part they are in the context of
discovery, not of justification. Only the logic of explanation and confirma-
tion in the latter is significant for knowledge. However, some philosophers
of science, such as Mary Hesse (1966), Rom Harré (1970), and Marx Wartofsky
(1979), have argued that models are an important part of scientific theories
and explanations.
Social historians of science and technology and sociologists of scientific
knowledge have claimed that the broader social and cultural images and
metaphors play a role in the acceptance and spread of scientific theories. For
instance, Darwinian natural selection was stimulated by Malthus’s theory of
the economics of human overpopulation (which also was a trigger for the
independent co-discoverer of the theory, Alfred Wallace) and by Quetelet’s
work in social statistics. The acceptance of Darwinism was aided by the
resemblance of the theory to that of the competitive capitalist free-market
economy (Gould, 1980; Young, 1985).
A more controversial example is that the model of the universe as one of
atoms moving and colliding in empty space, with no natural up or down,
mirrored the competitive, capitalist, free-market economy, replacing the
hierarchical Aristotelian worldview of the Middle Ages in which things
had their natural place, and the levels of the hierarchy were levels of value
(Brecht, 1938; Macpherson, 1962; Rifkin, 1983; Freudenthal, 1986).
Similarly, the technical or hardware understanding of technology would
exclude the imagery and cultural values that inventors or users of technology
might associate with the technology as not really part of the technology.
148
The technological systems definition of technology includes the social or-

ganization of the maintenance and consumption of the technology. Hence
images and metaphors that motivate inventors or make the technology
attractive to consumers have a role in the technology. If, for instance, the
imagery of making a “second creation” of life and the taking over by male
scientists and medical men of the power and mystery of human reproduc-
tion motivates molecular biologists, genetic engineers, and reproductive
physicians, then it is a part of the social system of that technology and
culture of that technology.
Variant Feminist Approaches to Theory of Knowledge in

Changing Science and Technology
Sandra Harding (1986) classified approaches to science in a way that has

relevance to technology as well. The position closest to the traditional and
widespread theory of scientific knowledge is feminist empiricism. Feminist
empiricism aims to reform science and its technological applications – for
instance, in medicine – by correcting bad science. It accepts standard empiri-
cist or even positivist accounts of the nature of scientific knowledge, claim-
ing that what is wrong is simply bad science and false claims about women.
Much of feminist science criticism has been directed at biological theories
of women’s intellectual inferiority and lack of motivation as explanations
of women’s lack of participation in science and technology. Numerous
accounts of women’s lack of mathematical ability are allegedly based on
psychology and brain science. The accounts have shifted over time but have
managed to maintain claims of a lack of female abstract reasoning ability.
With the discovery and popularization of differences in the two hemispheres
of the brain, right associated with intuitive and holistic grasp and left associ-
ated with language and formal thinking, women (but also non-Western
people in general) were initially claimed to be right-brained, intuitive, and
non-logical. This image fit with popular stereotypes. After it became obvi-
ous that girls’ language development led boys’ the story changed. The re-
cent version is that women are left-brained, skilled in language, but this is
now used against women’s abstract abilities. It is claimed that mathematical,
spatial, and geometrical skills are associated with the right brain, and that
boys are right-brained with superior spatial skills. This neglects purely lin-
guistic and non-spatial areas of math, as in logic and computer science. The
extreme extension of this approach is the speculative claim that men have a
149
“math gene” that women lack. This is based on differences in SAT scores.
There is no genetic evidence for the supposed sex-linked “math gene” (Moir
and Jessel, 1992; Hammer and Dusek, 1995, 1996).
The alleged discovery that women have larger connective tissue (splenium)
between the two parts of the brain has been used to claim that women are
less able than men to separate thought and emotion. Biologist Anne Fausto-
Sterling (2000) among others has pointed out the small samples and non-
replicable nature of the studies that make these claims. Feminist studies
have also criticized the scientific quality of studies in sociobiology and more
recently evolutionary psychology that give a supposed evolutionary basis
for the claims about women’s lack of abilities in abstract or technical fields.
Feminist empiricists believe that an honest and accurate use of traditional
scientific methods will undermine biases against women in science and tech-
nology. As feminist empiricism exposes more and more bias in the descrip-
tions of human and animal behavior, one is led to question the extent to
which scientific method, traditionally applied, is sufficient to expunge sexist
bias. If the leading peer-reviewed journal Science can publish an article on
“transvestitism” among hanging flies (Thornhill, 1979), even though the
insects do not wear clothes, one wonders whether traditional peer review
can function to correct for bias.
Other feminist approaches claim that more substantial changes in our
usual accounts of science and technology are needed. Feminist standpoint
theory is a more radical approach. The structure of the theory is based on
an aspect of Marxist theory. Georg Lukács (1923) claimed in his early work
that the standpoint of the worker, central to the process of industrial pro-
duction, but also oppressed and alienated, gave a privileged access to know-
ledge denied to the comfortable and detached capitalist owner. The worker
as “self-conscious commodity” had direct, personal insight into reification of
the self that the capitalist or professional did not. Feminist standpoint theory
makes a similar claim for the position of women as central to society’s
reproduction but oppressed. Unlike men, who generally take for granted
and do not notice the gender exclusions and gender discrimination built into
the structure of the technical community, women are forced to become
aware of the biases directed against them.
Post-Kuhnian philosophy of science emphasizes the extent to which guid-
ing assumptions over and above the formal theories and bare observational
data function. Paradigms include ideals of theory, as well as an image of
nature. Feminists have claimed that stereotypical images of science and techno-
logy, as control and manipulation of nature (rather than, say, understanding
150
and cooperation with nature) and as analytical breakdown and reduction of

systems to their simplest parts (as opposed to recognition of holistic effects
and emergent levels of systems), have gender bias behind them. Feminist
standpoint theory claims that women’s situation forces them or at least makes
them more likely to become aware of these biases than are men.
One objection to feminist standpoint theory, as it is to the Marxist version
of standpoint theory originated by Lukács, is to question whether oppres-
sion and pain themselves are automatic tickets to objectivity. They might
produce their own distorting biases.
Some feminists argue, as do many ecofeminists (see chapter 11) and
feminist participants in disarmament or anti-nuclear movements, that
women’s nature, including their involvement in childbearing and childrear-
ing, makes them more apt than men to be concerned with the existence of
future generations and the preservation of the planet. On a broader scale,
feminists committed to a notion of women’s nature, as well as ecofeminists
in general, claim that women are “closer to nature.” Whether attributing it
to male and female natures or to the power structure of society, ecofeminists
claim that there is a connection between patriarchy or male domination of
society and values of domination and control over nature.
Male nature is claimed to tend to abstract and reduce, to “murder to
dissect,” while women respect the integrity, complexity, and fragility of
natural systems. Another claim is that women are cooperative and non-
hierarchical, while men are predisposed to be competitive and hierarchical.
It is claimed that many technological networks and systems reflect the cen-
tralized control and hierarchy of a male-dominated society and that greater
participation of women would lead to a more decentralized and democratic
technology.
One irony of the position that holds that there is a women’s nature and a
men’s nature is that it parallels the claims of the sociobiologists and other
biological determinists who use similar accounts to claim that women are
unsuited for technology because of the same characteristics that the wom-
en’s nature theorists attribute to them. The difference is that the women’s
nature theorists positively value the irrationality and emotionality that tradi-
tionally has been regarded as inferior to male rationality. The women’s
nature theory also repeats the imagery and metaphors of much of the
rhetoric of the scientific revolution, with science as “male” and nature as
“female,” and the relation of scientist to nature as that of man to woman.
While the sociobiological “anatomy is destiny” theorists claim that women’s
lack of ability to totally detach their abstract thought from their emotions,
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and their supposed lack of aggressive competitiveness, make them lack sci-
entific and technological ability, the women’s nature theorists claim that
these very attributes will either eliminate technology as we know it or lead
to a more humane and beneficial science and technology.
Opposed to the theory of women’s nature are postmodernist feminism
and the anti-essentialist claim that gender is socially constructed. Post-
modernism is a diverse movement of the last decades of the twentieth century
that among other things denies that there is the possibility of a complete
system of knowledge or a metaphysical account of ultimate reality (see the
sections on post-industrial society, media, and postmodernism in chapter 6).
Postmodernism would deny that feminist standpoint theory could lay claim
to the possession of the true standpoint.
Postmodernism is a relativism that claims that there are a variety of stand-
points with equal claim or lack of claim to the truth. Postmodernism also
denies that there are essences (see chapter 2). Words and definitions are
arbitrary. There are no natural classes of things or natures of things. In
particular, postmodernist feminism denies that there is a women’s nature.
Gender is socially constructed (see chapter 12). That is, the personality char-
acteristics that a society attributes to women and to men do not reflect a
real nature of women or of men but are a product of the society itself.
Another feature of postmodernism is the denial of a unified identity of the
self. Postmodernist feminism emphasizes the extent to which individuals are
identified with a number of groups. Women are not simply women but
women of a certain race and class. Because of this the female “essence”
cannot be used to characterize a woman’s political and social place.
Donna Haraway is a postmodernist feminist who has greatly contributed
to the construal of science and technology. In her Primate Visions (1989) she
shows how the interplay of gender and race affects the portrayal of the great
apes in science and in popular discourse. In her “Manifesto for Cyborgs”
(Haraway, 1985, 1991) she develops the category of the cyborg, a combination
of human and machine, to undermine the dualities of the human and the
mechanical and to reject the notion of a human essence. The cyborg origin-
ated in technological speculation concerning long-range space travel and in
science fiction, but Haraway and others since have claimed that in fact this
interpenetration or inseparability of the human and the technological is char-
acteristic of our condition. In contrast to the romantic and the essentialist
feminist opposition of the natural to the technological, the cyborg shows the
two as inextricably intertwined. This cyborg breaks down the line between
human, animal, and machine. Genetically engineered organisms and even,
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in Haraway’s more recent work, companion animals such as dogs blur the
boundary between the natural and the artificial. Haraway’s use of cyborgs to
erase the traditional boundaries that humanism and essentialism have erected
is similar in many respects to Bruno Latour’s use of technology–human
hybrids or “quasi-objects” to undermine the opposition between traditional
positivist objectivism and social constructionism (Latour, 1992, 1993).
An example of such a nature/culture hybrid and its resonance in both
science and quasi-religion is the dolphin. Cosmodolphins (Bryld and Lykke,
2000) is a feminist cultural studies work, utilizing Heidegger, Cassirer, vari-
ous postmodern thinkers, and feminist philosophers, that reveals the ambi-
guities and ironies of contemporary attitudes to nature and the universe.
High technology projects for space travel and extraterrestrial communica-
tion mirror quasi-religious beliefs about higher intelligences in outer space
and New Age visions of harmony with nature. Dolphins have long been
considered intelligent and worthy companions of humans. They have also
been thought to be models for communication with alien intelligences by
leaders of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) community.
The experiments of neuroscientist John C. Lilly started as traditional, cruel,
constraining and invasive neurophysiologic probes, but led Lilly to believe
he was actually speaking with dolphins. Lilly himself moved to sensory
deprivation tank immersion and LSD to attempt to achieve dolphin-like
consciousness. His experiments received favorable popular attention world-
wide, and many non-scientists today believe that human–dolphin conversa-
tion has been achieved.
The popularity of dolphin and orca performances at aquaria and aquatic
parks show the popular fascination with cetaceans. Dolphin imagery has
spread in advertisements for telecommunications and computer software.
Carl Sagan, the solar system scientist of extraterrestrial life and TV popularizer
of science, met a waitress at a Virgin Islands restaurant who then became
Lilly’s assistant, and soon came to head the research while Lilly was im-
mersed, drugged, and incommunicado. Another leading physicist and
popularizer of science, Philip Morrison, veteran of the Los Alamos A-bomb
project and MIT professor, early advocated communication with dolphins
as a bridge to communication with extraterrestrials. New Age occultists and
NASA scientists are shown to share certain mythic and quasi-religious atti-
tudes to dolphins. The claimed objective detachment and impersonality of
science becomes mixed with religious awe and a desire to fuse with the
cosmos. The masculinist image of cosmic domination through space travel
becomes entangled in an ironic dialectic with the feminist and ecological
153
utopia of unimpeded communication and cooperation with nature. The

Cosmodolphins authors’ project is to undermine the masculine/high techno-
logy versus feminine/occultism split. The cosmic fantasies of the proponents
of the space program closely resemble those of spiritual ecofeminists and
New Age occultists (Bryld and Lykke, 2000, p. 36).
The strange association of dolphins with extraterrestrials by both New
Agers and mainstream scientists parallels the role of apes, both as symbol of
idyllic nature and as agents of space exploration. Donna Haraway, in her
chapter “Apes in Eden: Apes in Space” (Haraway, 1989, pp. 133–9), uses the
National Geographic image of the hand of ape and woman ( Jane Goodall)
entwined (which also appears on the dust jacket of the book) as somewhere
between holding hands and the touching of fingers of God and Adam in
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. Surprisingly, in the contrast of apes in
space with those in Eden, Haraway doesn’t mention Tom Wolfe’s portrayal
of the jealousy of the human Apollo astronauts for the space apes in The
Right Stuff (1979) or the movie made from it (1983).
Apes as well as dolphins are objects of human communication (see chap-
ter 8), but are also physical objects to be manipulated and exploited by the
military, as the dolphins are used to find undersea mines. Just as apes are
often implicit stereotypic stand-ins for African or African American humans,
from Tarzan to sociobiological studies of male inner city aggression (Good-
win, 1992; Breggin and Breggin, 1994; Wright, 1995; Sherman, 1998), so the
ape–female relationship from King Kong to African primate researchers Jane
Goodall and Dian Fossey can stand in for sexual as well as interracial rela-
tionships in popular culture. A recent, less literarily elegant example of apes
as extraterrestials, standing in for issues of gender and race, is the kiddy
cartoon Scooby-Doo video Space Ape at the Cape (2003), set in Cape Canaveral,
prior to a space launch with a trained ape. A rapidly growing supposed alien
is thought to be from an extraterrestrial egg, but turns out to be an African
American female researcher covering up the failure of her SETI science
project, dressed in an ape suit.
Conclusion
Feminist philosophy of technology deals with a variety of issues with a

variety of approaches. It counters the traditional downplaying of women’s
historical and contemporary role in technology, both as users and as innov-
ators. It investigates the aspects of technology that particularly impact women
154
in their traditional roles as mothers and homemakers, through reproductive

technology and household technology. It also examines broader issues of
masculinist attitudes to technology and nature, in which male technology
manipulates and dominates female nature. Feminist philosophers of science
and technology have been particularly sensitive to the metaphors and cul-
tural resonance of technology that are often dismissed by the technologists
themselves. Feminist philosophy of science and technology does not speak
with one voice. Investigations range from empirical criticisms of biological,
psychological, and technological claims about women’s nature or (lack of )
ability, to alternative visions of how science and technology might be if
women had more say in the directions of research and development.
Postmodernist feminism investigates the inadequacies of the very dichotomy
between humans and nature that lies at the basis of much traditional philo-
sophy of technology.
Study questions
1 Is the urge to dominate and control nature particularly male? Is it an

outgrowth of capitalism? Of the Judeo-Christian tradition? Is it human
nature?
2 Do you think the low representation of women in the fields of physics
and physical engineering will change greatly in the near future? Why?
3 Does the notion that technologies have a “valence,” are structured in
such a way as to be easier to use for the purposes of some groups and
not others (such as men and not women), make sense, or is technology
intrinsically neutral with respect to uses and users?
155
NON-WESTERN TECHNOLOGY AND LOCAL KNOWLEDGE
10
Non-Western Technology
and Local Knowledge
Most discussion of technology concerns itself with science-based contemp-

orary technology. The science at the basis of this technology is Western,
stemming historically from the scientific revolution in Europe in the seven-
teenth century. Most of this technology is generally claimed to stem from
the European industrial revolution of the eighteenth century. (Recent histor-
ians, however, have been finding more and more non-Western influences
on Western science and technology, particularly from the Arab world and
from East Asia, but also from the pre-conquest Americas and Africa.)
Non-Western technology, either from before the scientific revolution in
ancient and medieval cultures, or more recent technology, but not based on
Western science, raises a number of significant issues. One is the claim of
Western science to be universal, applicable to all times and places. The
mainstream Western view has been that non-Western science is, at best, an
imprecise and vague formulation of narrowly applicable rules of thumb that
are sub-cases of the more precise and general laws of Western science, or, at
worst, superstition. Some scholars of non-Western science and members of
the science and technology studies community who take an anthropological
approach to science have challenged this view. They claim that Western
science, itself, is a kind of “local knowledge,” appropriate for the laboratory,
just as non-Western science and technology is appropriate for its own envir-
onment and community.
A related, but perhaps even broader, issue concerns the usual contrast
between “rational” Western thought and “irrational” or at least “non-
rational” thought in indigenous pre-literate cultures. Nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century anthropology contrasted “primitive thought” with mod-
ern, Western, scientific thought. More recent anthropologists and students
156
of technology studies influenced by them have claimed that indigenous

thought and technology are not “primitive” and that Westerners are only
“rational” in highly limited professional contexts of science and technology.
Most Westerners most of the time, anthropologists claim, including scient-
ists and technologists outside of their specialties, think like so-called “prim-
itive natives,” relying on myths, cultural stereotypes, and loose analogies.
A third, less abstract, issue is that of the superiority or even the appropri-
ateness of Western technology in developing nations. In the nineteenth
century and through most of the twentieth the prevailing view was (and still
is for many) that developing nations should imitate the technology and
organization of developed nations and import Western technology to re-
place their own. More recently, examples of failures of implanting advanced
Western technology in the environments of developing nations have sug-
gested that less complex and difficult-to-service technology is needed. This
technology is called “appropriate technology” or “intermediate technology.”
It is “appropriate” to less developed nations, or is “intermediate” between
indigenous technology and advanced Western technology. Another claim
defended by many students of contemporary non-Western and indigenous
technology is that local, indigenous technologies of non-literate cultures
often have great usefulness and applicability to their environment. These
critics further claim that in the past Western colonial powers often dis-
missed indigenous technology and logical knowledge, only to replace it with
techniques less efficient and effective in the tropical, arctic, or other environ-
ments. Furthermore, present Western aid projects are mistaken to dismiss
the local, traditional technology and replace it with Western technology
inappropriate to the environment. For example, in southern Africa, a tire
factory produces tires for export to Europe. It employs local citizens, but
automobiles are rare in the area. A bicycle factory would supply a mode of
transport actually used by many local residents.
Local Knowledge
One of the contrasts between scientific and pre-scientific or traditional know-

ledge is the contrast between the local nature of traditional or indigenous
knowledge and the universal nature of scientific knowledge. Indigenous,
traditional knowledge is often oral in nature and conveyed by an apprentice-
ship in skills. The skills and lore are often secret, or at least not public. The
standard view is that scientific knowledge is, as Ziman (1968) calls it, “public
157
knowledge” (recall Merton’s “communism” of data-sharing in his norms of

science discussed in chapter 1). Indigenous knowledge includes detailed
knowledge of the local environment, both social and biological, and has
been called “local knowledge.” In contrast, scientific knowledge is generally
considered to be universal in at least three senses. First, scientific laws are
logically, spatially, and temporally universal. Second, scientific knowledge
can be applied anywhere in the universe. Third, Western science-based tech-
nology has a geographic universality of applicability. Any society can use it in
any environment. In contrast, indigenous technology depends on locally
handed down skills and on a particular, local, environmental situation.
This view of the contrast has been challenged by the science and techno-
logy studies (STS) movement of recent decades. STS is an interdisciplinary
area including the sociology of scientific knowledge, the anthropology of
science, literary studies of science, studies of scientific rhetoric, and approaches
to the history of science influenced by these approaches. But the tone of STS
is not simply a product of interdisciplinary efforts. The field, in contrast to
traditional history of science and sociology of science, is often sympathetic
to postmodernism in its rejection of positivistic approaches to scientific and
technological objectivity and skepticism concerning the progress of science
and technology (see box 6.3).
According to much of the literature of STS, science itself is a form of local
knowledge. Consequently, Western science-based technology is also a special
form of local knowledge. On this view, the locality of scientific knowledge is
the laboratory. In the special, artificial conditions of the laboratory “effects”
are produced (Hacking, 1983). The results of experiments involve the purify-
ing and processing of the complicated mixtures of materials that we find in
nature. Pure chemical elements are isolated from mixtures or compounds.
Relatively frictionless environments are produced. Objects are dealt with at
ultra-high or ultra-low temperatures to bring out certain characteristics. Pure-
bred strains of mice, bacteria, or flies, often unable to survive in the natural
environment, are developed for the purposes of experiment.
On the postmodern STS view, the “universality” of science is a product of
the reproduction of these “local” special conditions of the laboratory in
various places and transportation of the local results. Standardization of
weights and measures, the shipping of purified substances, or of instructions on
techniques for purifying substances help in transporting local conditions.
The training of observers in laboratory techniques of measurement and obser-
vation allows the local observations to “travel” (Latour, 1987, chapter 6).
According to Shapin and Schaffer (1985), Robert Boyle made experimental
158
knowledge non-local by developing social networks of “virtual witnesses.”

