Abstract
This article takes stock of where philosophy of technology is at, and where it has been since the so-called ‘empirical turn’ announced around the millennial turn. The article both discusses recent advances and suggests concrete ways of making progress in specific topics, especially regarding the philosophical study of technical artefacts. The article proposes to pursue philosophy of technology under three headings: the nature of artefacts, the concept of design, and the notion of use. The paper illustrates two specific ways in which philosophical discussion of such notions can and will make progress: one, by bringing a much greater degree of systematicity to answers that philosophers give to individual questions thrown up by these three notions, and two, by drawing in to a greater degree philosophical expertise acquired and developed in current foundational analytic philosophy, above all metaphysics and the philosophy of language. The paper’s two goals are connected: only by enlisting ‘foundational’ philosophy can we bring a degree of systematicity to contemporary analytic philosophy of technology, and its future.
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Notes
- 1.
Arguably the content of the observation is controversial – what it is held to imply about the state of the field and what can and should be done about it – but not its truth value. Our observation’s authority further rests on the field’s entry in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, co-curated by one of us since 2009 Franssen et al. 2013). That entry presents the field in its present state in as systematized a manner as possible, with the limitations of that systematization clearly in view: an inventory of issues and positions does not make a field, but at most present the making of one.
- 2.
That is, even readers agreeing with our diagnosis may wish to explore means of remedy other than the ones we provide here. We would be the first to welcome the ensuing methodological diversity – a diversity disciplined by a shared metric of success, namely that of systematicity. As Williamson (2007, pp. 285–286) remarks a propos disciplined methodological diversity in philosophy, “Tightly constrained work has the merit that even those who reject the constraints can agree that it demonstrates their consequences.”
- 3.
It should be noted that it is an issue of considerable philosophical interest whether ‘design’ is necessarily an intentional or mental activity. At least one account has been proposed that construes the notion as broader than that, in the same way that there is a broad notion of function underlying both biological and artefact functions. In fact, the broad concept of design was construed exactly to ground the broad concept of function (see Krohs 2009). The further discussion of this issue does not fall within the scope of this paper, however.
- 4.
The performative arts are the notable exceptions to this claim. On the complications such art forms create for a general ontology of art, and on how to overcome these, see Davies (2004). Whether there are similar exceptions on the technology side is much less clear, and insofar as there is indeed a difference, this may further serve to demarcate art from technology and, arguably, technology from ‘social engineering’, that is, all forms of social and societal interventions.
- 5.
The ‘Dual Nature’ research programme has resulted in a large literature on technical functions, including the so-called ICE theory of technical function (see esp. Houkes and Vermaas 2010). In our opinion, this literature has not established that the notion of function belongs primarily or first of all to technology. One might even argue that by developing a special theory for technical functions this work has done the opposite. Whether ‘function’ can count as a unitary concept and what unites its various uses remains an issue to be settled. To single out ‘technical function’ as a primitive concept structuring technology would amount to taking a position with respect to this issue, whereas one would rather hope that a mature philosophy of technology will contribute to clarifying it. As an aside, it could be remarked that the term came to technology and engineering later than to biology and social science, but this is not the place to document this claim.
- 6.
- 7.
Language is a practice for which the ambiguity between the activity and its product is more difficult to pin down. In Sect. 3.6, we discuss important connections between the philosophy of technology and the philosophy of language.
- 8.
Involved in this claim is the notorious English term ‘technology’, which merges an object and its study into a single notion. Many other languages are careful to make the distinction. In French and German, for instance, there is, still (although one may wonder how long it can resist the dominance of English), a significant difference between ‘technique’ and ‘technologie’ and between ‘Technik’ and ‘Technologie’, respectively.
- 9.
See Shields (1999).
- 10.
See, for instance, (de Weck et al. 2011).
- 11.
Recent and extensive treatments of the divergence of intended and actual use of artefacts from a philosophy-of-technology perspective, defending opposing positions, can be found in Houkes and Vermaas (2010) and Preston (2013). The first two of our examples are discussed by Sauchelli (2012) and Priemus and Kroes (2008), resp.; the third is ubiquitous in the literature on the functions of artefacts.