Trusted individuals (gentlemen in Boyle’s day, technical professionals in our
own day) were to witness the experiments and their replication (Shapin, 1994).
Against this postmodern STS account is the claim of the usual view of
scientific laws that they apply throughout the universe. According to this
view the processes described by science are not simply local phenomena but
processes that occur throughout the universe, although usually involved
with other processes and factors. Furthermore, many processes or phenom-
ena observed in biology, geology, and astronomy, such as huge and distant
cosmological events or long-term geological or biological evolutionary pro-
cesses, are not entities that exist within laboratories. The skepticism one
sometimes encounters among scientists concerning large-scale cosmological
speculations (Bergmann, 1974) and macro-evolutionary processes (long-term
evolution of species and classifications above the species level) is due to
there not being direct results of laboratory observations. During the first
two-thirds of the twentieth century physical theories of the universe as a
whole (cosmology) were considered speculative and less respectable than
experimental particle physics. It was only when the theories of particle
physics (grand unified theory, GUT, and later developments) became closely
tied with cosmological results that the latter gained higher empirical status. A
common objection to evolutionary theory by opponents of evolution is that
large-scale evolutionary processes are not directly observed. Smaller-scale
genetic changes over relatively short time periods are observed in the labor-
atory, but not the multimillion-year changes and trends of evolution. Both
of these cases show how observational sciences that cannot be completely
turned into experimental sciences can be considered somehow “less scient-
ific” than experimental science.
The issue of scientific realism versus anti-realism becomes involved in
this debate (see chapter 1). According to scientific realism, the theoretical
entities discussed in scientific theories, such as atoms, subatomic particles,
and fields, refer to real, although not directly observed, objects. Anti-realism
claims that these theoretical entities are not real. According to the form of
anti-realism known as instrumentalism, the language of theories is simply a
tool for making predictions. According to fictionalism, this language of the-
ories should not be taken literally. For the anti-realist, what is real is what is
directly observed. This issue arises again with the treatment of science as
local knowledge of experimental effects.
Should we believe that the purified and “cleaned up” processes observed
in the physical laboratory actually occur (albeit mixed with and affected by
159
many other processes) in the rest of the universe? The positivists and British
empiricists (see chapter 1) wished to tie science tightly to sense-observations
and demanded that theory be justified by being directly tied to sense obser-
vations or else be treated as a purely symbolic instrument. In like manner,
the technology and science studies approach implicitly demands that science
be directly and tightly tied to laboratory demonstrations. Popper, Kuhn, and
numerous other philosophers of science have made criticisms of inductivism
as an account of the method of science. STS advocates have accepted many
of these criticisms, at least of formal theories of induction, as an account of
science. Yet, ironically, the model of delocalizing and extending the local
knowledge of the laboratory as a model of the making of science (à la
Latour and Hacking) is itself a form of inductivism. If so, then Hume’s
problem of induction still needs to be solved.
Local Knowledge and Technology Transfer
Although the debate over whether science itself is local knowledge may
seem abstract and theoretical, it has importance for the fixing of the status of
science in relation to indigenous knowledge. During the past few centuries,
scientific knowledge has been seen as superior to indigenous knowledge.
Western missionaries saw themselves as bringing the true religion to be-
nighted savages. Similarly, colonial administrators saw themselves as bring-
ing genuine knowledge of technology to replace superstition and “primitive”
ignorance. In policy and practice indigenous knowledge has often been re-
jected as “old wives’ tales” or “gossip” (note the derogatory gender connota-
tions), to be replaced by universal scientific knowledge. Colonial powers
and Western scientific advisors have often ignored or discounted the tradi-
tional knowledge of local peoples they were ruling or advising. Often the
military might that allowed Western colonial powers to conquer and subjug-
ate non-Western nations was seen as proof, via Western military technology,
of the superiority of Western knowledge and peoples (Adas, 1989).
However, if Western science is a kind of local knowledge, then Western
science and indigenous knowledge are put on a par, not in terms of political
and military power, but in terms of claims to knowledge. Both are local
knowledge systems to be evaluated on their own merits, especially with
respect to applicability to local conditions.
Particularly in the cases of medicine and agriculture, both of which involve
biological and environmental complexity, the strengths of local knowledge
160
are evident. Often local farmers have detailed knowledge of the environ-
ment and its soils, weeds, and pests that scientific agricultural experts from
the city or from other countries lack. Traditional Botswanan herding and
Zulus in Mozambique had kept away the tsetse fly by burning the grazing
lands and discouraging the growth of bushes. Colonial agriculture intro-
duced rinderpest, killing livestock but allowing brush to regrow and bring-
ing back the fly. One expensive American soil survey in Ghana was completed
before the “experts” found that local farmers had already known and clas-
sified the main soil types just as the experts had (Pacey, 1990, pp. 190–1).
Zapotec Mexican indigenous classifications of soil correspond closely to
Western scientific classifications (González, 2001, p. 131). Traditional Zapotec
farmers sometimes comment on the lack of knowledge of local conditions
and successful techniques of visiting urban agricultural advisors (González,
2001, p. 221). Local intercropping methods turn out to increase yields when
combined with chemical fertilizers over monocrop techniques with the same
fertilizers (González, 2001, p. 170). On the Island of Bali, Dutch colonial
agricultural administrators dismissed the complex pattern of religiously des-
ignated seasons of field use, abandonment, and rotation as a superstition,
only to learn later that it was more efficient than their own continuous
cultivation techniques. These examples suggest that because successful agri-
culture depends on complicated details of the local environment, local and
traditional knowledge is sometimes more accurate and successful than applica-
tions of general scientific principles and technological techniques that lack
knowledge of the details of the context of application. Many writers con-
cerning agriculture and medicine in the less developed world have become
more sensitive to the issues of local contexts of application.
Theories of the Differences between

Technology and Magic
Despite the successes of local knowledge in indigenous technology in areas

such as agriculture and medicine, the mixture of technology with magic in
traditional societies is problematic. Many dismiss indigenous technology as
“mere magic,” or, at best, believe that Western science borrows indigenous
knowledge, strips the magical dross from it, and extracts the pure gold of
(Western) scientific knowledge. For instance, Western biotechnology firms
collect plants known to cure diseases by local shamans in less developed
nations, extract the chemicals believed to produce the effect, and patent the
161
result, usually without benefit to the local communities that supplied the
plants in the first place. This sort of behavior can be justified by the claim
that the shamanistic knowledge was “merely magical,” in contrast to the
genuine knowledge produced by Western science and technology.
There have been several accounts of the relations of technology and
magic in these societies, none of which has received universal assent. The
opposing views have different implications for the status of the magical com-
ponent of indigenous technology. The issue is still puzzling.
One view of the relation of technology and magic is that magic is simply
a technology that does not work. The mathematician René Thom once
quipped, “Geometry is successful magic,” though he added, “is not all magic,
to the extent that it successful, geometry?” (Thom, 1972, p. 11 n4). Magic,
like technology, attempts to manipulate and control the world, both inanim-
ate and animate.
The early anthropologist Sir James Frazer (1854–1941) claimed in his mas-
sive The Golden Bough (1890) that the core of magic is identical with science
in its belief in the uniformity of nature (Tambiah, 1990, p. 52).
A common view of the decline of magic is that successful science led to
it, as magic was increasingly considered less valid and useful than science
(Thomas, 1971). A problem with this view is the fact that the witch craze,
involving the belief in and persecution of witches, reached its height pre-
cisely when early modern physics was formed in the late sixteenth to mid-
seventeenth centuries. One member of and leading propagandist for the
Royal Society, the scientific society of England, Joseph Glanville, wrote a
book on the reality of witchcraft. Only one minor member of the Royal
Society disputed this work, and he was ridiculed for his beliefs – as well
as his short stature. William Whiston, Newton’s disciple and successor to
Newton’s chair at Cambridge, claimed that there was more certainty of
the existence of witches than of Newton’s gravity or Boyle’s gas pressure
(Webster, 1982, p. 98).
Another objection to the claim that science simply replaced magic is that
magic was part of the worldview of a number of early modern scientists and
contributors to the modern worldview. These included Paracelsus, a pioneer
of chemical medicine, itinerant memory expert and magician Giordano
Bruno, who first claimed that the sun is a star, and who propagated the view
that the universe is infinite, and Newton himself, who believed he had merely
rediscovered the law of gravity known to Pythagoras and other ancient sages,
including the Egyptian God Toth or Hermes Trismegistus (Yates, 1964, 1968,
1972; Dusek, 1999, chapter 6). Leibniz, the inventor of symbolic logic and
162
the differential calculus, believed that the binary number system had been
invented by the ancient Chinese sage Fu Hsi (Dusek, 1999, chapter 11).
A third, and more obvious, problem for the claim that science replaces
magic is that large numbers of people in the technological societies have quasi-
magical beliefs of various sorts that survived the growth of modern science and
technology. Indeed, the so-called New Age thought of the past few decades
has involved for many educated people a revival of the respectability of magic.
In Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century, a high water
mark of faith in technological and scientific progress also saw widespread
occultist movements (Turschwell, 2001; Bown et al., 2004; Owen, 2004).
It would seem that the rise of early modern science, far from discouraging
magical thinking, coincided with its apogee in the witch craze. Furthermore,
the dominance of modern science and technology in the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries coincided with a revival of occultism reminiscent of
nothing so much as the superstitious “failure of nerve” that Gilbert Murray
(1925) castigated in writing about the late Roman Empire. Historically, the
thesis of the replacement of magic by science is dubious, to say the least.
The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) claimed that magic
begins where technology ends (Malinowski, 1925; Tambiah, 1990, p. 72).
That is, technology is used to manipulate that which can be manipulated,
but magic is used in cases where control fails. A different view of magic was
also held simultaneously by Malinowski, and consistently by the philo-
sopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). It holds that magic differs totally
from technology in that magic is an expressive activity. That is, magic aims
primarily not at practical external effects, but at the expression of internal
emotions. Magic does not involve false factual beliefs, but is an expression of
emotions such as anger in revenge magic or erotic passion in love magic.
Magical language is rhetoric meant to sway the emotions, not describe real-
ity. Wittgenstein’s (1931) points appear in his highly critical notes on Frazer’s
Golden Bough (1890).
These competing views are relevant to philosophy of technology, insofar
as Malinowski’s main view makes magic a kind of illusory or mistaken
attempt at an extension of technology, while Wittgenstein’s view makes
magic something non-factual, non-scientific, and not related to the manip-
ulation of the physical world, quite different from physical technology.
Only insofar as magic is considered a kind of “psychological technology”
does Wittgenstein’s expressive view make magic a kind of (often successful)
technology. The comprehensive systems definition of technology, which
includes motivating aspects of culture, makes magic a part of technology, as
163
technology now encompasses “all tools and culture” ( Jarvie, 1967). Thus,
differing views of magic construe the contrast between magic and techno-
logy in different ways. Is magic an ineffective attempt at technology? Is magic
a non-technological form of expression more akin to art than technology?
Or is magic a kind of psychological technology only appearing to be a phys-
ical technology?
Magical versus Technological Thought: Mythic

versus Logical Mentalities?
Another area of controversy over the past century has been concerning the
kind of reasoning involved in magic and technology. This can involve con-
trasting the “logic” of magic with that of technology. It also involves the
issue of whether magical thought involves a kind of mythic structure quite
different from technological reasoning. This contrast involves the logical
reasoning involved in successful technology, either as applied science in
some sense (see chapter 2), or as practical, means–end thinking or instru-
mental reasoning (see chapter 4).
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939), a French philosopher who dealt with
topics that would now be considered to be in the area of social anthropology
as well, presented in the early twentieth century a view that contrasted “prim-
itive” thought with rational thought (Lévy-Bruhl, 1910).
The German Kantian philosopher of “symbolic forms,” Ernst Cassirer
(1874–1945), accepted and developed the same contrast, calling magic thought
mythic thought (Cassirer, 1923), and further distinguishing between Aris-
totelian common sense and modern, formal, scientific thought. Cassirer’s
scheme is progressive, like that of Comte’s three stages (see chapter 3).
Recall that Comte’s three stages are the theological, the metaphysical, and
the scientific. Cassirer’s three stages are: (a) mythic thought; (b) Aristotelian,
common-sense thought, dealing with objects and qualities as fundamental,
and based on subject–predicate grammar; and (c) scientific-functional think-
ing, based on mathematical and other functions. Cassirer analyzes the stages
as different forms of the structuring of thought in terms of space, time,
number, and causality, using Kant’s philosophy of the organization and uni-
fication of perceptual knowledge through concepts or categories (Cassirer,
1923). (While at Yale University, Cassirer and Malinowski used to talk at
length over lunch about “functional” thinking and its superiority to other
forms of thought, but Cassirer meant mathematical functions, while
164
Malinowski meant social functions in terms of which a group is organized to

serve ends, in so-called functionalist anthropology.)
Lévy-Bruhl claimed that “primitive” thought has a logic different from
that of standard formal logic and the so-called laws of thought of traditional
logic. The “laws of thought” are: (a) non-contradiction, i.e. something can-
not be both A and non-A at the same time in the same respect; (b) excluded
middle, i.e. anything is either A or non-A; and (c) identity A equals A. “Prim-
itive” thought identifies opposites and rejects the prohibitions of contradic-
tions of formal logic. It also disobeys the law of identity, as when a believer
in totemism identifies himself or herself with the totem object: “I am a
parakeet.” It further identifies the part with the whole (as in magic in which
harmful actions performed on hair or fingernails taken from the person to be
affected supposedly act on that whole person). “Primitive thought” accord-
ing to Lévy-Bruhl has a different sort of causality from causality as understood
in civilized societies. Things are caused not through chains of secondary
causes, but through direct action of non-located spiritual beings. Also, primit-
ive space is not organized like the space of geometry.
Lévy-Bruhl, contrary to the accusations of some of his critics, did not
claim that indigenous peoples were incapable of logical or causal thinking.
He claimed that the group structures and solidarity of pre-state societies led
to “collective representations” and a priority of the group to the individual.
Lévy-Bruhl’s critics have pointed out that the technology of non-literate or
non-civilized societies exhibits the same practical task-oriented problem-
solving structure as modern technology. Another, more recent, line of criti-
cism of Lévy-Bruhl notes that in contemporary industrialized societies there
remains much “primitive” or “mythic” thought in popular astrology, New
Age mysticism and magic, and, less obviously, in advertising and political
propaganda. Cassirer noted how similar he found Nazi propaganda to that
of old magical and occultist writings of five centuries ago (Cassirer, 1948),
while Malinowski noted the magical thinking involved in advertisers’ at-
tempt to link the purchase of automobile or toothpaste brands with the
improvement of one’s love life. Marshall Sahlins shows how implicit rules
distinguishing pets from animals that can be eaten are as arbitrary as the
taboos of non-Western societies. Eating of dogs in some East Asian coun-
tries horrifies Westerners who see nothing wrong with slaughtering cows
for food, something that the Hindus of India find abhorrent (Sahlins, 1976).
The authors of Cosmodolphins (discussed in chapter 9) analyze contemporary
astrological beliefs in Russia and among New Age devotees using Cassirer’s
treatment of mythic thought (Bryld and Lyyke, 2000).
165
The anthropologist Evans Pritchard (1902–72) in early criticisms of Lévy-