- 12.
Baumberger, ‘Funktion und Gebrauch’, presented at the second Forum Architekturwissenschaft, Darmstadt, Germany, November 2015, abstract available at: http://www.architekturwissenschaft.net/pdfs/Abstracts_Forum_Architekturwissenschaft_2015.pdf
- 13.
Philosophers of technology in the later Heideggerian tradition have connected this point to issues of ‘tacit knowledge’ and ‘knowing how’; space does not permit a discussion of these issues here. Within the ‘Dual Nature’ research programme, the notion of a use plan – initially termed user plan – made the terms ‘use’ and ‘plan’ central, if not almost constitutive of artefacts, but the terms were applied as if unproblematic and the application was not accompanied by an analysis of either using or planning (see Houkes et al. 2002; Houkes and Vermaas 2010).
- 14.
Defended more fully in Chap. 8 of the same book.
- 15.
An intrinsic property is a property a thing can have by itself, whereas an extrinsic property assumes its bearer to be related to something other than itself. While philosophers disagree on how to remove the circularity in this ‘definition’, they agree that the definition provides a satisfactory informal elucidation of ‘intrinsic’.
- 16.
For a recent overview, see (Bach 2004).
- 17.
See (Koller 2015, p. 31).
- 18.
Our adoption of Austin’s framework departs in one point, concerning category (a): Austin thought (where we presently do not) that sentence meaning was already an abstraction of sentence use, namely of “making a statement” (idem, p. 1 fn. 1). This has the confusing result that Austin thinks of (a) as already a type of speech act, with the consequence that no such speech act can occur in the absence of type (b) speech acts: “To perform a locutionary act is […] eo ipso to perform an illocutionary act” (idem, p. 98).
- 19.
This is sometimes called ‘sentence meaning’ (to contrast ‘speaker’s meaning’), or (a sentence’s) ‘literal meaning’. This taxonomy has been hotly disputed in recent years, but thankfully little of that debate impacts the extremely basic points we draw on here.
- 20.
Thomasson ends her (2014) contribution to a volume on artefact kinds precisely with the claim, or rather suggestion, that there are commonalities between technology and language. Language here features as another practice, to which technology could be compared and with which it could be contrasted (mutatis mutandis for the philosophies of technology and language). This is certainly how we intend readers to view the present section.
- 21.
Wittgenstein (1998, p. 50).
- 22.
Wittgenstein (ibid.). In merely walking or drinking a cup of tea, the agent would not (have to) seek to have her intentions recognized in the act itself.
- 23.
“Wittgenstein insisted on the importance of understanding meaning as use and not separated from practice. Language does not represent artefacts, but is itself an artefact we use when we participate in intertwined language-games.” (Ehn 2007, p. 56)
- 24.
- 25.
The present example can be replicated to many other types of artefacts – such as healthcare robots –, as soon as the artefactual specifics of such artefacts and their conditions of use fail to receive sufficient analysis.
- 26.
- 27.
It seems to us that none of the standard theories currently on the market – action schemes, mediation, etc. – manage to shed much light on the matter. In the final instance, the ‘entice’ remains unanalysed, and thus fails to explain what we wanted to know: the nature and degree of (im)moral ‘inheritance’.
- 28.
For example, even if b* is morally neutral, that of d* could be extremely negative (call this moral value amplification); and the reverse is conceivable too, where d* is morally neutral even though b* is morally negative (call this moral value neutralization). So, putting a dangerous weapon behind a secure glass display neutralizes its potentially harming uses, analogous to how some adjectival modifiers like ‘allegedly’ neutralize the ascriptive content and moral value of what they qualify, such as ‘is a murderer’.
- 29.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Peter Kroes, Mark Coeckelbergh, and Pieter Vermaas for comments on earlier drafts; and Mark Alfano for a critical suggestion on what became Sect. 3.6.3.
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Franssen, M., Koller, S. (2016). Philosophy of Technology as a Serious Branch of Philosophy: The Empirical Turn as a Starting Point. In: Franssen, M., Vermaas, P., Kroes, P., Meijers, A. (eds) Philosophy of Technology after the Empirical Turn. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 23. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33717-3_3
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