Bruhl argued that it is unfair to describe Western thought solely in terms of
the reasoning of logicians and scientists and to ignore much popular culture
and religion in the West, while describing non-Western cultures solely in
terms of their magical and religious beliefs rather than their practical tech-
nology and agriculture (Douglas, 1980, pp. 27–30).
It is notable also that the public or popular image of technology in indus-
trial societies often has elements of the magical, particularly with the develop-
ment of atomic power. One member of the European Center for Nuclear
research has spoken of “Scientists as Magicians: Since 1945” (Kowarski, 1971).
Similarly, the theorists of nuclear weapon strategy have been called “the
wizards of Armageddon” (Kaplan, 1983). Lévy-Bruhl himself in his last writ-
ings granted that both “primitive” and “logical” thought are present in all
societies, although he claimed that the non-logical “primitive” thought was
more obvious in non-literate, pre-state societies (Lévy-Bruhl, 1949).
Much of the contemporary rejection of Lévy-Bruhl is due to the appear-
ance of racism in the contrast of “primitive” and “civilized” thought. Indeed,
the original title of Primitive Mentality translates as The Mental Functions of
Lower [Inférieures] Societies. Lévy-Bruhl denied that “savages” were incapable
of logic and claimed that the alternative system of reasoning was quite as
complex and organized as Western logic. Nevertheless, the chronicling of
differences such as he presented have been used to argue for the inferiority
and subjugation of persons of color in general and Black Africans in particu-
lar. However, even if the early Lévy-Bruhl was mistaken to associate “prim-
itive” thought solely with non-Western, pre-literate societies, the distinction
between “primitive” or Cassirer’s “mythic” thought and logical thought holds.
Some of the critics have gone so far in attempting to draw similarities
between the thinking of Western technological societies and pre-state, non-
literate societies as to misrepresent the latter. Robin Horton argues that
African traditional thought has the same hypothetico-deductive logic of laws,
deduction, and testing that logical empiricist Carl Hempel or critical ration-
alist Karl Popper present as the logic of science (Horton, 1967). However,
post-positivist philosophers of science have questioned whether this austere
and rigorous logic really describes actual practice in the physical sciences.
Furthermore, Horton grants that African traditional thought is closed and
impervious to criticism or logical refutation. Evans Pritchard emphasizes the
extent to which belief in witchcraft among the Azande is adjustable to all
objections. This would suggest more the logic of Duhem, Quine, or Kuhn’s
account of science, with the use of the strategy of adjustment of auxiliary
166
hypotheses taken to its extreme. Paul Feyerabend, the defender of “epi-

stemological anarchism” and “anything goes” as scientific method, who
became favorable to non-Western medicine when a traditional Chinese
healer cured him of a urinary disorder that years of visits to various Western
doctors had failed to cure, writes against his mentor, Popper, that he erred
in thinking that:
the suggested conceptual dichotomy (between empirical and metaphysical

statements) corresponds to a real separation between statements that are part
of scientific traditions, and . . . that traditions that do not know the separation
or contain it only in a blurred form are improved by eliminating the blur . . . a
closer look at the growth of rationalism in Greece, at the comparative effective-
ness of “scientific” medicine and various folk medicines, at the comparative
effectiveness, in special situations, of oracles and a “rational discussion”
(described vividly by Evans Pritchard) shows that this assumption too is highly
questionable. (Feyerabend, 1981, pp. 21–2)
(On Popper’s demarcation of science and non-science, see chapter 1.)
Separating the Technology from the Magic in an Activity
Even if one accepts a distinction between magic and technology in non-

literate, non-state societies, there remains the issue of distinguishing magic
from technology when they function in the same activity, such as fishing or
agriculture. Many practical activities in indigenous societies involve both
practical technological activity and magical chants or the casting of spells.
This is most evident in pre-literate, pre-state societies, but is not absent in
contemporary society. Workers in dangerous occupations, such as sailors
and miners, often have superstitious rituals, even if not as elaborate as those
of indigenous peoples. Boat-building, weapon-making, fishing, planting,
and harvest have their appropriate ceremonies and rituals. To the people
involved both what we would see as technological and what we would see
as magical actions are essentially involved in the task.
A traditional African or Japanese sword-maker engages in heating, ham-
mering, and quenching, accompanied by various mythic rites (Ellul, 1954,
p. 20; Bronowski, 1973). The Western technologist would claim that the mythic
prayers and ceremonies could be dispensed with, leaving the pure metallur-
gical process. However, anthropologists such as Malinowski and later func-
tionalists emphasize that the magical rituals often function to unify and
167
motivate the work group of fishers or farmers (Malinowski, 1922). The

scientifically influenced observer of these activities may wish to separate
the effective technological activity, the part that “works,” from the magical
components. One Polynesian twentieth-century navigator courageously tried
this, and successfully performed traditional ocean canoe navigation without
the magical rituals.
One of the peculiar results of the inclusion in technology of prayers and
rituals as “psychological technology” is that the magical ceremonies them-
selves can be analyzed as technology, now a psychological technology of
motivation rather than a physical or biological technology of hunting or
fishing. One problem with this view of rituals and chants as “psychological
technology” is that it so broadens the notion of technology as to make it
indistinguishable from other spheres of life. However, given that technology
is so intertwined with and so penetrates all aspects of human life, devotees
of technology studies might not see this as a problem. Even the Popperian
anthropologist-philosopher Ian Jarvie includes psychological technology
within technology, and concludes one examination by admitting that his
notion of technology expands to include all of culture and society ( Jarvie,
1967, p. 61).
However, one can be led to a different view of the role of rituals and
chants if one accepts the technological system definition of technology, which
includes social organization as a part of technology, or Pacey’s “technology
practice,” which includes culture as well as society as a part of technology.
This view could allow the ritual aspects of indigenous technology, in their
role of motivating or timing the rhythms of work, to be part of technology.
The line of demarcation between magic and technology is dependent on
one’s views on the status of so-called psychological technology as techno-
logy, the understanding of technology as applied science, and the definitions
of technology as hardware or tools, versus the definition of technological
system as including social organization and the relevant cultural motivations.
Traditional Chinese Technology and Science and the

Possibility of Alternative High Technologies
The technologies and science of traditional India, China, and Japan are ex-
amples not of ethnosciences, but of the technology and science of highly
cultured civilizations that did not follow the route of the ancient Greeks or
Renaissance Italy. Do these sciences and technologies show alternative
168
possibilities, “what might have been,” as alternative routes to a high tech-

nology that were aborted by the dominance of Western science? Many would
say no.
The usual view has been that these cultures did not have science. Einstein
(less informed here in history and cultural studies than in physics and math-
ematics) often puzzled over why China never developed science. Even in
the 1990s a blurb for a popular book on scientific method by a nuclear
physicist and educational theorist, Alan Cromer, states that “he nails his
thesis against the doors of . . . political correctness and multiculturalism reit-
erating his view that the core of scientific thinking is a uniquely Western
discovery” (Oxford University Press, 1995–6). Cromer claims that “the Chi-
nese, seeing everything from their own perspective, learned nothing about
the outside world.” It is, then, odd that a 1315 Chinese map was the basis for
a Korean map of 1401 that is more complete than any map made by Euro-
peans at that time. Cromer also claims that (presumably unlike himself )
“the Chinese didn’t develop objectivity” (Cromer, 1993). By the time Cromer
wrote this, a score of volumes by the biochemical embryologist and science
historian Joseph Needham had long buried this ignorant view. Starting in
the late 1940s, Needham uncovered for the West the vast riches of tradi-
tional Chinese science and technology in a project that some have called the
greatest historical achievement of the twentieth century.
The traditional Chinese not only had a technology far ahead of that of the
West up until the Renaissance, but many Western technological devices
seem to have migrated from China to Europe. Francis Bacon, in arguing
that the Greeks and Romans did not think of everything, cited what he
believed were three modern Western inventions unknown to the ancients:
the magnetic compass, printing, and gunpowder. Unbeknownst to Bacon,
these inventions were, though indeed unknown to the ancient Greeks, prod-
ucts of medieval China that had traveled to the West.
Not only did numerous Chinese inventions travel the Silk Road through
Central Asia to the West during the Middle Ages (stirrups, wheelbarrow,
fishing rod with reel, and many others), but also in some areas Chinese
technology was ahead of the West until the twentieth century, particularly
in “holistic” areas of medicine, ecology, and earth science. The Chinese had
maps of shifting magnetic field lines and declination on the surface of the
earth centuries before Westerners learned from them about the magnetic
compass (Dusek, 1999, chapter 2). The Chinese had hormone therapy, both
thyroid hormone and estrogen therapy, in medieval times. They had bio-
logical pest control (the use of insects eating insects rather than chemical
169
pesticides) centuries before American agricultural advisors in the nineteenth

century brought these ideas to the West. The ancient Chinese had seismo-
graphic observation of earthquakes by Chang Heng as early as 100 CE (Ronan,
1978, volume 2, pp. 300–5).
There was deep drilling for brine as early as 100 BCE, with traditional
wells in the modern period extending to at least 4800 feet (Needham, 1954,
volume 1, p. 244; Vogel, 1993, p. 86). There were deep natural gas wells
penetrating a thousand feet into the ground many centuries before the West
achieved such things. Chinese drilling techniques percolated to the West
through Dutch visitors beginning in the seventeenth century and culminat-
ing in detailed descriptions by French missionaries in 1828. French engineers
soon copied the Chinese techniques. In fact, the famous 1859 Oil Creek well
in Pennsylvania of Colonel E. L. Drake used techniques probably borrowed
from China, either via the French or from Chinese-American indentured
Chinese railroad workers (Temple, 1986, p. 54). Thus, the American oil and
gas giants that only now are moving into the “Stans” of Central Asia after
the Afghan War use drilling techniques that Chinese used over 1000 years
ago and that the USA borrowed from them.
The superiority of Chinese over Western technology before the Western
scientific and industrial revolutions is widely granted by contemporary his-
torians of technology. More controversial are Needham’s claims about Chi-
nese science. Needham himself, goaded by some visiting Chinese graduate
students, was initially puzzled why China did not develop physical science.
If one means by science the combination of mathematical laws of nature
and controlled experiment that began in the sixteenth century with Galileo,
then China never developed science.
Needham, following Edgar Zilsel, suggested that the European notion of
universally applicable laws in jurisprudence was transferred by figures such
as Bodin and Kepler in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to laws of
physical nature. The notion of laws of society was transferred in Europe to
the notion of a Divine Lawgiver that legislated for the physical universe.
Needham traces an intermediate stage in the late Middle Ages, when a
rooster that laid an egg as well as a three-legged hen were put on trial and
executed as “unnatural.” He concludes that only a society crazy enough to
have a trial for an egg-laying rooster could have the fanatical faith in the
order of nature that yielded a Kepler or a Newton despite nature’s chaotic
appearances and the inaccuracy of then available observational data (Ronan,
1978, volume 1, pp. 301–2). A talk once summarized the situation with a
title that must have puzzled those not yet familiar with Needham’s opus:
170
“What Do You Do when a Rooster Lays an Egg? Or the Social Origins of

Modern Science” (Walter, 1985).
China had a high quality of purely observational science in astronomy,
geology, and biology. The Chinese, uninfluenced by the Aristotelian notion
of the separateness of the pure “quintessence” or aether that made up the
stars and planets from the grubby earth and water that made up our earthly
abode, observed the birth of new stars (novae) and sunspots centuries
before did Tycho Brahe and Galileo. In the West, the birth of new stars and
the existence of sun spots were initially rejected by the Jesuit scholastics as
inconsistent with Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas’ view of the heavens.
Ironically, when Jesuits Matteo Ricci and others brought Western geometry,
mechanical clocks, and astronomy to China in the early sixteenth century,
the church back in Rome was banning the views of Galileo and put him
under house arrest (Sivin, 1973; Spence, 1984). Thus after a few initial years,
the theories of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler about the sun-centered solar
system and motion of the earth could not be taught openly and directly to
the Chinese by the Jesuits. Ironically, the heathen Chinese were told by the
missionaries that their infinite universe, in which stars floated without sup-
port in empty space and in which stars were born and died, was primitive
superstition, just as those very views were spreading in Europe.
Despite the high quality of Chinese observational astronomy, Chinese
computational astronomy had degenerated, even though in ancient times it
had been approximately equal to that of the Babylonians and early Greeks.
Furthermore, the Chinese never developed physical and astronomical laws
of motion, as did the West. Only one school of thought in ancient China,
the Mohists, who were lower-class artisans and military engineers, devel-
oped quantitative ideas of optics and mechanics that might have developed
into something like Western physics (Graham, 1978). However, the Mohists,
as artisans with independent power as mercenaries, were suppressed with
the unification of the Chinese Empire around 200 BCE. Most Chinese phys-
ical thought emphasized the inexactness and indeterminacy of physical meas-
urements (Sivin, 1973).
At a purely qualitative level, the Chinese view of the universe as an
evolving process-natured entity, with indeterminacy and lack of permanent
underlying substances, looks more like twentieth-century science than like
the classical mechanical view of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
West (Dusek, 1999, chapter 3). Needham even suggests that the Chinese
were, in effect, attempting to leap to a worldview akin to that of relativity and
quantum theory without going through the intermediate stage of classical,
171
deterministic mechanics, and Newton’s absolute space and time (Ronan,

1978, volume 1, p. 292).
When Chinese gunpowder in cannons carried on ships guided by the
Chinese-invented rudder and compass bombarded and defeated the Chinese
troops to enforce the opium trade on the resistant Chinese monarchy, Chi-
nese science declined. Just as the Chinese were denounced as degenerate
opium addicts for imbibing the drug that the British forced them to accept,
so their science was denounced as primitive and superstitious.
The decline of science occurred in many parts of the world just before,
during, and after the European invasion and domination. The British Raj in
India prohibited the teaching of indigenous Indian mathematics to the Indi-
ans. This suppressed memory of the mathematical tradition of Kerala, which
in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries developed techniques similar to the
differential and integral calculus invented shortly afterwards by Newton in
Britain and Leibniz in Germany ( Joseph, 1991, pp. 299–300).
The West suppressed records of older, indigenous engineering achieve-
ments after it came to dominate. British colonial rulers prohibited teaching
Black children about the African stone city of Great Zimbabwe in Southern
Rhodesia. Meanwhile, the city was progressively looted and defaced and
looted by the colonizers. Rhodesian Blacks were taught that African Blacks
had never built stone buildings or had “civilization,” in the sense of cities.
An old colonial tradition, stemming from the German explorer Mauch,
attributes Zimbabwe to Sheba of the Bible, in order to claim that it not have
been built by African Blacks. Another tradition, alive even today, associates
Zimbabwe or nearby Angola with Ophir in the Bible, associated with
Phoenicians rather than Blacks, despite archeological evidence that it was
built by Africans, not by visitors from the Middle East (Davidson, 1959,
pp. 250–64; Kinder and Hilgemann, 1964, p. 221). The fact that the earliest
mineral mines had developed in prehistoric Black Africa was likewise long
ignored.
If European military technology and strategy had not overwhelmed indi-
genous populations on other continents, could alternative sciences and
science-related technologies have developed? Technological determinists (as
presented, for instance, in Robert Heilbronner’s arguments) tend to claim
that there is one predetermined route for science, and, since modern tech-
nology is identified with applied science, there is but one route to high
technology (see chapter 6). Could an alternative, more holistic, ecological,
and medical technology have developed in an isolated China to levels reached
by Western technology?
172
Perhaps Chinese decline would have prevented it in any case. Just as

Vasco de Gama, Columbus, and Magellan were embarking on their world
girdling and eventually dominating voyages, the Chinese pulled back
their mighty fleets, which under Admiral Cheng Ho, the “Three Jeweled
Eunuch,” had sailed to and traded with Africa (Ronan, 1978, volume 3,
pp. 123–35). Chinese magnetic and geographical lore, during this period far
ahead of that of the West, was still preserved in the geomancer’s compass,
but progressively overlain with superstition.
Likewise, Arabic science and technology had reached heights far above
the medieval West, and were the source of the revival of Western science
and logic, as Arabic texts were translated into Latin in the “renaissance of
the twelfth century” CE. There were factories in the Arab Middle East as late
as the seventeenth century, but there too decline soon set in (Rodinson,
1974). Some World Systems theorists in economics, in their most radical
phase, suggested that the decline in the non-European regions was in fact a
product of the expansion of Western economic penetration (Frank, 1967).
Yet the simultaneity of general Asian decline and Western rise to power
may be a coincidence. The decline started in China, in the Mughal Empire
of India, and in the Middle East shortly before the Western penetration.
The case of Cheng Ho’s fleet being disbanded in China is a case in point.
Could there be economic effects of the encroaching European system
before the actual explorers and armies arrived? Certainly in the Americas
there is a case for such a cause of decline preceding the arrival of Western
settlers. It appears that a very few European explorers on the east coast of
North America were sufficient to spread major epidemics into the center of
the continent decades or even centuries before large numbers of European
settlers arrived there. The triumph of the armies of the Spanish conquista-
dors in Mexico and Peru over Native American armies that vastly outnum-
bered them, especially in the case of a few dozen troops of Pissaro conquering
the Inca Empire, has always been puzzling. The situation is easier to under-
stand when one realizes that the vast majority of Aztecs and Incas were
suffering from fever and dysentery spread from the earlier coastal landings
of Europeans before the conquistadors arrived at the capital cities of the
empires.
However, economic causes of disruption of the economy of the Mughal
Empire in India or of the Ottoman Empire prior to the arrival of the Euro-
pean invaders, if such exist, are presently unknown, though various conflict-
ing hypotheses are floated in the literature of economic history and world
systems theory (see, for instance, the journal Review, passim, and symposia
173
in Modern Asian Studies, 24(4), and the Journal of Economic History, 29(1) ). It
may be that trade with the West prior to the European invasions “softened
up” and undermined the Middle Eastern and South and East Asian econom-
ies for European domination and colonization.
Gunder Frank, in his more recent work on “re-Orientation,” has sug-
gested that the dominance of the West and the submission of China may be
a relatively temporary (two-century) accident, due to an economic crisis in
the silver trade. According to Frank, China will have moved back to its
rightful, millennia-long, and traditional self-designated place as “Middle King-
dom” or center of the world by the mid-twenty-first century (Frank, 1998).
One suggestion is that the use by the West of the precious metals looted in
Mexico and Peru supplied the West with a means of trade not supplied by
its paltry manufactures, and the drain of silver from China because of the
British introduction of opium and the resulting widespread addiction may
have shifted the world balance of trade.
In contrast to the technological determinists, social constructionists claim
that the appearance of the necessity and inevitability of our present scientific
theories and “facts” is a product of social processes of consensus and know-
ledge dissemination. A variety of interest groups and factions contribute to
the development and stabilization of the science and technology that we
have (see chapter 12). Could the same contingency be true of our present
science and technology as a whole? Needham’s work on China, as well as
similar work on India, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa, raises this
question.
The answer, whichever it is, has major political implications. If an alter-
native, perhaps more ecologically sensitive and holistic, science (such as the
indigenous sciences of China, India, and other non-Western cultures) is pos-
sible, then the claims that our present science and technology is a product of
its own inexorable logic are false. Both the pessimists, such as Ellul, and
optimists, such as the modern technocrats, may be rationalizing present
arrangements. Both culture-critical pessimism and the technocratic ideo-
logy criticized by critical theorist Habermas and others (see chapter 4) may
obscure genuine alternatives. On the other hand, if the theses of autonomous
technology and technological determinism, and the claim that Western sci-
ence and rationality are truly universal, are correct, then the hopes for such
an alternative science and technology held by feminists, deep ecologists, and
self-described radical reformers of science and technology are a dangerous
illusion (see chapters 9 and 11, and the discussion of the “science wars” in
chapter 1).
174
Study questions
1 Is it possible to sharply separate the purely technological aspect of a

cultural activity from the ceremonial, religious, or other aspects of the
activity?
2 How would you distinguish magic, science, and religion?
3 Is scientific knowledge a truly universal description of nature in itself, or
is it a kind of Western “local knowledge” that has spread over the globe
through the building of Western-style laboratories as environments for
that “local knowledge”?
4 Is indigenous knowledge (say of agriculture or medicine) merely a sim-
plified or inaccurate example of scientific knowledge or is it a completely
different sort of thing from scientific knowledge?
5 Do you think that China, if isolated from the West to the present, would
have developed its own brand of advanced science and high technology?
175
ANTI-TECHNOLOGY
11
Anti-technology:
Romanticism, Luddism,
and the Ecology Movement
One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings.

Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:
We murder to dissect.
William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned”
Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Ode Inscribed to W. H. Channing”
Some intellectual and social movements are highly optimistic about techno-
logy. They totally praise and are uncritical of it. Positivism (see chapter 1),
orthodox Marxism, and technocracy (chapter 6) are examples. Other move-
ments have been critical of technology and pessimistic concerning the present
direction of technology. Romanticism is a movement that has propounded
a number of main themes that have been taken up by many later anti-
technology movements. Romanticism arose in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries within poetry, philosophy, and visual art, and continued
through much of the nineteenth century in music.
This chapter examines a number of anti-technology movements, includ-
ing the Romantic Movement, the original Luddism of the machine-breakers
at the beginning of the industrial revolution, modern accusations and self-
designations of Luddism, and the late twentieth-century deep ecology and
other radical ecology movements.
176
ANTI-TECHNOLOGY
Romanticism
Romanticism arose, in part, as a reaction against the industrial revolution of

the late eighteenth century. The pollution, urban poverty, and ugliness of
the newly industrializing cities repelled many writers and thinkers. Roman-
ticism was also a reaction against the worship of reason (see chapter 4) and
denigration of the emotions that was promoted widely by writers of the Age
of Reason and Enlightenment eras of the previous century.
The French philosopher and educational theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712–78) was the great forerunner of and inspiration for many of the roman-
tics. Rousseau’s earliest significant work, his prize essay Discourse on the
Sciences and the Arts (1750), argued, contrary to the spirit of the age, that the
development of civilization, science, and technology had been harmful to
morals and society. Rousseau praised the archaic civilizations, warlike and
heroic, and claimed that civilization led to weakness and decadence. In his
educational treatise Emile (1762), Rousseau argued, as would many later
romantics, that discipline and direction suppressed the natural impulses and
creativity of the child. Rousseau even recommended that reading should
not be taught until the child had reached the level that we should call mid-
dle school. Education should be pursued by communing with nature in
the woods and fields, not in the classroom. The romantic cult of the child
appears again in Wordsworth and many others through twentieth-century
progressive education. The notion of the “noble savage,” the pre-civilized
person, superior in spirit and personality to the alienated products of civil-
ization, also influenced much later anthropology and cultural theory.
An example of Rousseau’s impact is the fact that Immanuel Kant, who in
his later years kept to a schedule so rigid that townspeople could set their
watches by his passing their houses on his daily walk, missed his walk only
twice, once when news of the French revolution arrived, and the other when
one of Rousseau’s books arrived in the mail (Cassirer, 1963). Numerous
Europeans wept and swooned to Rousseau’s sentimental novel The New Eloise
(1761). One noblewoman, dressing for a ball, happened to pick up a copy
that had arrived. She bid her coachman wait a minute, while she read a bit,
asked him to wait longer, and finally made him wait all night, never arriving
at the ball.
Certainly the rise of science and its success, including the success of
Bacon’s inductive method (see chapter 1) and of the use of mathematics in
formulating laws of nature by the early modern physicists and astronomers,
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stimulated and reinforced their emphasis on reason. The success of Galileo,

Newton, and others in formulating laws of motion and mathematically pre-
dicting the motions of the planets led to the belief that the mathematical and
experimental methods would solve all human problems, including those of
ethics and politics. The passions, in contrast, were seen as unruly and in
need of suppression or channeling by reason. The romantics opposed this
and championed the importance of emotion and passion. The romantics
downplayed reason in favor of passion and imagination or, in the case of the
German romantic philosophers, praised reason but meant by it something
that was highly intuitive and very different from the reason that the follow-
ers of the experimental or mathematical methods had previously praised.
Romantic philosophers such as Schelling and other “nature philosophers”
claimed that “transcendental reason,” in the form of intuitive insight and a
higher imagination, instead of observation and experiment, would explain
the structure and ultimate reality of things (see chapter 4 on transcendental
reason).
Romanticism also questioned the view of the world that the philosophers
of early modern science had presented. Science, particularly physics, was
successful in describing the world in terms of mathematics, of quantity. In
addition, physics explained the world in terms of atoms, entities unobservable
in direct perception. Physics was described in terms of mass, length, and
time, not of other qualities. For instance, experienced colors, sounds, smells,
tastes, the so-called “secondary qualities,” were explained in terms of the
spatial, “primary qualities.” Secondary qualities were considered a subjective
product of our sense organs and mind and not as real or fundamental as the
primary qualities.
The romantics reacted against this claim by emphasizing that what is real
is what we directly perceive in terms of colors and sounds. Nature, as directly
experienced, is real, while the physicists’ description of nature in terms of
atoms and geometry is a lifeless abstraction. A twentieth-century philosopher
and mathematician, A. N. Whitehead, sympathetic to the romantic critique,
called the belief in the reality of abstractions and the unreality of what is
directly perceived “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” It confused our
intellectual abstractions with reality. (See similar ideas in chapter 5.)
The denigration of direct sensory experience of qualities, of colors and
sounds, and the elevation of quantity and number as the ultimate reality
may have had consequences for the justification of lack of concern for the
ugliness, filth, and pollution of the new industrial cities. Both physics and
economics dealt with quantity. Physics described reality and economics
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calculated profit and loss. Concern with matters of beauty and ugliness was
rejected as trivial and irrelevant. Writers after romanticism, such as Thomas
Carlyle (1795–1881) and Charles Dickens (1812–70), pointed out how the
quantitative approach to all things, including morality, had deadened people’s
taste and sympathies and made education desiccated and boring (Carlyle, a
conservative, coined the term “cash nexus,” which was borrowed by Marx and
Engels in The Communist Manifesto).
One feature of much romantic thought that has been taken up by ecolo-
gical critics of contemporary science and technology is holism. Holism is the
claim that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. That is, the whole
system has qualities and characteristics that are not those of its parts.
Romantics opposed the analytical and atomistic approach. The British
poet Wordsworth famously said “They murder to dissect.” Here in a nut-
shell is the romantic distrust of analysis into parts of atoms and the belief
that such an approach destroys what is worthwhile in the organism or sys-
tem being studied. William Blake similarly denounced atomism and the
approach of John Locke:
The atoms of Democritus

And Newton’s particles of light
Are sands upon the Red Sea Shore
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.
William Blake, “Mock On”
For Blake, to teach atomistic doctrines was “to educate a fool how to build
a universe of farthing balls” (Bronowski, 1965, p. 137). Like some contemp-
orary postmodern science critics, Blake associated atomistic doctrines and
inductivism with the political establishment that he opposed.
Romantics did not reject science as such, but thought that a science differ-
ent from the mechanical approach was needed. In contrast to the mechan-
ical view, romantic physicists presented a “dynamical” view that emphasized
forces rather than objects. Some historians of science have suggested that
the field approach to physics of Oersted and Faraday, as well as the notion of
the conservation of energy, owed part or all of its formulation to romantic
conceptions of nature as unified (Williams, 1964). Romantic nature philo-
sophers wanted an intuitive rather than an analytical approach to nature.
For the romantics Nature is what is directly perceived in terms of qualities,
the nature grasped in ordinary perception, the nature portrayed by the artist.
Also, “Nature” is valued over civilization and refinement. Being natural
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Box 11.1
Holism
Often holism claims that the whole determines the features of its parts.
The term was coined by the early twentieth-century South African prem-
ier and military leader Jan Smuts (1870–1950), who used to read Kant
for relaxation in his field headquarters tent (Smuts, 1926). Opposed to
holism is atomism, which analyzes wholes into their smallest compon-
ents. Also opposed to holism is reductionism, the claim that the parts
are smaller components, which fully explain the whole or system, and/or
that they are more real than the whole system that they compose. To use
a modern example, a reductionist biochemist or molecular biologist would
analyze a living organism into its atoms and molecules. A holist organismic
biologist would focus on the functions and behavior of the whole organ-
ism, and deny that some of these are adequately accounted for in terms
of the characteristics of the atomic parts. Writers such as organic chemist
and ecology activist Barry Commoner (1967) criticize reductionism and
defend holism, claiming that living organisms and natural systems must
be understood as wholes. Many political ecologists are holists, emphasiz-
ing the interconnectedness of all things in the environment and claiming
that the analytic, atomistic approach leads technologists to overlook the
environmental side-effects of their projects. There are various degrees of
holism that are often confused in discussions of the issue. The most
extreme holism is monism, which claims that there is only one object
(see box 11.2). A less extreme holism is organicism. In organicism, the
system is a whole that determines its parts, but the parts have relatively
independent existence. A number of twentieth-century biologists, such as
J. B. Haldane and Paul Weiss, have been organicists, in opposition to
mechanists as well as vitalists (who claim the existence of a separate life
force). Another, yet weaker, form of holism is relational holism. This
positions claims that all the elements of a system are significantly related
to one another, and that an understanding of the relations is impossible
simply from the elements that are related. Some logical positivists deny
that relational holism is really a holism at all, and claim that the accept-
ance of the reality of relations allows one to defend atomism and mech-
anism (Bergmann, 1958). Process philosophers, on the other hand, claim
that the relations are the only reality, and that the relata, if they exist
at all, are further, lower level relations (see box 12.2). Similarly, some
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anti-atomist, anti-mechanist biologists, such as evolutionists Stephen Jay

Gould (1941–2002) and Richard Lewontin, oppose holism because they
identify it with monism, although they are close to the organicism and
relational holist positions (see Dusek, 1999, chapter 1).
rather than artificial is valued. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who praised “natural

man” and despised the artificiality and hypocrisy of the French society of his
day, was the great initiator of this attitude.
The romantics saw the industrial revolution and the new technology as
destroying both nature and the human spirit. The belching smokestacks and
polluted streams and rivers of the industrial centers destroyed nature, while
the crowded, unhealthy living conditions, the repetitive work, the poverty
of the workers, and the greedy pursuit of wealth by the owners destroyed
human character. Technology itself – the steam engine, the railroad, the
mill – was frequently seen as the culprit. Blake famously wrote of the “dark
satanic mills” in a poem (“And did those feet . . .”) that became a popular
hymn. Ruskin likened traveling by railroad car to being shipped like a pack-
age (Schivelbusch, 1979). Nature, in contrast to the artificiality of civilization
and the ugliness of cities, was seen as a source of wisdom and inspiration.
“One impulse from the vernal wood,” claims Wordsworth in the poem at
the head of this chapter, will deliver wisdom.
Later “back-to-nature” movements – such as the arts and crafts move-
ment of nineteenth-century Britain, the German youth movement of the
early twentieth century, the counterculture of the 1960s and after, and the
ecology movement of the past few decades or the New Age movement –
share romanticism’s praise of wild nature, criticism of artificiality, and dis-
trust of technology. William Morris’s late nineteenth-century arts and crafts
movement rejected the uniformity and lack of imagination of mass pro-
duced objects and emphasized a return to handicraft (Thompson, 1977).
The German youth movement combined outdoor hiking and camping with
a disdain for the “lifeless” abstractions of physics and technology (Heer,
1974) (Heisenberg was a follower of the youth movement; see chapter 6).
Luddites
During the past half century the term Luddite has most commonly been
used to disparage opponents of technology. Anti-nuclear demonstrators,
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opponents of computerization, and other critics of technology have been

dubbed Luddites by the defenders of the technology. Sometimes people in
organizations are called Luddites, half jokingly, simply because they are slow
or reluctant to learn to use new office technology or software. More recently,
some members of the ecology movement and others who see all of modern
technology as harmful have proudly called themselves neo-Luddites.
The original Luddites were weavers and other textile workers in Britain
at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries whose
home handwork was being made obsolete by mechanized looms and weav-
ing factories. The Luddites smashed the factory machinery in protest at and
opposition to the new factory system. They claimed to be followers of
“General Ned Ludd” as leader of the movement, who may have really ex-
isted or may be a mythical figure. Numerous letters and manifestos by
different individuals and groups were issued in the name of General Ludd or
“King Ludd.” The original Luddites apparently were acting primarily from
economic motives. They were being put out of work by the lowering of
prices for cloth. They were being forced from their traditional craft-based
homework into the factory system, subjected to labor discipline, and mak-
ing less money in the process (Hobsbawm, 1962; Thompson, 1968).
The modern use of the term Luddite is somewhat misleading. Many of
the modern anti-technology crusaders whom the supporters of technology
disparage as Luddites or who proudly call themselves neo-Luddites are gen-
erally concerned not with direct impoverishment or job loss but with life-
style issues (compare the mainly literary figures described in Fox (2002) as
later members of the Luddite tradition). The so-called neo-Luddites are really
more akin to the romantics in rejecting technology as alienating and
inimical to a well lived life. (Some romantics, such as the British poets Byron
and Shelley, defended the Luddites, but seem to have done so more from
radical political views and sympathy for the downtrodden than from roman-
tic nature philosophy.)
Chellis Glendinning, a psychologist, issued a “neo-Luddite manifesto”
(1990). Glendinning is not solely concerned with lifestyle issues, but sees
contemporary technology as a genuine threat to life and health. She had
previously researched people who had suffered from various nuclear and
chemical technologies, such as pesticides and medicines that have produced
cancer and pain. As a psychologist, Glendinning compares our social addic-
tion to technology to drug and alcohol addiction, considering the writers of
techno-hype as enablers. Glendinning, like most other critics of contemporary
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technology, does not demand the elimination of all technology, but wants a
development of different technologies more amenable to human well-being
and political democracy than present technologies. Social scientists talk of
technological choices versus social ends, claiming that the choices for tech-
nology development are made with an eye toward profit rather than with
an eye toward improving the society.
Ecology, the Conservation Movement, and

the Political Ecology Movement
The term “ecology,” for a branch of biology dealing with the interrelations
of the members of natural communities of organisms, was coined in 1866 by
the German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel. Ecology in its American version in
the first third of the twentieth century, borrowing ideas from the Dane
Eugenius Warming and others, and developed notably by Frederic Clements,
focused on the succession of plant and animal communities in a given area,
as in the succession from pond to marsh to forest. The succession of plant
life in a given area develops to a “climax” community. The community
succession notion was one of progress toward a harmonious equilibrium.
(Here we can see the influence of the notion of historical progress that
dominated technocratic thought as well as many other philosophies of his-
tory in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.) This early ecology also
treated plant and animal communities as organisms. Clements borrowed
this approach from the pre-Darwinian evolutionist, philosopher, sociologist,
and later social Darwinist Herbert Spencer. Both Spencer, with his organismic
theory of both natural communities and human societies, and Haeckel, with
an overall organismic view of human societies, show the strong tie of early
ecology with holism.
There is a darker side to Spencer and Haeckel’s influence, with the ideology
of social Darwinism and imperialism common among many of the followers
of Spencer, and with Haeckel’s Monist Society, which according to some
devolved into the Nazi movement after Haeckel’s demise (Gasman, 1971).
US President Theodore Roosevelt combined imperialist social Darwinism,
advocating domination of the “savage” races by Anglo-Saxons as in the Span-
ish American War, with innovative support of conservation and the National
Park system. Roosevelt’s military adventures are celebrated in the murals
that cover the walls of the vestibule of the American Museum of Natural
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History. I, who once worked as a volunteer at the museum for a summer,

and another biologist who frequently visited there, had never noticed these,
despite entering the museum hundreds of times through that hall.
The Nazis had a strong interest in ecology and preservation of nature,
combined with their racial extermination policies, understood as parts of a
unified policy for biological health. Germany under the Nazis led other
countries by decades in attempting to eliminate smoking as a cause of lung
cancer (Proctor, 1999). The Nazis, with their encouragement of breeding
the Aryan “master race,” as well as their policy of eliminating Jews, Slavs,
Gypsies, and gays, had a policy of fostering what Foucault (1976) called
“biopower.” There is a famous photo of Hitler petting a fawn, to show what
a lover of animals he was. Amazingly, the concentration camp at Dachau
had a health food herb garden, which fed guards, as well as some prisoners
who were later exterminated (Harrington, 1996).
The tie of ecology to holism was revived among biologists and philo-
sophers at Chicago and Harvard universities in the 1920s and during the 1970s
in the political movement called the ecology or green movement. One of
the late nineteenth-century ecologists, the Scotsman Patrick Geddes, applied
his ecological approach to city planning and in turn influenced Lewis
Mumford (Boardman, 1944) (see chapter 8 on Geddes and Mumford).
With the Midwest dust bowl of the 1930s and the rise of Franklin
Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression, holistic ecological
thinking based on the climax community notion came to dominate the con-
servation movement. Mechanized agriculture in the form of the tractor was
claimed to have caused the dust bowl. The “sodbuster . . . had bound himself
by a different set of chains, those of technological determinism” (Worster,
1977, p. 246). The holistic and organismic approach to land management
was contrasted with the partial, fragmented, and atomic approaches of indi-
vidual interests, such as those of the farmer, real estate developer, or timber
company. Not since the Romantic Movement and the industrial revolution in
the early nineteenth century was there so great a conflict as that in the 1930s
between nature and society (Worster, 1977, p. 237 and chapter 12 passim).
Scientific ecology began to criticize the rigid succession and climax com-
munity notions that were beholden to the theory of historical progress and
organismic equilibrium. A. G. Tansley of Oxford, although a follower of
many of Clements’s ideas, criticized the notion of a unique, natural climax.
Later, Tansley began to criticize the organismic model of the living commun-
ity. With the growth of energy flow conceptions of ecology based on the
laws of thermodynamics (another notion vaguely adumbrated by Spencer in
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the previous century), late twentieth-century ecology, in contrast, has often

emphasized process and disequilibrium.
The emphasis on disequilibrium grew gradually, as a Darwinian, competition-
influenced model of equilibrium was also developed out of population
science in a mathematical form. For instance, Edward O. Wilson and Robert
MacArthur’s Theory of Island Biogeography (1967) was formulated in conversa-
tions that began concerning the “balance of nature” that MacArthur refor-
mulated mathematically as a theory of equilibrium (Quammen, 1996, p. 420).
Tansley’s terminology of “ecosystem,” rather than super-organism or
community, was melded with Charles Elton’s notions of food chains and
energy flows. The competition-based Darwinian “economy of nature,” with
its version of the economic “invisible hand” leading to equilibrium and opti-
mality, continued to have influence. However, the energy/flow economic
model emphasized rather economic notions of consumption and production,
input and output. The “new ecology” also emphasized planning and man-
agement of the environment as a whole, just as the technocrats emphasized
the planning and management of society.
H. G. Wells, until near the end of his life a partisan of technocratic plan-
ning, and the evolutionist Julian Huxley wrote a chapter called “Life under
control” in their elementary biology textbook in the 1930s (Worster, 1977,
p. 314). H. T. Odum, one of the Odum brothers who did US Atomic Energy
Commission funded work on the ecological effects of H-bomb tests, in
his Environment, Power and Society (1970) expounded the technocrat’s dream
of a society constructed in a carefully manufactured pattern. Kenneth Watt
demonstrates in his book Ecology and Resource Management (1968) that the
new ecological principles lend themselves easily to the agronomic desire to
“optimize harvest of useful tissue” (Bowler, 1992, p. 540). Watt’s somewhat
ad hoc systems theoretical approach does not find favor with the mathemat-
ical population biologists who are influenced by Marxism. Richard Lewontin
and Richard Levins even went as far as to satirize and ridicule his systems
approach under their pseudonym of “Isadore Nabi.” Their message is that if
Watt’s systems approach had been used in physics, laws of motion would
never have been discovered, and the same is true in ecology. Nevertheless,
the somewhat technocratic version of systems ecology has tended to dom-
inate environmental regulators and managers.
Ecological science largely (though not entirely) underwent a shift during
the 1930s and 1940s, from a progress-toward-an-ideal (climax community)
and harmony of nature view (via the notions of organism and equilibrium) to
a disequilibrium view in which many possible end-states are possible for an
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ecosystem. Despite this direction of development William Morton Wheeler,

an expert on social insects at Harvard, emphasized the superorganism con-
cept. During the 1930s, biochemist and physiologist L. J. Henderson, author
of the puzzling The Fitness of the Environment, led the “Harvard Pareto Cir-
cle” (Heyl, 1968). Henderson supported and interpreted the ideas of the
early twentieth-century sociologist and economist Vilfredo Pareto using ideas
from chemistry and physiology. Pareto was one of the “Machiavellians” in
the theory of social elites and was praised by the fascist Mussolini. The circle
included the soon-to-be major sociologists Talcott Parsons and George
C. Homans, founding sociologist of science Robert K. Merton, and the his-
torian Crane Brinton (whose model of revolution in Anatomy of Revolution
was influenced by Henderson’s version of Pareto and in turn influenced
Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions) among others (see chapter 1).
The group encouraged a functionalistic view of society as a kind of self-
regulating organism that reaches equilibrium.
During the 1920s Alfred North Whitehead, British mathematician and
logician turned Harvard metaphysician, developed a “philosophy of organ-
ism,” tied to relativity theory and early subatomic physics, that held strong
appeal to organismic biologists. Whitehead emphasized the priority of pro-
cess over enduring substance and the priority of relations over simple qual-
ities (see box 12.2). Significantly, Whitehead also gave a defense of romanticism
against the mechanistic worldview of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment
in one of the most accessible and influential chapters of his Science and the
Modern World (1925). At the University of Chicago the ecologists Warder
Allee and Alfred Emerson, Thomas and Orlando Park, and Karl Schmidt, who
all co-authored a major text in ecology, followed Whitehead’s philosophy,
as did fellow biologists, the embryologist Ralph Lillie, and Ralph Gerard.
Sewall Wright, the Chicago co-founder of mathematical population gen-
etics, though not a member of the Allee group, was also a panpsychist process
philosopher, whose views were praised by Whitehead’s leading disciple, but
who did not much trumpet his views, as they seem to have had little dis-
cernable influence on his actual research (Provine, 1986, pp. 95–6). This
organismic influence continued through the 1940s but most ecologists were
turning to the energetics/economics conception.
Around 1970 (the year of the first Earth Day in the USA) the green move-
ment or ecology movement began as a mass political movement, as opposed
to a trend within the scientific community. “Ecology” spread from being a
division of biology and the preserve of a relatively small number of biologists
and conservationists to a mass social movement. The ecology movement
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largely retained a conception of pristine nature in harmony in a static

equilibrium as its ideal. New Age holists such as the ex-physicist Fritjof
Capra (1982) appealed to ecology and the green movement to reinforce
their holism. On the other hand, the fact that even the population biologist
Paul Ehrlich should title his excellent popular summary of scientific popula-
tion biology The Machinery of Nature (1986) shows how far most modern,
scientific ecologists are from the organismic or holistic opposition to mech-
anism as a philosophy. The more radical political ecologists would and do
(when aware of it) look askance at the mechanistic viewpoint of many sys-
tems and population ecologists as well as at the domination of nature or
managerial ethic held in much of systems ecology.
Deep Ecology
Deep ecology is a movement whose name and principles were first formu-
lated by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (1973). Deep ecology claims
that the usual approaches in scientific ecology and the environmentalist
movement are “shallow,” in that they treat nature as an object of human
use for human benefit. Deep ecology claims that we have to go further and
treat nature as having value in itself, apart from any human use.
The deep ecology movement emphasizes the intrinsic value of wild
nature. Deep ecology rejects the viewing of nature as instrumental to human
well-being. It rejects the anthropocentric (human-centered) approach to
nature. It contrasts as strongly as possibly with the goal of human control
of nature found in much Western thought of the past two centuries. Naess’s
deep ecology has drawn inspiration from the early modern philosopher
Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), with his completely naturalistic approach to phi-
losophy and his goal of identification of the self not with the selfish ego but
with the broadest environment, ultimately the universe. For Spinoza there
is only one real substance or thing, the universe as a whole, which he
identifies with God (see box 11.2). Some later philosophers of deep ecology
use the philosophy of Martin Heidegger to support their position. They
draw on Heidegger’s turning away from a human-centered or subjective
approach to the nature of knowledge and being. They also appreciate
Heidegger’s conception of the earth as not fully graspable in knowledge and
the contrast of earth (or nature) with scientific abstraction (see box 5.1).
For deep ecologists and to a lesser degree many other radical political
ecologists, the approach of mainstream scientific and government agency
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Box 11.2
Spinoza, Einstein, monism, and holism
The seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza opposed the mathematician-
philosopher René Descartes’s sharp division between mind and matter
(so-called Cartesian dualism). Descartes claimed that there are two funda-
mental kinds of substance, material (or body, interpreted by Descartes as
spatial extension) and mental (or thought). For Spinoza, in contrast, mind
and matter, or thought and extension, are two aspects of a single under-
lying substance whose full nature we do not know, since it is infinite.
Spinoza emphasized the bodily parallel to all thought. He also made a
deep and detailed analysis of the emotions, which are both bodily and
mental. Spinoza has been portrayed as a forerunner of psychoanalytic
theories of bodily expression of mental states and of psychosomatic ill-
ness, such as those of Freud and of other twentieth-century thinkers who
emphasized the physiological and emotional bases of all thought. Spinoza
was a thoroughgoing naturalist; that is, he denied that there is any aspect
of reality that is not part of the natural world. Spinoza was a pantheist
who identified God with nature (“God or nature”). He was also a monist
who claimed not only that there is only one kind of substance, but also
that there is numerically only one substance: God = universe.
Albert Einstein was a great admirer of Spinoza. Einstein admired
Spinoza’s naturalism and sense of awe for and worship of the universe.
Einstein, like Spinoza, did not believe in a personal God but had a religious
awe for the mysteries of the cosmos. In some of Einstein’s more specula-
tive interpretations of General Relativity there is only one thing: space-
time. “Things” in the everyday sense (particles) are singularities or warps
in space-time. This theory (later called geometrodynamics by John
Wheeler) has a strong resemblance to Spinoza’s one substance view.
The monism of Spinoza and of geometrodynamics is an extreme form
of holism. It claims not only that the whole is prior to the parts but that
the parts do not have real existence at the most fundamental level; only
the whole system does. Naess and some other ecologists support this
form of holism and even relate it to geometrodynamics, as well as to
Spinoza and panpsychism (Mathews, 1991, 2003) (on panpsychism, see
box 12.2). The whole has properties that the parts do not possess.
In many forms of holism, the properties of the whole cannot be fully
explained simply on the basis of knowledge of the properties of the parts.
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Nevertheless, most biological holists are not monists. That is, the parts
do have independent existence even if they are intimately related to one
another. The genuine monist, such as Spinoza, denies that the parts have
independent reality at all; they are simply “modes” or local modifications
of the one real entity or substance (see Dusek, 1999, chapter 1).
ecology is too close to the very technological domination of nature that

deep ecologists oppose. The terminology of “managing ecosystems” that
many mainstream environmental scientists and agencies use implies this
sort of control. Deep ecologists claim that such system management itself is
part of the disease, not the cure. Despite this, Naess himself sometimes falls
into technocratic language in his presentation of deep ecology.
Ecofeminism
Ecofeminism is a movement combining ecological and feminist concerns.

Ecofeminists claim that patriarchy, or male dominance of society, is linked
to exploitative and destructive approaches to the environment. In chapter 9
we discussed the gendered metaphors traditionally used to discuss the “man–
nature” relationship. From the time of Francis Bacon and the Royal Society
until our time, nature has often been portrayed as female, while the invest-
igator or exploiter of nature has been portrayed as male. Unexploited land or
timber is called “virgin,” while unproductive land is called “barren.” Many
ecofeminists claim that women by nature have more affinity for and sym-
pathy with wild nature. Others claim that the structure of society – with men
in power – structures gender roles and the personalities of men and women
such that men are likely to take an attitude of domination over nature,
while women tend to have more respect for and are oriented toward the
protection of nature.
Karen Warren (2001) enumerates a number of ways in which, she claims,
there is a link between patriarchy and anti-ecological attitudes. Some of
these are the linguistic connections mentioned above. Others include con-
ceptual connections of hierarchical thinking in terms of the superiority of
certain terms traditionally associated with male rather than female attributes.
Examples of these are reason/emotion, mind/body, culture/nature, and
man/nature, and there are many others. The first is associated with men,
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and is assumed to be superior, and the latter is associated with women, and
claimed to be inferior.
Traditionally, Judeo-Christian religion has emphasized the superiority of
humans to nature as well as the priority, both in creation and in rank, within
the family of men to women. Standard examples of this are the creation of
Eve from Adam’s rib in the first version of the Genesis creation story, and
St Paul’s admonition that women should submit to their husbands.
Ecofeminists, particularly those concerned with the developing nations,
note the ignoring of and underemphasis on the contribution of women’s
work, particularly in agriculture, in the developing world. Schemes for
Western aid and development have generally ignored the important role of
women’s subsistence agriculture, and encouraged industrial and agribusi-
ness development that has traditionally involved male workers.
Ecofeminists have criticized deep ecology, claiming that despite its claims
to reject the orientation toward domination of nature and construal of nature
solely as human instrument, deep ecology, because of its masculine origins,
partakes of the hierarchical and abstract thinking that it claims to reject.
Ariel Salleh (1984) notes that founder Arne Naess himself formulates his
presentation in terms of the analytic and positivistic philosophy with which
he began his career as a philosopher (see chapter 1). Naess speaks of axioms
and deductive consequences and of intuitions that need to be made precise.
He also compares his approach to general systems theory. Salleh and other
ecofeminists see this as a masculinist betrayal of the real implications of
deep ecology, which they say would lead away from a formalistic and tech-
nocratic approach to knowledge.
Despite these differences, ecofeminists and deep ecologists have more in
common with each other than either does with the technocratic and man-
agerial utilitarian approach to environmental and wildlife management. The
irony, pointed out by Worster (1977) and Bowler (1992) among others, is
that scientific ecology itself, as it becomes more rigorous and quantitative,
is enshrined as a professionalized academic subject, and reaches for more
influence on government and corporate policy, is generally moving far away
from its original romantic and organismic inspirations in a technocratic
direction, often in conflict with the personal opinions concerning preserva-
tion of wild nature of the ecological scientists themselves. It remains to be seen
whether the collaboration of scientists with (or at least having support for)
the aims of the green movement will shift the science itself back onto a
more holistic path (Bowler, 1992, p. 550–3).
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Overpopulation and Neo-Malthusianism
We noted in passing above that some of the holist and monist movements
of the beginning of the twentieth century became associated with Nazism.
Indeed, Nazism, despite its horrendous murder of millions of members of
supposedly “inferior” races based on pseudo-biological theories, also made
a major effort to preserve wild areas and species, as part of its “back to
nature” and “blood and soil” emphases. Thus, as Bowler (1992, pp. 437, 551)
and others have noted, radical ecology has associations with the Nazi right
as well as the communal anarchist left.
Another area of political ambivalence of ecological policy is in the area of
population limitation. Campaigns against world overpopulation are called
neo-Malthusian, after Parson Thomas Malthus’s Essay on Population (1803).
Malthus famously argued that human population grows geometrically, as in
the sequence 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, while agricultural production grows arithmet-
ically, as in the sequence 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, such that population vastly outruns
food supply. Malthus opposed birth control and thought that the “inferior”
lower classes were incapable of exercising the sexual self-restraint that the
upper classes did, and hence concluded that the poor will always be with us.
Marx and Engels fulminated against Malthus, as they saw him blaming the
poor for their poverty rather than the capitalist economic system that kept
their jobs scarce and their wages low. Malthus, according to Marx, was “a
shameless psychophant of the ruling classes” (Marx and Engels, 1954).
In the twentieth century Marxists such as Paul Baran (1957) criticized
ecological neo-Malthusians such as bird biologist William Vogt (1948) by
pointing out that the population of Belgium or England was three times
denser in the mid-twentieth century than that of “overpopulated” India and
twenty times as dense as Sumatra, Colombia, Iran, or Bolivia (Baran, 1957,
p. 239). Baran and some other, non-Marxist, economists argued that “over-
population” was an artifact of bad organization in terms of the landlord
system of agriculture in less developed nations (Baran and others saw these
nations not as euphemistically “developing nations” but as underdeveloping
nations, kept poor by the neo-imperialism of the industrial nations). Mao
Zedong, the mid-twentieth-century Communist dictator of China, claimed
that “Every mouth comes with two hands attached” (Hertsgaard, 1997) and
that rational organization of agriculture could counteract scarcity. (In con-
trast, since Mao’s death and the introduction of capitalist markets in China,
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draconic forced population limitation measures have been instituted, lead-

ing to widespread abortion of female offspring.)
Roman Catholic writers have likewise objected to Malthusianism in order
to defend the consequences of the Catholic Church’s opposition to birth
control and abortion. Although the strictest opposition to contraception
(obviously not followed by most Catholics in the industrialized west) is
associated with the most conservative aspects of Catholic theology, the Cath-
olic opposition to neo-Malthusianism has often gone along with left-wing
“liberation theology” sympathy for the demands of the poor in the develop-
ing world.
The scientific fallacies of the early eugenics program were exposed by
modern genetics. It turned out that most deleterious genes are recessive,
and are carried in a single copy by many people who do not show the
disease that the gene causes when present in two copies. Thus negative
eugenics (at least before the arrival of genetic screening in the late twentieth
century) would not succeed simply by preventing those with genetic dis-
eases from breeding. Furthermore, many illnesses are caused by numerous
genes working together, and eliminating “bad” genes turns out to be more
difficult than the early eugenicists thought. Once the racial extermination
horrors to which Hitler and the Nazis took the program were exposed in
1945, eugenics was almost universally rejected.
After the decline of simplistic early eugenics, many early advocates of
limitation of reproduction by the “unfit” and the “inferior” races through
eugenics shifted to the apparently more neutral “population limitation” pro-
grams sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. For instance, Raymond
Pearl made the transition in his own lifetime (Allen, 1991). Later neo-
Malthusians have still sometimes associated themselves with anti-
immigration groups that show racist orientation in their propaganda. Marxist
and Catholic opponents of Malthusianism can point out the class and racial
biases of many Malthusians, but the issue of the validity of the claim of
limits to unchecked population growth remains.
The Stanford University ecological scientist and expert on butterflies Paul
Ehrlich has long campaigned for population limitation, writing books with
titles such as The Population Bomb (1968) and, co-authored with Anne Ehrlich,
The Population Explosion (1991), and the textbook Population, Resources, Envir-
onment (1972). Ehrlich was also the moving spirit of the organization ZPG,
or Zero Population Growth. Ehrlich himself is explicitly anti-racist, having
authored with S. Shirley Feldman The Race Bomb (1978), and considers him-
self a social democrat.
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However, some have criticized Ehrlich’s early blaming of poverty and

pollution solely upon population growth in The Population Bomb and ZPG
slogans, and claimed that he was blind to the economics of capitalism as
well as implicitly racist with respect to the high-population, less developed
world. Since his earliest book on the topic Ehrlich has greatly qualified and
elaborated on his position with respect to issues of equity and the role of
population vis-à-vis industrialization, underdevelopment, and other factors,
while emphasizing the untenability of unchecked (or, indeed, any further)
world population growth.
Nevertheless, biologist Garrett Hardin, whose politics are explicitly on
the right, advocates more ruthless Malthusianism of the older sort. (His
spouse stabbed one of the Science for the People members with her knitting
needle at an American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting
(Kevles 1977).) In his “lifeboat ethics” Hardin (1972, 1980) has counseled
against food aid in famines in Africa, claiming that this simply maintains the
high population that will cause more famines.
The biologist and ecological activist Barry Commoner (1975) summed up
the criticism of these views in an article entitled “How poverty breeds over-
population (and not the other way around).” Commoner and some other
economists and demographers claim that pre-industrial, agrarian societies
encourage large families and that economic development leads to progress-
ively lower birth rates. In the case of pollution, it has often been pointed
out that the developed industrial countries produce many times their share
of solid waste and greenhouse gases, though developing nations such as
China will soon dwarf others as they industrialize. The USA uses 25 percent
of the world’s resources with only 4 percent of the population, while the
industrialized countries (the USA, Europe, and Japan) use 80 percent of
world resources. China in 2004 had one million automobiles. If privatization
of transportation leads to widespread gasoline-powered automobile use com-
parable to that in the West, China will have many hundreds of millions of
automobiles and enormous pollution. It seems unlikely, to say the least, that
China and India can develop in the wasteful and energy-intensive manner of
the presently industrialized countries, although there are utopians who claim
that technological advances will allow this to happen.
With respect to famines in Africa, some demographers and sociologists
on the left have claimed against Hardin and others that civil wars and the
breakdown of transportation of food are often the cause of famines in Ethi-
opia and Sudan, not the absolute inability of the land to support the popula-
tion (Downs et al., 1991; Reyna and Downs, 1999). In other parts of Africa,
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the monoculture (single crop agriculture) practiced by multinational corpora-

tions, which replaces local subsistence farming, and the exporting of food
to more affluent European markets even during famines have been claimed
to exacerbate African food shortages (Lappé et al., 1979; Lappé and Collins,
1982).
Ecologists have long argued that world population needs to be limited. It
would seem indisputable that there is some limit on human population in
terms of the carrying capacity of the planet. Nonetheless, some technological
optimists as well as Marxists and Roman Catholic theorists (for the very
different reason of opposition to artificial birth control and abortion) have
disagreed even with that claim. In the 1960s, architect, inventor, and utopian
Buckminster Fuller once claimed that more than the whole world popula-
tion could fit onto Manhattan Island “with enough room to dance the twist”
(although a telephone-booth sized living space would seem to be somewhat
constraining). Fuller, who thought his geodesic dome would end poverty,
believed that a less wasteful technology would allow vast population in-
crease. He believed his design science thinking had refuted Malthusianism.
Between the extremes of Mao, Bucky Fuller and some Roman Catholic
writers who deny there is any problem of overpopulation, and the simplistic
but easy to communicate early Ehrlich message that “population = poverty
plus pollution,” a number of writers have attempted to combine a demand
for world population limitation with demands for equity between nations
and regions and an avoidance of blaming all problems of poverty and pollu-
tion on population alone.
However, the fact that overpopulation theory or neo-Malthusianism has
found support among both left-wing, communal anarchists and right-wing
racists and class elitists shows the complexity of any simple association of
ecological demands with a single political position.
Sustainability
The metaphor and language of sustainability has become the central man-
ner of expressing ecological concerns about the economy and technology
today. The very ambiguity of the term has allowed many varied groups and
individuals with diverse theories and programs for health or ecological sur-
vival to find common ground. Sustainability sounds less radical than such
movements as anarcho-communism and bioregionalism, although its implica-
tions, if taken seriously, may be equally or even more radical. At present,
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sustainability is sufficiently broad in concept to accommodate ecological

radicals, government regional planners, neo-liberals, and corporations offer-
ing sustainable products. There is even a Dow Sustainability Index, tracking
the stocks of corporations that claim to contribute to sustainability.
Attempting to formulate a definition of sustainability leads to many of
the issues and problems that we had when attempting to give a definition
of technology (see chapter 2). One website lists some 27 definitions of
sustainability. A regional planning commission declares “The definition of
sustainability depends on who [sic] you talk to.” This statement seems to
accept the conventional notion of definitions as arbitrary, or the extreme
idiolect version of descriptive definitions, where every person has his or her
own personal definition. There also are a number of what might be called
“feelgood” definitions of sustainability that say sustainability is the simul-
taneous maintenance of biodiversity, economic development, and personal
growth for all citizens. This sounds great, if it can be achieved.
Despite the variety of definitions available, there are a few core factors
common to many definitions, or at least present in many definitions. One
is clearly the maintenance of resources and environmental integrity for
future generations. One of the earliest and most influential definitions of
sustainability is found in what is informally called the “Brundtland Report”
and officially titled Our Common Future. The World Commission on Environ-
ment and Development defined sustainability as the project to “meet present
needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their
needs” (WCED, 1987). The theses of this report have since been elaborated
and clarified in subsequent conferences, such as the Rio conferences on
biodiversity, starting with the United Nations Conference on Environment
and Development at Rio de Janeiro in June 1992.
Some definitions of sustainability make this the sole characteristic of
sustainability, the “seven generations” test attributed to the Seven Nations,
known to the white settlers as the Iroquois tribe of Native Americans. The
notion of “sustainable agriculture,” which pre-dates and is a source of the
general notion of sustainability, emphasizes that the resources of the land,
the fertility of the soil, should not be decreased by its agricultural use. The
leaching of soil by irrigation, as in the salting up of the canals in ancient
Mesopotamia (Iraq), the loss of soil, as in the amazing amount of topsoil
that is lost in the North American Midwest by flowing into the Mississippi
River, and the loss of nutrients of the soil through intensive farming are all
disturbing examples of what sustainable agriculture wishes to avoid. Some of
the agricultural and biological definitions of sustainability are simple input/
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output definitions, rather like the physical definitions of mechanical effi-

ciency (see chapter 12).
These simple input/output bio-efficiency definitions are rejected by many
advocates of sustainability, because they ignore two other factors that these
critics of such definitions deem essential to sustainability. First, there is the
maintenance of biodiversity. This is not simply the maintenance of agricul-
tural productivity, but the maintenance of the biodiversity of the surround-
ing ecosystem. Second, the input/output form of definition, even with
concern for future generations and support for maintaining biodiversity,
ignores the human factor. The comfort, health, and well-being of the
human population must be sustained. Furthermore, the human potential
for development and fulfillment should be maintained.
“Sustainable development” is another sustainability term that was devised
prior to the notion of “sustainability” in general. There has been a series of
United Nations Commissions on Sustainable Development since 1992.
This leads us to an attempt to formulate a comprehensive definition
of sustainability. Sustainability includes the: (a) maintenance of resources,
particularly the use of renewable resources; (b) passing on of resources,
the environment, and social benefits for future generations; (c) preservation
of biodiversity and the integrity of the environment; (d) maintenance of
technological and economic development, enhancing the well-being of the
human population; and (e) fostering and enhancing of a comfortable and
fulfilling lifestyle for the human inhabitants.
Sustainability combines the advocacy of technological and economic
development with biodiversity and the use of renewable resources. What
is not clear is that all these desirable things can be simultaneously maintained.
Supporters of sustainability are optimists, in that they think that all these
desirata can be achieved.
Study questions
1 Is the term “Luddite” historically accurate when used to describe con-

temporary critics of technology?
2 Do you think that holism is a valuable approach to nature? Is holism a
valuable approach to science or is the analytical and atomistic approach
the only viable one?
3 Is deep ecology a broader and more decent ethic than human-centered
views, or is it inhumane and lacking proper consideration for human
beings?
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4 Do you think there are conflicts between the results of ecological sci-
ence and the goals of the ecology movement? If so, why? If not, why
not?
5 Do you think that overpopulation is the major source of problems of
food shortages, pollution, and poverty?
6 What is, in your opinion, the best definition of sustainability? Why is it
superior to others?
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SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM AND ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY
12
Social Constructionism and
Actor-network Theory
Social constructivism has become a common approach to a variety of topics

in a variety of fields of the humanities and social sciences. Its heyday has
been since the 1980s, even though the basics of constructivist philosophy,
mathematics, and psychology have deep historical roots. The theme of
constructivism goes back at least several centuries in philosophy and has been
tied to fields as diverse as the theory of knowledge, mathematics, develop-
mental psychology, and the theory of history and society (see box 12.1).
Sociology of Knowledge as a Prelude to Constructivism
Around the beginning of the twentieth century sociologists influenced by

Kant, such as Georg Simmel, developed notions of society that emphasized
the construction of the social world. Georg Lukács (1885–1971), a Hungar-
ian, studied under Max Weber the sociologist (see chapter 4), Wilhelm Dilthey
the hermeneuticist (see chapter 5), and Georg Simmel (1858–1918), a soci-
ologist associated with the historically oriented neo-Kantians, who wrote in
Philosophy of Money (1900) on, among many other social topics, the pervasive
influence of money on the rise of subjectivity in the modern era. Lukács,
once he moved, literally almost overnight, from existentialism and neo-
Kantianism to communism during the social crisis in Hungary at the end of
the First World War, presented a view of society as constructing the categor-
ies of the world, with the claim in his History and Class Consciousness (1923)
that capitalist and communist society would categorize and understand the
world differently. In many respects, Lukács rediscovered in his own thought
the ideas of the early Marx a decade before they were finally published.
198
Box 12.1
History of constructivism in philosophy and other fields
Constructivism is a tendency in the philosophy of the past few centuries.
Probably the earliest proponents of the claim that our knowledge is con-
structed were Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and Giambattista Vico (1668–
1744). Both of these philosophers claimed that we know best what we
make or construct. Hobbes claimed that mathematics and the political state
were both constructed by arbitrary decision. In mathematics and science,
the arbitrary decision is stipulative definition (see chapter 2). In society,
the decision was the subordination of oneself to the ruler in the social
contract. Vico claimed that we know mathematics and history best because
we construct both. For Vico history is made by humans in collective action.
The major source of the varied ideas of constructivism in many fields
is Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant (1781) held that mathematics is
constructed. We construct arithmetic by counting and construct geo-
metry by drawing imaginary lines in space. Kant also claimed that we
construct concepts in mathematics, but that philosophical (metaphysical)
concepts are not constructed, but dogmatically postulated in definitions.
For Kant, the source of the constructive activity is the mind. Various
faculties or capacities are part of the makeup of the mind. Kant differed
from the British empiricists in that he emphasized the extent to which
the mind is active in the formation of knowledge. Although sensation is
passive, conceptualization is active. We organize and structure our know-
ledge. Through categories we unify our knowledge. Kant compared his
own innovation in theory of knowledge to the “Copernican Revolution”
(the astronomical revolution of Copernicus that replaced the earth as the
center of the solar system with the sun as center). Some have suggested
that, given that Kant makes the active self the center of knowledge, his
revolution is more like the Ptolemaic, earth-centered, theory of astronomy.
After Kant a variety of tendencies in philosophy furthered constructivist
notions. While Kant claimed that we structure our knowledge or experi-
ence, he held that there is an independent reality, things in themselves,
which we cannot know or describe, because all that we know or describe
is structured in terms of the forms of our perceptual intuition and the
categories of our mind. We can know that things in themselves exist, as
the source of the resistance of objects to our desires, and the source of
the input to our passive reception of perceptual data. But we cannot
199
know anything about the qualities or characteristics of things in them-

selves. Gottlieb Fichte (1794), much to Kant’s horror, proposed that since
the thing in itself is inaccessible, and we cannot say anything about it,
philosophy should drop the thing in itself and hold that the mind posits
or creates not simply experience but reality as such. For Fichte the mind
“posits” reality, and its positing is prior even to the laws of logic. Within
later constructivism there are differences between those who claim merely
that our knowledge is constructed, as did Kant, and those who claim, like
Fichte, that objects and external reality themselves are constructed.
Hegel (1770–1831) added a historical dimension to Kant’s categories.
Kant had presented the categories as universal for reason as such and
basically unchanging. Kant claimed that even extraterrestrials and angels
would share our categories. Hegel added an emphasis on historical
development to philosophy. Hegel claimed that the categories develop
through time and history. Even in logic, there is a dialectical sequence of
categories. For instance, Hegel began his Logic (1812–16) by generating
non-Being from Being and then producing the synthesis of Becoming. In
his Phenomenology of Mind (1807) Hegel developed the categories of know-
ledge and ethics in a quasi-historical manner. Ancient Greece and Rome,
the French Revolution, and more recent Romanticism furnish examples
of the sequence of ethical and social categories. Most later Hegelians in
Germany and Italy treated Hegelianism as a fully historical philosophy.
Marx and Engels (1846) claimed that the construction of categories
was not a purely mental sequence, but was a material process of actual
social and historical activity of production in the economy. For Marx,
real, social history, not an idealized history of spirit, generates the frame-
works (ideologies) in terms of which people understand the world.
The neo-Kantian school revived Kant’s ideas in the late nineteenth
century. One branch of the neo-Kantians (the Marburg School) empha-
sized the construction of lawful (nomothetic) scientific and mathematical
knowledge. Another branch (the Southwest German School) focused on
the construction of historical and cultural knowledge of unique indi-
viduals (idiographic knowledge) in the humanities. The nomothetic versus
idiographic dichotomy is manifest in the later opposition of the logical
positivists and the hermeneuticists (see chapter 1 on positivism and chap-
ter 5 on hermeneutics).
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, constructive ideas of
mathematics were developed into detailed philosophies of mathematics
200
and programs for the rigorous building up of systems of mathematics.

Henri Poincaré in France (who also was granddaddy of parts of chaos
theory – see box 6.2) and Jan E. Brouwer in Holland claimed that math-
ematics is built up from the ability to count (Brouwer) and the principle
of mathematical induction (Poincaré), and that these notions went be-
yond purely formal logic (Poincaré, 1902, 1913; Brouwer, 1907–55). Con-
structive mathematics is a growing minority current within mathematics
(Bridges, 1979; Rosenblatt, 1984), and has gained some renewal from
theories of computers and computation (Grandy, 1977, chapter 8). Sev-
eral of the leading theorists in the constructivist approach in education
began in mathematics education (von Glasersfeld, 1995; Ernest, 1998).
In the early twentieth century, the British logician Bertrand Russell
(1914) and the logical positivist Rudolf Carnap (1928) developed the
notion of the logical construction of the world. According to Russell’s
logical construction doctrine, all of our factual knowledge is based on
data from direct sense experience (or sense data). Physical objects are
simply patterns and sequences of these sense data. What we com-
monsensically call a physical object is, in terms of rigorous knowledge,
a logical construction from sense data. The various perspectives we have
or experience are systematically combined and organized to give us the
notion of the physical object. This form of constructivism is different
from Kant’s constructivism and is a logically developed version of British
empiricism. It is interesting, however, to note that constructivist themes
were very much a part of the logical positivist tradition that social
constructivists in contemporary philosophy of technology think they are
rejecting. At least one contemporary survey and evaluation of social
constructivism includes logical constructivism in its scope (Hacking, 1999).
Ironically, Hume’s purely logical criticism of induction and causality led
to logical positivism, but his appeal to “habit and custom” in explaining
the psychological reasons why we believe in induction and causality
strongly resemble social constructivist accounts.
Kantian constructivist ideas also found their way into psychology in
Jean Piaget’s (1896–1980) theories of the growth of knowledge in the
child. Piaget has very strongly Kantian approaches to knowledge, espe-
cially in his early works (Piaget, 1930, 1952). Unlike Kant, Piaget believes
that the categorization or organization of knowledge develops and changes
with the growth of the individual, just as Hegel thought it developed his-
torically in society. For Piaget, the categories of thing and of conservation
201
can be shown to develop through various stages. The Russian psychologist

Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934) developed a theory of cognitive development
that emphasized more than Piaget the social dimension of the development
of the child’s conceptual framework (Vygotsky, 1925–34b).
Because of Lukács’s training in Kant and Hegel he was able to rethink the
conceptual moves that Marx himself had made from earlier German philo-
sophy. However, Lukács’s conclusions were more spiritual and idealistic
than those of Marx. This earlier Lukács, who later claimed self-critically in
1967 that he had earlier “out-Hegeled Hegel,” claimed that the workers
could achieve absolute knowledge after the communist revolution. This is
because the workers are positioned to grasp the essence of capitalist produc-
tion and the “reification” it produces. Marxism is the theory of the move-
ment of the workers. Marxism is true because it reflects the absolute
knowledge that the workers will achieve. However, the reason we can be
sure that the workers’ movement will achieve communism is that Marxism
says so, and is true. The argument is circular. The victory of the workers
leads to the viewpoint that vindicates Marxism’s truth, but the truth of the
Marxist theory of history guarantees the victory of the workers. Lukács
himself later gave up this circular justification, but merely allied himself
with dogmatic “scientific” Marxism-Leninism. Without this later dogmat-
ism, one is left with relativism again.
From Marxist concepts of ideology (minus the partisanship of Marxist
politics) the sociology of knowledge developed. Sociology of knowledge,
such as that of Karl Mannheim (1893–1947), a non-Marxist sociologist very
influenced by Lukács, claims that knowledge is conditioned and constituted
by the social position and role of the knower, but does not assign any special
role to the working class in grasping truth (see the discussion of Mannheim
in chapter 1). Mannheim (1929) claimed that his “relationism” overcame
relativism. Relationism, in various formulations, adjudicates between the
different ideological standpoints by relating them to one another and syn-
thesizing them. It also admits its own socially conditioned nature, sup-
posedly thereby escaping the naiveté of ideological positions. Mannheim also
sometimes appealed to the “free floating intelligentsia” as being less biased
than other classes, such as capitalists and workers, and claimed that the
viewpoint of intellectuals was more accurate than that of other groups.
Mannheim’s solutions are generally conceded to have failed to fully overcome
202
relativism. Nevertheless, his analyses of various movements of thought in

relation to their social context and conditioning launched the sociology of
knowledge.
A work that greatly influenced later social constructivism in the English-
speaking world is Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Con-
struction of Reality (1966). This work, subtitled A Treatise on the Sociology of
Knowledge, presented ideas akin to those of Lukács and Mannheim in a polit-
ically neutral and easily accessible English language formulation. Berger and
Luckman concentrated on the constitution of knowledge of society, but
their ideas could be adapted to knowledge of the natural world by sociolo-
gists of scientific knowledge (see the discussion of sociology of scientific
knowledge in chapter 1).
What Is Constructed? The Varieties of Constructivism
Social constructionism (or constructivism) is perhaps the dominant tendency

in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). Social constructionism was
applied later to technology and is becoming a major tendency in the social
theory of technology. Social construction of technology (SCOT) is some-
what less controversial than the social constructivist theory of science. This
is because SCOT does not have to confront questions from the theory of
knowledge in their most controversial form, which SSK does have to con-
front. The claims that artifacts or devices are constructed and that theories
are constructed are not metaphysically controversial. The addition of the
adjective “social” to the account of the construction makes it descriptively
differ from accounts of individual construction of artifacts and theories, but
does not raise fundamental issues about reality (though the latter raises
issues about the nature of knowledge). SSK has to face the apparently more
philosophically speculative claim that scientific facts and objects are socially
constructed.
The most philosophically controversial aspect of social constructionist
SSK is the claim that facts or physical objects and events are social con-
structed (see chapter 1). This claim can be made to sound innocuous by
saying that scientific “facts” are simply those statements accepted by the
scientific community and that scientific “objects” are simply those concepts
or names of objects that are accepted in scientific theories. However, if more
is claimed than that our belief in facts or the existence of objects is constructed
203
– say, that there is no difference between our belief in facts or objects and
the facts or objects themselves – then one is led into philosophical questions
about the degree of objectivity or subjectivity of our knowledge of the world.
The question arises as to whether objects, events, and facts exist independ-
ently of knowledge or construction of them. Sociologists of scientific
knowledge sometimes claim to be merely doing sociology and not making
philosophical claims, but this flies in the face of the obviously philosophical
claims that partisans of SSK sometimes make.
SCOT seems more reasonable and less controversial than the social
constructivism of nature or physical reality, in that technological artifacts
are indeed made. Devices, artifacts, or inventions are literally physically
constructed. Insofar as their construction involves the collaboration of peo-
ple or even the utilization of techniques, viewpoints, and facts borrowed
from others, the construction is social in an obvious sense. Furthermore,
theories and models are conceptually constructed. Insofar as concepts of
others are utilized, past or contemporary, this construction is also social.
Furthermore, because of the active, manipulative nature of technology, tech-
niques, guiding principles, concepts, and theories are embedded in the physical
construction of technological artifacts. The interpenetration of socially con-
structed concepts and socially constructed devices is clearly evident in tech-
nology. This is more obvious than in science, given the tradition of
understanding the latter as purely theoretical knowledge.
Similarly, the claim that social groups and social institutions are socially
constructed is a much less controversial aspect of social constructionism
than the claim that the objects and facts of science are socially constructed.
For instance, the philosopher John Searle, in The Construction of Social Real-
ity, argues strenuously against the social construction of physical objects or
the objects of science, but develops an account of the social construction of
institutions (Searle, 1995). Searle defends a notion of “brute facts” concern-
ing the physical world in strongest contrast to the notion of socially con-
structed physical facts. However, he develops at length the notion of social
facts as socially constructed. (Searle appeals to “speech acts,” which are
“performative”; that is, create social relations or institutions. Examples are
“I do” in marriage or “I promise” in an agreement or contract.)
The technological systems approach to technology emphasizes that tech-
nological systems involve both physical artifacts and social relations of pro-
ducers, maintainers, and consumers of technology. Hence the social
production of artifacts is intertwined with the social production of such
groups. Thus, in the systems approach, the sharp distinction that Searle and
204
other anti-constructionists with respect to science would make between the

purely physical technological brute facts about devices and the purely social
and constructed facts about social relations and institutions becomes blurred.
The controversial claims of the social construction of science, the claims
that facts, realities, and nature are socially constructed, are much less central
to the consideration of technology. However, one aspect of social construc-
tion of technology that resembles the social construction of facts is the claim
that the effective functioning of technological devices is socially constructed.
That is, effective function, or “working,” is taken not as a physical given but
as a social arrangement by the constructionist approach. In engineering the
efficiency of a device is taken to be a purely quantitative ratio of the energy
input and energy output. However, in practice, whether a device is considered
to “work well” is a product of the character and interests of a user group.
The same device may be considered effective by one group and ineffect-
ive by another. Bijker (1995), in his study of the bicycle, shows how the
large wheel bicycle was considered functional and useful by youthful ath-
letic users, but dangerous and unstable by other, everyday users.
Social constructionists emphasize that a technological artifact is only the
totality of meanings attributed to it by various groups. A pure social
constructionism of technology leads to the view that there is no underlying,
neutral physical device, only differing meanings and evaluations attributed
to it by various groups. This leads back to the metaphysical issues about the
reality of objects independent of human attitudes to them. For instance, the
realist would claim that the inputs and outputs of energy and work are
physical realities, even if different groups might consider the same device
“efficient” or “inefficient” depending on their criteria, goals, and needs. How-
ever, social constructionists with respect to technology forefront such meta-
physical issues far less than do social constructionist accounts of science.
Winner’s Criticisms of Social Constructionism
Langdon Winner (1993) notes that social constructionism shares some of

the features and weaknesses of pluralism in political science. The pluralists
oppose those theories of rule, such as Marxism and power elite theory, that
claim there is a ruling class or a power elite that rules society. Pluralists deny
that there is a ruling elite and claim that political decisions are the product of
the interaction of a number of interest groups. The critics of pluralism note
that some of these groups, such as the very wealthy, are far more influential
205
on social policy than others, such as the very poor. Furthermore, the plural-
ists study conflicts among proposed alternative policies but neglect to note
the possible policies that never are on the agenda, because they are excluded
by the terms of the debate. According to the critics, the most powerful
groups frame the alternatives in the debate and set the agenda.
Winner claims that the social constructionists emphasize the diversity of
groups that influence technological development without noting how some
of those groups dominate the development of the technology and others
have practically no say. For instance, the interests of owners and managers
determine the design of factory technology to the almost complete exclu-
sion of the desires and interests of laborers (Noble, 1984).
Winner’s criticism of social constructionism above is not in itself a criti-
cism of the general or abstract social constructionist thesis. That is, techno-
logical artifacts could still be socially constructed, but constructed entirely or
primarily in terms of the goals and values of one dominant group. Neverthe-
less, in practice those who dub themselves social constructivists do oppose
Winner’s claims and criticism. Social constructivists emphasize interpretive
flexibility and the great variety of meaning attributed to what the naive
observer might think to be the “same” technical device.
The response of Steve Woolgar and Mark Elam to Winner’s criticism
shows the extent to which liberal or even libertarian pluralism is incor-
porated into much social constructionism (Elam, 1994). Winner uses the
example from Robert Caro (1975) of New York City planner Robert
Moses’s building of bridge overpasses on highways to Long Island beaches
high enough for private autos but too low for public buses to travel under
them. Caro and Winner claim that Moses did so specifically to prevent poor
New Yorkers, particularly African Americans, from using the public beaches.
Woolgar and Elam emphasize that a variety of other interpretations are
possible. Winner asserts against Woolgar that there is a single, true account
of Moses’s motives and goals, even if we do not know what it is, hence
implicitly appealing to a kind of metaphysical realism. (One could bolster
the claim that Moses attempted to exclude African Americans from public
facilities such as beaches by the further fact that Moses ordered public swim-
ming pools to be kept at cold temperatures, on his often expressed but
mistaken belief that African Americans would not swim in cold water.)
Although Winner castigates Woolgar’s approach as apolitical, while Elam
defends Woolgar’s position as a kind of liberal or libertarian irony, Wiebe
Bijker (1995, p. 289) emphasizes the political implications and applications of
social constructionism. Bijker notes, as have many constructivists, that
206
recognition of the social nature of closure or consensus with respect to tech-

nological devices and their “working” can free critics of a technology from
resignation to technological determinism. Nonetheless, social constructionism
does not automatically imply a leftist politics. Environmentalists who appeal
to “hard scientific facts” to bolster their case may wish to deny the socially
constructed nature of science and technology. Similarly, defenders of the
status quo could use insights from social constructivism to further their own
strategies of power and persuasion. For instance, some conservative social
constructionists claim that citizens’ objections to air pollution are merely
primitive taboos and purification rituals (Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982).
Social constructivism can be used for political purposes, but it does not
predetermine the political positions in support of which it can be used.
Another criticism of social constructivism that Winner raises is that it
emphasizes the creation and acceptance of technology but not the impact of
the technology. Social constructivism of science is mainly concerned with
the creation of theories and experimental observations. Taking as a model the
earlier work on science, social constructivists working on technology use the
portrayal of the construction of theory and data as a model for the construc-
tion of technology. Social constructivists might reply that the “impact” of
the technology is treated in the systems of meaning that groups attribute to
the technology. However, the emphasis of the constructivists is on the pro-
duction of the technology itself, not on the broader social changes in institu-
tions and attitudes brought about by the incorporation of the technology.
Actor-network Theory as an Alternative to

Social Construction
Bruno Latour, although often associated with social construction because of

the subtitle of his Laboratory Life, in its first edition, The Social Construction of
a Scientific Fact, became a critic of social constructionism. (The second edi-
tion of the book removed the word “social” from the subtitle, claiming that
the emphasis on the social was misleading.) Latour, Michel Callon, and John
Law became proponents of actor-network theory. In actor-network theory
the participants include human actors as well as laboratory animals and
inanimate objects. No special priority is given to human society. Latour
refers to the elements as actants, including non-human living things and
physical objects. Actants are recruited into a network. Social construction,
following the earlier Latour, may speak of individual researchers being
207
recruited to support a position, but actor-network theory also speaks of

laboratory organisms and apparatus being recruited.
Latour (1992) criticizes social constructionism for overemphasizing the
power of the human mind or society in constructing artifacts and nature.
Social constructionism is a variation on the Kantian (see box 12.1) notion of
the mind organizing the world, even if the abstract, universal mind of Kant
is replaced by a group of socially interacting individuals in social construc-
tionism. Actor-network theory does not wish to prejudge the relative power
or influence of any of the actants.
Furthermore, according to Callon, the boundaries between the techno-
logical system and the rest of society or the rest of the universe do not have
to be delimited. The technological system cannot be neatly separated off
from the rest of society or nature.
Law emphasizes that the apparently purely physical engineer is really
what Law calls a heterogeneous engineer, who engineers society as well as
physical artifacts. The engineering of artifacts should not be separated as
“engineering” from the changing of society that is involved in introducing a
new technology, such as the automobile or the electric power network.
Box 12.2
Process philosophy
Actor-network theory has a number of resemblances and explicit affili-
ations with process philosophy. Process philosophy is a collective term
used for a number of philosophical systems around the turn of the twen-
tieth century. Process philosophy stems from the works of the French-
man Henri Bergson (1911), the Englishmen Samuel Alexander (1916–18)
and Alfred North Whitehead (1929), and in part the more metaphysical
aspects of the American pragmatist philosophers Charles S. Peirce (1839–
1914), William James (1842–1910), John Dewey (1859–1952), and George
Herbert Mead (1863–1931). Process philosophers were influenced in part
by the theory of biological evolution, although some, like Bergson (1859–
1941) and Peirce, rejected Darwin’s natural selection version of evolution
for a more purposive evolution. Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity
influenced some process philosophers, such as Mead (1932) and particu-
larly Whitehead (1922).
Process philosophy holds that the ultimate entities in the universe are
not enduring things or substances but processes. Its oldest precursor in
208
Western philosophy is the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, who

famously claimed that one “cannot step in the same river twice,” and that
“there is a new sun every day.” Whitehead’s process philosophy (as well
as that of James and Mead) also makes relations central. Rather than
things or substances, relations are the fundamental stuff of reality (basic
metaphysical elements). According to James, against Kant, we perceive
relations, rather than combining bits of sense experience with our mind.
In this, James resembles, and actually influenced, phenomenology (see
Gurwitsch (1964) and chapter 5). Whitehead also holds the doctrine of
panpsychism, in which the ultimate elements of reality are not material
particles but psychic entities, in Whitehead’s scheme elements of feeling.
Latour, in his later work and talks, has made frequent reference to
Whitehead’s panpsychism.
Latour and actor-network theorists’ designation of the elements of
their networks as actants, not distinguishing human actors from physical
objects usually considered inorganic and inert, has some resemblance to
Whitehead’s panpsychism. A difference is that traditional panpsychists
such as the seventeenth-century mathematician-philosopher Leibniz (1642–
1727) and the twentieth-century Whitehead only attributed mental
(Leibniz, 1714) or feeling (Whitehead, 1929) properties to what they con-
sidered to be organic units. Aggregates, such as a table or a rock, were not
attributed consciousness or feeling, though molecules or organs might be.
Whitehead’s emphasis on relations clearly fits with actor-network
theory, where the network or, better, the production of the network is
central and is prior to or at least not built up from its atomistic indivi-
duals. Also, Latour (1988) has drawn (controversial) analogies between
Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity and the relational and relativistic
approaches in the social sciences.
Interestingly, two other leaders of science/technology studies, Donna
Haraway and Andrew Pickering, have also recently made reference to
Whitehead and made use of his ideas. Haraway and Pickering share with
Latour an emphasis on the hybrid or intermediate beings, as in Haraway’s
use of human–machine combinations, such that intentionality is not at-
tributed to humans alone (Haraway and Pickering, in Ihde and Selinger,
2003). Pickering, oddly, gets his knowledge of his fellow British thinker
Whitehead (who had interests in mathematical physics like Pickering)
indirectly via the postmodern French theorists Gilles Deleuze (1966, 1988)
and Paul Virilio (2000). It would be better to eliminate the middle men.
209
Actor-network theory has a number of resemblances and explicit affili-

ations with process philosophy, particularly that of the British-American
mathematician-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, to whom Latour in
his more recent work often refers (see box 12.2).
Study questions
1 What versions of social constructionism do you think are correct or

incorrect? Does the “social construction of facts and artifacts” correctly
locate both as socially constructed?
2 Do you think that social constructionism is more reasonable as applied
to science to technology?
3 Do Winner’s criticisms of social constructionism hit their mark? For
instance, is social constructionism a kind of pluralism that ignores the
dominant interests that really direct the development of technology?
4 Do you think a case can be made for the claim that the “efficiency” of
technological devices is a social construction and not simply a matter of
measuring input and output in terms of physical quantities?
210
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INDEX
Index
abortion 136, 141, 143, 144, 192, 194 Arabic science 173
Ackermann, Robert 22 Arabs 3
actants 104, 207–8, 209 Archimedes 115
active principle 145 Arendt, Hannah 4, 57, 75, 108, 113,
actor-network theory 72, 207–10 122, 123, 128–32, 134, 135
Adam 41, 67, 81, 90, 115, 130, 154, Aristotle 13, 27, 28, 40, 42, 56, 57, 59,
190 60, 78, 89, 100, 112, 113, 115, 117,
Adorno, Theodor W. 98, 99 126, 127, 132, 134, 145, 171
aesthetic 16, 33, 53, 64, 68, 99, 124, Arnold, Matthew 1
127 artificial intelligence (AI) 77, 79–80,
Africa 3, 156, 157, 172, 173, 174, 193 82
Agassi, Joseph 7, 12 Arts and Crafts Movement 181
Age of Reason 177 Assyria 125
agora (marketplace) 131 aufheben 59
Agre, P. 82 Augustine 90, 129
AIDS 103 authoritarian technics 124
Alberti, Leon Battista 13 automobile 84, 139, 140, 165, 193,
alchemists 142, 146 208
Alexander, Samuel 208 autonomous technology 3, 4, 76, 84,
algorithm 55, 56 105–10, 131, 174
alienation 93, 97, 121, 122–3 auxiliary hypotheses 15
Allee, Warder 186 Aztecs 173
Allegory of the Cave 39
Anaxagoras 113, 127, 134 Babbage, Charles 95
anomalies 14 Babylonian civilization 20, 171
anthropology 2, 20, 116–17, 124, 132, Bacon, Francis 1, 2, 6, 38, 41–3, 44,
138, 156, 158, 164–5, 177 51, 81, 146–7, 169, 177, 189
anti-realism 12, 159 Bali 20, 161
applied science 6, 23, 24, 33–5, 37, 46, Baran, Paul 191
53, 84, 95, 106, 164, 168, 172 Barlow, John Perry 101
appropriate technology 157 Baudrillard, Jean 101
234
INDEX
Beauvoir, Simone de 112 chaos theory 62, 85, 87, 201

behavioral technology 31 Chaplin, Charles 131
Bell, Daniel 49 Chapman, David 82
Benedict, Saint 115 Cheng Ho 173
Bentham, Jeremy 56, 63, 120 China 31, 49, 55, 85, 114, 116, 125,
Berger, Peter 203 143, 168–74, 175, 191, 193
Bergson, Henri 208 Chinese civilization 3, 20, 33, 95, 114,
Berle, Adolph 50, 52 115, 163, 167, 168–73
bicycle 103, 157, 205 Christianity 115, 129
Bijker, Wiebe E. 36, 103, 205, 206 Chuang Tzu 114
biodiversity 195, 196 circular definition 30
biological determinists 93 clerical workforce 144
biological pest control 114, 169 Clothilde de Vaux 45
biopower 184 Cold War 49, 110, 125
Blake, William 179, 181 Collins, Harry 18, 19, 24
Bloor, David 18 colonize the lifeworld 133
Bodin, Jean 170 Commoner, Barry 180, 193
Bohr, Niels 105, 109 Alliecommunication media 96–9, 100
Borgmann, Albert 99, 127, 128 communicative action 62, 132–3,
Bowler, Peter 190, 191 135
Boyle, Robert 15, 158–9, 162 communicative rationality 61
Boyle’s law 15 compass 169, 172, 173
Braverman, Harry 123 compatibilism 93
Brazil 45 compatibilists 91
Brouwer, L. E. J. 201 computer surveillance 123
Brundtland Report 195 Comte, Auguste 2, 7, 17, 38, 43,
Brzezinski, Zbigniew 49, 50 44–6, 47, 51, 57, 100, 101, 122,
Burt, Sir Cyril 11 125, 126, 133, 164
connectionism 80
calculus 55, 95, 163, 172 consensus definition 33, 35–6
Capital see Marx, Karl conspicuous consumption 47
capitalism 44, 50, 60, 94, 96, 116, 120, constructive mathematics 201
121, 122, 155, 193 contraception 141, 192
Capra, Fritz 187 Cosmodolphins 153–4, 165
cargo cult 32 crank (mechanical) 138
Carlyle, Thomas 1, 120, 179 critical theorists 4, 60, 98
Carnap, Rudolf 9, 56, 68, 79, 81, 82, Cromer, Alan 169
201 cultural lag 94
Carroll, Lewis 27 cyborg 104, 152
Carson, Rachel 2
Cassirer, Ernst 153, 164–5, 166, 177 Dachau 184
Catholic Church 19, 45, 192 dark satanic mills 181
235
INDEX
Darwin, Charles 7, 95, 118, 208 Eddington, Sir Arthur Stanley 92

Dawkins, Richard 86 Edison, Thomas 34
deep ecology see ecology, deep Edsel car 110, 111
definitions 2, 26–37, 39, 55, 71, 112, effects 158
131, 152, 168, 195–6, 199 Egypt 31, 95, 125
Deleuze, Gilles 5, 209 Egyptian civilization 20, 125, 162
democratic technics 124, 126 Ehrlich, Paul 187, 192–3, 194
Depo-Provera 141 eidetic intuition 71
Descartes, René 55, 71, 77, 78, 79, 91, Einstein, Albert 14, 105, 169, 188, 208,
145, 188 209
determinism 4, 16, 49, 59, 84–99, 100, Eisenhower, Dwight D. 49
102–4, 106, 119, 121, 132, 152, Elam, Mark 206
174, 184, 201, 207 Elliott Smith, Grafton 117
Dewey, John 22, 58, 78, 208 Ellul, Jacques 4, 27, 29, 31, 32, 36, 53,
dialectic 40, 59–60, 153 54, 57, 105–7, 108, 109, 110–11,
dialectical reason 69 122, 131, 167, 174
Diaz, Porfirio 45 ELSI 109
Dickens, Charles 179 emancipatory interest 133, 134
Dilthey, Wilhelm 72, 74, 198 Empedocles 114
disabled 142 end of ideology thesis 49
Disney, Walt 59 Engels, Friedrich 44, 60, 116–17, 119,
Disneyland 44 120, 122, 123, 134, 179, 191
division of labor 123 epidemics 173
dolphin 153 essence 27, 28, 29–30, 32, 36, 53, 55,
Douglas, Mary 67 57, 71, 76, 86, 100, 112, 121, 126,
dreamtime 124 129, 134, 152, 202
Dreyfus, Herbert 77–80, 82, 83, 99, estrogen therapy 169
127, 128, 132 Ethiopia 193
dualism 61, 79, 91–2, 132, 135, 188 ethnomathematics 55
Duhem, Pierre 14, 15, 16, 17, 78, 166 ethnosciences 168
Duhemian argument 14, 15 eugenics 192
Duns Scotus 81 Evans Pritchard, Edward 166, 167
Durkheim, Émile 93 existentialists 57, 112, 129
dynamical view 179
fallacy of misplaced concreteness 72,
Earth Day 2, 186 178
Eccles, Sir John 90, 91, 92 falsifiability 10
ecofeminism 151, 154, 189–90 family resemblance 29
ecology 3 –4, 21, 37, 124, 137, 169, Faraday, Michael 7, 179
176, 180, 181, 182, 183–7, 189–91, Feenberg, Andrew 29, 30, 53, 61–2,
196, 197 103, 127, 128
deep ecology 176, 187 feminist empiricism 149
236
INDEX
feudalism 85 Glanville, Joseph 146, 162

Feyerabend, Paul 19, 137, 167 Glendinning, Chellis 182
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 200 God 10, 30, 58–9, 87, 90, 125, 130,
field of consciousness 79 154, 162, 187, 188
Flores, Fernando 82 GOFAI 77
forces of production 94, 100 Golden Bough 162, 163
forms 39, 58, 89, 115 Goodyear, Charles 34
of information 96, 100 Greek civilization 12, 26, 71, 76, 89,
of intuition (Kant) 199 95, 114–15, 126, 129, 131, 134, 145
of perception (Kant) 58 Green, Catherine 139
Plato’s 27, 39, 40, 42 green political movement 184, 186–7,
Foucault, Michel 143, 184 190
foundation (base) (Marx) 94 Greenfield, Susan 118
France 19, 39, 43, 70, 94, 101, 110, guidelines for definition 30
201 Gulf War 101
Frank, Andre Gunder 174 gunpowder 85, 169, 172
Frankfurt School 121, 128, 132 Gurwitsch, Aron 209
Franklin, Benjamin 113, 120, 134 GUT 159
Fraser, Nancy 61
Frazer, Sir James 162, 163 Habermas, Jürgen 60–2, 128, 132,
free relation to technology (Heidegger) 133–4, 135, 174
76, 83, 127–8 Hacking, Ian 22, 23, 158, 160, 201
French Revolution 43, 94, 200 Haeckel, Ernst 116, 183
Fu Hsi 163 Haldane, J. B. S. 180
Fuller, Buckminster 194 Hanson, Norwood Russell 16, 74, 87
Fuller, Steve 17, 19 Haraway, Donna 29, 53, 104, 137,
fundamentalisms 101 152–3, 154, 209
Hardin, Garrett 193
Gaia 145 Harding, Sandra 15, 20, 137, 146, 149
Galbraith, John Kenneth 35, 49, 50, hardware 31–2, 33, 35, 54, 148, 168
52 Hebb, Donald O. 81
Galilei, Galileo 14, 34, 71, 170, 171, Heelan, Patrick 73
178 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 4,
Galison, Peter 22 30, 54, 58, 59–60, 68, 121, 200,
Gama, Vasco de 173 201, 202
Garden of Eden 41, 96, 97, 115, 130 Hegelians 200
Geisteswissenschaften 74 Heidegger, Martin 4, 5, 23, 27, 29, 36,
Genesis 115, 130, 190 53, 71–3, 75–6, 77, 78, 81, 83, 113,
geographic universality 158 122, 123, 126–8, 129, 132, 134,
German Youth Movement 181 153, 187
gestalt 78–9 Heilbroner, Robert 43, 84, 89, 93, 95,
Gilbert, Walter 86 106, 119, 172
237
INDEX
Heisenberg, Werner 88, 89, 90, 92, industrial society 43–4, 45, 49–50, 54,
181 96, 122
uncertainty principle 88 instrumentality 133
Hempel, Carl 166 instrumental action 61–2, 132, 133
Henderson, L. J. 186 instrumental rationality 54, 57–8,
Henderson, Lynda Dalrymple 62 60–1
Heraclitus 209 instrumental realism 22–4, 25
hermeneutics 3, 5, 72–4, 77, 81, 82, instrumentalism 12, 13, 159
83, 126, 133, 137, 198 intermediate technology 157
Hermes 162 Internet 84, 98–9, 100, 101, 128,
heterai 130 135
Hilbert, David 148 Inuits 20, 103
Hitler, Adolph 98, 184, 192 Iran 32, 191
Hobbes, Thomas 28, 108, 199 Iraq 31, 125, 195
holism 79, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184, irrationality 18, 66, 151
187, 188–9, 196
Holy Grail 86 James I, King 42, 146
Homans, George C. 186 James, William 70, 93, 208, 209
homunculus 142 Japan 106, 127, 144, 168, 193
Hoover, J. Edgar 48, 84 Japanese sword maker 167
horizon 79 Jarvie, Ian 31, 164, 168
Horkheimer, Max 98 Jesuits 171
household technology 3, 137, 139, Johnson, Lyndon 48
140, 155 Jonas, Hans 75
housework 138, 139, 140 justice 27, 39, 40, 53, 58, 65, 69
Hume, David 7, 8, 10, 28, 79, 160,
201 Kant, Immanuel 8, 54, 56, 58–60, 68,
Humpty Dumpty 27 74, 78, 92, 164, 177, 180, 198,
Husserl, Edmund 61, 70–1, 72, 73, 199–201, 202, 208, 209
78–9, 126 Kekulé, F. A. 10
hylozoism 145 Keller, Evelyn Fox 137, 146, 147
Kennedy, John F. 48
idols 7 Kerala 172
Bacon on 42 Kierkegaard, Søren 99, 126
Ihde, Don 4, 22, 23, 29, 30, 53, 73, 74, knight 85
77, 83 knowledge guiding interests
Incas 173 (Habermas) 133
indigenous knowledge 157, 160, 161, knowledge is power (Bacon) 42
175 Korean map of 1401 169
induction 6 –7, 8, 9, 14, 16, 23, 25, 42, Kuhn, Thomas 13–14, 15, 16, 17, 19,
56, 68, 78, 106, 146, 177 20, 22, 24, 62, 74, 137, 160, 166,
inductivism 6 –7, 24, 160, 179 186
238
INDEX
L’Ecole Polytechnique 43 McCulloch, Warren S. 81–2

labor, work, and action (Arendt) 129 McLuhan, Marshall 4, 96–8, 100, 127
Lao Tzu 114 McNamara, Robert Strange 49
Laplace, Pierre Simon de 87–8 magic 161–4, 165, 167–8, 175
Laplacian determinism 87–8 Maier, Michael 142
lathe 102 male “gaze” 144
Latour, Bruno 5, 23, 104, 153, 158, Malinowski, Bronislaw 163, 164–5,
160, 207–8, 209, 210 167–8
law 45, 207, 208 Malthus, Thomas 95, 148, 191
Law of the Three Stages (Comte) 45 Man the Hunter theory 138
laws of nature 33, 92, 147, 170, 177 Mannheim, Karl 17, 48, 202–3
Leaky, Louis 117–18 Manning, Ann Harned 139
Leary, Timothy 82 Manning, William 139
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 55, 90, 95, Mao Tse-tung 191
162, 172, 209 Maoris 141
Leonardo da Vinci 13 Marcos, Subcommander 101
Lettvin, Jerome 82 Marcuse, Herbert 4, 60, 61, 62, 75,
Levins, Richard 185 121
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 164, 165–6 Marglin, Steve 123
Lewontin, Richard 181, 185 Marx, Karl 1, 2, 4, 44, 49, 60, 61,
libertarian 99, 206 93–6, 97, 100, 101, 116, 119–23,
lifeworld 61, 62, 71, 72, 133 129, 131, 132, 133, 134–5, 148,
Lillie, Ralph 186 179, 191, 198, 200, 202
Lilly, John C. 153 1844 Manuscripts 120, 121
local knowledge 3, 21, 156, 158–61, Capital 120, 121, 122–3, 129
175 Marxism-Leninism 49, 202
Locke, John 28, 55, 91, 146, 179 Marxist humanism 121
logic of the lamp post 22 math gene 150
logical construction 201 Maxwell, James Clerk 34
logical positivism 7, 46 Mead, George Herbert 208, 209
logical positivists 7, 9, 10, 13, 56, 70, medical forceps 142
71, 74, 180, 200 medium is the message 96
Lovelock, J. E. 145 megamachine 32, 125
LSD 82, 153 Merchant, Carolyn 145, 146
Luckmann, Thomas 203 Merton, Robert King 17, 18, 95, 158,
Ludd, Ned 182 186
Luddites 4, 181–3, 196 Mesthene, Emmanuel G. 89, 93
Lukács, Georg 150, 151, 198, 202, 203 metaphor 39, 94, 144, 147, 194
Lyotard, François 100 Mexico 45, 101, 173, 174
microwave oven 140
MacArthur, Robert 185 Middle Ages 28, 85, 115, 138, 148, 170
McCormick, Cyrus 139 midwives 142–3
239
INDEX
military industrial complex 49 New Atlantis 41, 43

Mill, John Stuart 72, 91 New Eloise, The 177
minitel 103 New Organon 42
Minsky, Marvin 80 new priesthood 125
Modern Times (Chaplin) 131 Newton, Isaac 14, 34, 44, 87, 88, 95,
Mohists 114, 171 142, 145–6, 162, 170, 172, 178,
Monastery 97 179
monism 180, 181, 187, 188 Nietzsche, Friedrich 126, 129, 143
Morris, William 2, 181 Noble, David 102, 147, 206
Morrison, Philip 153 nominalism 27, 28
Moss, Lenny 132
Mughal 173 object relations theory 147
multiples 95 Ockham, William of 28
Mumford, Lewis 4, 31, 32, 102, 113, Odum, H. T. 185
116, 118, 119, 122, 123–6, 129, Oersted, Hans Christian 179
132, 134, 138, 184 Ogburn, William F. 94
Murray, Gilbert 163 Oldenburg, Henry 146
Museum of Modern Art 33 Oppenheimer, J. Robert 49, 105, 109
Muslim 20 oracles 167
mythic thought 164–5 oral communication 96, 97, 100, 157
organicism 180, 181
Nabi, Isador 185 organismic biologist 180
Naess, Arne 37, 187, 190 Ortega y Gasset, José 112
Nagel, Thomas 137 orthodox Marxism 176
Native American 173 Oscar II of Sweden and Norway 87
natural gas wells 170 Ottoman Empire 173
nature philosophers 178, 179 ovens 139
Nazis 18, 20, 108, 109, 128, 165, 183,
191 Pacey, Arnold 35, 103, 161, 168
Needham, Joseph 114, 169, 170–1, Paijing 116
174 panpsychism 188, 209
negative theology 30 Papert, Seymour 80
Nelson-Burns, Leslie 136 Paracelsus, Theophrastus
neo-Kantianism 74, 200 Bombastus 162
Neolithic hunter-gatherer 126 paradigm 13–14, 22, 24, 53, 55
neo-Malthusianism 192, 194 Parsons, Talcott 186
neo-Marxism 4 Pascal, Blaise 78
neo-Platonism 40 Pasteur, Louis 35
neural networks 80 Pavlov, Ivan 47
Neurath, Otto 9 Peirce, Charles S. 81, 208
New Age 88, 153–4, 163, 165, 181, Penfield, Wilder 91
187 penicillin 34
240
INDEX
Penrose, Roger 90 public transportation 140

perceived risk 67 Puerto Rico 141
perceptrons 80 Puritan Revolution 94
phenomenology 3, 5, 23, 61, 70–3,
74, 79, 82, 99, 126, 178, 200, 209 quantum mechanics 90
Piaget, Jean 201, 202 quantum theory 171
Pickering, Andrew 5, 104, 209 Quine, Willard van Orman 15, 17,
Piltdown Man 117 137, 166
Pitts, Walter 81–2
Plato 2, 27, 38, 39–41, 42, 43, 44, 51, Raj 172
53, 54, 57, 58, 60, 68, 71, 78, 89, rationalization 32, 54, 60
100, 113, 115, 116, 117, 119, 126, Ravetz, Jerome 22
134 Reagan, Ronald 65
Plutarch 115 real definition 26–7
Poincaré, Henri 87, 201 real essences 28
Polanyi, Michael 16, 22, 74, 78, 137 real risks 68
Polynesia 168 realism 12, 13, 23–4, 104, 159, 206
Popper, Karl 8, 10–13, 14, 15, 17, 23, reasons for acting 92
33, 160, 166, 167 recursiveness 118, 135
post-industrial society 50, 96 reification 150, 202
Post-it 34 relational holism 180
postmodernism 5, 15, 23, 36, 93, relations of production (Marx) 94–5
100–1, 128, 152–3, 158–9, 179, 209 relativity theory 186
postmodernist feminism 152 reportative definitions 28
postmodernists 15, 17, 53, 62 reproductive technology 137, 139,
post-positivistic 62 140–4, 155
potentiality and actuality 89 Republic 39–40, 41, 94
pragmatism 5, 22, 48, 75, 121 Rickert, Heinrich 74
praxis 122, 129 risk/benefit analysis 54, 56, 63, 65–7
précising definition 29 Rockefeller Foundation 192
predictability 85 Roman Catholicism 45, 192, 194
primary qualities 178 Roman Empire 92, 114, 163
primitive thought 156, 164–6 Romantic Movement 176, 184
problem of induction 8, 16, 23, 24, Romanticism 137, 176, 177–9, 181,
160 200
process philosophy 5, 72, 121–2, 180, Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 47, 50,
208–9, 210 184
professional managerial class 50 Roosevelt, Theodor 183
propaganda 31, 32, 36, 50, 98, 107, Rosenblatt, Arturo 80, 201
131, 165, 192 Ross, Andrew 21, 101
psychological technology 31, 32, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 177, 181
163–4, 168 Royal Society 42, 146, 162, 189
241
INDEX
Ruskin, John 1, 181 social Darwinism 120, 183

Russell, Lord Bertrand 9, 16, 79, 81–2, social epistemology 19
201 Society for the Philosophy of
Russia 110, 148, 165 Technology 2
sociobiology 120, 150
safety glass 34 sociology 4, 15, 17–19, 22, 32, 36, 46,
Sagan, Carl 153 89, 104, 119, 124, 158, 203–4
Sahlins, Marshall 165 of knowledge 202
Santayana, George 8 of scientific knowledge (SSK) 17,
Sartre, Jean-Paul 71, 112 18, 104, 203, 204
Schelling, Friedrich 132, 178 Socrates 26–7, 114
Schleiermacher, Friedrich 72, 74 soft determinism 89, 92–3
Schumpeter, Joseph 119 Sokal, Alan 21
science and technology studies (STS) Southwest German School 200
15, 158–9, 160 Soviet Marxism 132
Science Wars 21, 88, 174 Soviet Union 44, 49, 105, 131, 140
scientist Spanish conquistadors 173
in the institutional sense 11 species being 121, 122
in the normative sense 11 Spencer, Herbert Mead 183, 184
Scott, Howard 47, 48 Sperry, Roger W. 91
Searle, John 204 Speusippus 40
Second Industrial Revolution 96 Spinosa, Charles 128
Second World War 32, 49 Spinoza, Baruch 55, 187, 188–9
secondary qualities 178 Spratt, Thomas 146
seduction 42, 146 SSK see sociology
seismographic observation 170 St Simon, Henri de 2, 38, 39, 43–4,
SETI 153, 154 45, 46, 48, 51, 101, 110, 122, 123,
Silent Scream (film) 144 131
Silk Road 169 Staël, Madame de 43
Simmel, Georg 198 Stalin, Joseph 44, 131
sin 90, 96 steam engine 95, 102, 181
Skinner, B. F. 31, 32, 86, 93, 121 steam pump 95
slaves 95–6, 113, 114–15, 130, 132 stipulative definition 28, 199
Smuts, Jan 180 stirrup 85
snowmobile 103, 104 Stockman, David 65
Soble, Alan 146–7 Strong Programme (Bloor) 18
social construction 4, 17–19, 36, 67, STS see science and technology
102, 104, 108, 152, 204, 205, 207, studies
210 Sudan 193
of technology (SCOT) 203, 204 sunspots 171
social constructionism 5, 104, 153, superconducting supercollider 107
204–7, 208, 210 superstructure 94, 99
242
INDEX
sustainability 194–6, 197 United Nations Commissions on

symbolic forms (Cassirer) 164 Sustainable Development 196
symbolic logic 81, 121, 162 Upjohn Corporation 141
synthesis 59, 200 USSR 18, 44, 48, 49, 51, 95, 110, 123,
Syracuse 115 125
utilitarianism 56, 63, 65
Tansley, A. G. 184–5
Taoists 114 valuing life 64
Taylorism 123 Veblen, Thorstein 39, 46, 47
technocracy 2, 17, 38–52, 54, 60, 61, verification theory 7
66, 96, 125, 133, 146, 176 Vico, Giambattista 108, 199
technocrats 53 Vienna Circle 7, 13, 82
technological determinism 3, 84, 86 Vietnam War 49, 107
technological system 33, 35–6, 63, 90, Virginia Company 142
107–8, 109, 110, 138, 148–9, 168, Virilio, Paul 5, 209
204, 208 von Neumann, John 49
technology as rules 31, 32, 106 vulcanization 34
technoscience 23 Vygotsky, Lev 202
technostructure 50–1, 52
Teller, Edward 49, 109 Wallace, Alfred Russel 95, 148
things in themselves 8, 199, 200 Watson, John B. 47, 86
Thurber, James 16, 136 Watt, Kenneth J. 185
thyroid hormone 169 Weber, Max 32, 53–4, 57, 60, 106,
Timaeus 113 116, 198
tool-makers 113, 118–19, 134 Weinberg, Alvin 125
tool-making 112–13, 117–18, 120, Weiss, Paul 180
126–7, 133–4, 135 Wells, H. G. 185
tools 12, 13, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, Wheeler, John 188
113, 114, 117–18, 120, 125, 127, Wheeler, William Morton 186
134, 135, 164, 168 Whiston, William 162
Toulmin, Stephen 62, 74, 137 Whitehead, Alfred North 5, 38, 72,
transcendentality 2, 68–9, 178 119, 178, 186, 208–9, 210
trial and error 33, 34 Whitney, Eli 139
Turkle, Sherry 128 Wiener, Norbert 82
two standpoints (Kant) 92 Wilson, Edward O. 121, 185
Tycho Brahe 171 Wilson, Harold 48
typewriter 144 Windelband, Wilhelm 74
Winograd, Terry 82
ultrasound 143–4 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 29, 78, 163
uncertainty principle 88 Wizards of Armageddon (Kaplan) 125,
underdetermination 16–17 166
unintended consequences 104, 106 Wolfe, Tom 154
243
INDEX
Wolpert, Lewis 86 Worster, David 185, 190

Woman the Gatherer 138 Wright, Sewall 186
Wood Jones, Frederick 117
Woodstock 127 Zapotec 161
Wordsworth, William 1, 176, 177, Zen Buddhist monasteries 116
179, 181 Zilsel, Edgar 12, 170
World Systems theorists 173 Zero Population Growth (ZPG) 192–3
244
INDEX
245
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Dusek, Val, 1941–

Set in 10.5/13pt Dante

For further information on

1 Philosophy of Science and Technology 6

As philosophy goes, philosophy of technology is a relatively young field.

rationality, and dialectical rationality, among others. Risk/benefit analysis,

early twentieth centuries, a new dimension of scientifically based criticism

European phenomenology and existentialism, and hermeneutics), American

Much of the philosophy of technology in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-

what he called “idols,” or sources of pervasive bias, both individual and

criterion of meaning was meant to exclude theology and metaphysics from

inspiration from Kuhn, has been used to counter technological determinism

Many sociologists of scientific knowledge and science and technology stud-

Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

The work of Kuhn (and a number of other philosophers of science of the

doings of politicians and religious people. It is significant that Merton first

In Anglo-American analytical philosophy a field of social epistemology

evaluative stances, in judging and rejecting certain scientific theories, and

Feminist, Ecological, and Multicultural Science

Accepting Kuhn’s views, if cultural considerations of worldview and

defenders of ethno-science sometimes claim that it is simply an alternative

The “Science Wars”

With the post-Kuhnian development of politically critical studies of science

A later development in the philosophy of science with the greatest relevance

Since contemporary science is so involved with and dependent upon

Historians and sociologists of science who use the instrumental realist

1 Do you think that inductivism is adequate as a theory of scientific method?

Why Bother with Definitions?

Many students, in my experience, especially in the natural sciences, are

Let us look at a few different sorts of definitions. At one extreme is the

with using stipulative definitions in everyday reasoning is that the ordinary

language is frequently imprecise as to exactly what objects count as falling

As mentioned above, the major theorists of technology of the first two-

Guidelines for Definitions

Some general guidelines for definition are the following:

An example of defining technology in a too narrow manner is the com-

Three definitions or characterizations of technology are: (a) technology as

this mass organized labor “the megamachine” (Mumford, 1966). Jacques

1 An airplane (perhaps crashed or abandoned) sitting deserted in the rain

present in a milieu of high tech, urban sophisticates. Non-Western

These examples suggest that for an artifact or piece of hardware to be tech-

Technology as Applied Science

Much of contemporary technology is applied science. However, to define

been tremendously broadened to include virtually all human learning, in-

Systems Definition as a Consensus

A number of writers have formulated a somewhat complex definition of

The tool approach to technology tends to make technology appear neut-

1 Do you think we can have successful discussions of controversial topics

Technocracy is a theory of rule by technical experts. (Various other similar

of technocratic thinking as well as a scientific methodologist. St Simon in

later technocratic thought. The power, rigor, and prestige of mathematical

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) in the early modern period presented a utopia

investigation of nature is the way to social prosperity and well-being is

Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de St Simon

During the course of his lifetime, St Simon sketched a number of different

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) attended the L’Ecole Polytechnique and studied