Abstract
The philosophy of science and the philosophy of technology share the same fate. The experimental turn in philosophy of science and the empirical turn in philosophy of technology open the black boxes of explanatory models and technical systems, and consider the creation of phenomena and artefacts. And yet, technology is viewed through the lens of science, subservient to or derivative of representation and the relation of mind and world. The philosophy of technoscience and an epistemology of working knowledge introduce a technological turn that affords a view of research as technological practice, both in science and in engineering.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
This claim is emboldened by Paul Forman’s (2007) reflection on “The Primacy of Science in Modernity, of Technology in Postmodernity, and of Ideology in the History of Technology.” Forman argues that most philosophers and historians of technology failed to notice, take seriously, or critique the primacy of technology but discuss technology as subservient to the progress of science and society, that is as a means for the advancement of non-technical goals. My claim finds support also in recent remarks by Martina Heßler who argues that technology and humans are missing in contemporary studies of “technology in context.” According to Heßler, these situate black-boxed technological systems and devices in a social context that consists of actors who shape or use technology. She calls for a “historische Technikanthropologie” which considers how humans understand themselves in relation to technology (Heßler 2013). Heßler’s anthropology of technology cannot be undertaken if one presupposes the primacy of science and society, if one privileges the head over the hand, if one is preoccupied with the relation of mind and world. See also Nordmann (2015a).
- 2.
Especially in the work of Mieke Boon, e.g. Boon (2012).
- 3.
If metaphysics queries the preconditions of knowledge as agreement between mind and world, one might speak of metachemistry as exploring the preconditions of knowledge through making and building; see Nordmann (2013).
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
Since the time of Plato, Western philosophy has worked with the definition of knowledge as “justified true belief”. Someone who demonstrates they have acquired a skill is not formulating a belief, that is, a proposition that could prove either to be true or false, justified or unjustified. To put it differently again: anyone who draws on the intellect to establish agreement between mind and world has to worry constantly whether it is even possible to conform to mind-independent reality. This is tantamount to the worry that the presumably discovered token of reality might be nothing but an artifact of the chosen procedure or method (here, “artifact” has a negative connotation). Someone interested in producing a therapeutic active substance, on the other hand, is seeking to create an artifact (positively connoted). Accordingly, they will not seek to sort out whether this artifact owes its existence to mind-independent reality or to human intervention.
- 7.
From the perspective of the philosophy of technology Hacking’s anthropological “fancy about the origin of language” (idem, p. 135) appears just as peculiar as the spectator theory of knowledge. After all, cave paintings and wood carvings are significant and contribute towards the organization of social life even without serving predominantly as claims about what is real and without triggering debates of the kind “No, not that, this here is real”. They might serve ritualistic functions, for example, by instituting rhythms and patterns of action or dependency. Putting the point in a Wittgensteinian manner: A wood carving cannot say that something does not exist or is falsely represented, and thus it cannot say that something exists and is correctly represented. In a discussion of two wood carvings it might well be said under very special conditions that the one is “more similar” than the other (assuming both carvings make the same “claim” and are trying to be representations of the same object), but even then there would not be any criterion for telling when a carving “says” something that is “correct” or “false” about reality. The fact that Hacking presents this archaic representational practice as a prototype for the formulation of propositional theories reveals that he is thinking and writing in the context of the traditional debate of scientific realism. By positing that, when a wooden figure is carved, a thought is formed, he has not distanced himself from a philosophy that is in love with theory and thought. (On this issue, Ludwig Wittgenstein takes a more subversive and fruitful stance: His picture theory of language is based on the discovery that under quite specific circumstances a game with model cars that initially represents nothing can be transformed such that the toys are now said to stand for actual cars in an accident. Only now and only thus does playing with cars become modeling and representation of reality, see Wittgenstein (1994, p. 279).
- 8.
This sentence opens the “analytical table of contents” in Hacking (1983, p. x).
- 9.
What does the philosophy of technology have to offer the philosophy of science apart from a different point of departure? This requires a more informed answer than I am able to offer in this context, but one which issues in a challenge to the philosophy of technology regarding, for example, the epistemology of working knowledge. The attentive reader will notice, at any rate, that the present essay doesn’t have much more on offer as yet than Heidegger’s technological understanding of modern science.
- 10.
This kind of ontological concern, even anxiety, regarding the status of evidence for theoretical knowledge of reality contrasts with the ontological indifference of tinkerers, engineers or technoscientists. On “ontological indifference” see Galison (2016) and (though they do not refer explicitly to “ontological indifference”) Daston and Galison (2007, Chap. 7, especially pp. 393 and 414).
- 11.
Peter Galison’s (1997) had previously shown that although experimental systems such as the Large Hadron Collider are completely geared towards testing a theory and are thus classically scientific in nature, only a fraction of the research that is done there is scientific in this sense of the term: a majority of the work is dedicated to developing and modeling detectors, that is, it is concerned in a technoscientific sense with acquiring and demonstrating fundamental capabilities of observational control.
- 12.
The distinction between science and technoscience has been presented in greater detail and with more sophistication in (Bensaude-Vincent et al. 2011). This text also discusses methodological issues for the study of science and technoscience and how to conceive their relationship.
- 13.
This motif can be traced by to Wittgenstein (1993). When combined with a different concept of the model and an iterative method borrowed from software engineering, fitting and tuning can also serve to generate not so much a representation that accords with reality but rather a technical model-system that is a substitute for reality. The distinction between representational models of and substitutional models for cannot be explicated here but its exploration is one of the tasks of philosophy of technoscience; cf., for example, Lenhard (2011).
- 14.
- 15.
Cf., among others, Roush (2005).
- 16.
This list makes no claim to be exhaustive. For example, Bayesian philosophy of science has also adapted the idiom of engineering in that it develops instruments for tracking changing degrees of belief.
- 17.
Compare Nordmann (2015a). Instead of relying on such a diffuse concept of practice, Martin Carrier pursues another strategy that allows him to ignore the fundamental difference between scientific and technoscientific knowledge production. Carrier refers to two kinds of continuity. One is the continuity of science’s orientation toward utility, which underpins the entire development of modern science. The other is a methodological continuity in terms of causal analysis, modeling and validation. On this view, the control of phenomena and the descriptions of the world are always in interaction with one another. The appearance in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries of a seemingly purely theoretical science should not distract our attention from this continuity; see his (2011). In my view, however, Carrier underestimates (1) the powerful influence of a notion of pure science – however elusive it may be – upon a philosophy of science that has in the 19th and most of the twentieth century articulated and valorized a very specific understanding of what science believes itself to be; (2) the difference between controlling phenomena and explaining the world with regard to notions like “causal analysis,” “modeling,” or “validation” – these terms (like “knowledge,” “theory,” “explanation,” etc.) have different meanings in scientific and technoscientific research; (3) the emergence of new methods that unsettle or interrupt the continuity – such as iterative procedures for increasing the complexity of models or explanatory inferences to an underlying dynamic from the similarity between two visualizations. Conversely, I am happy to admit that I overestimate discontinuity and, above all, that I fail to dwell on the fact that, of course, the radically different modes of knowledge-production are actually in conversation with one another, provide correctives to and complement one another.
- 18.
This is Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent’s (2009) view of what a philosophy of technoscience ought to do.
- 19.
See, for example, the work of Sabina Leonelli, such as her (2015).
- 20.
And thus it is a research topic for the philosophy of technoscience to analyze and clarify the notion of what is a “proof of concept.”
- 21.
For an overview and particular investigations see (Bensaude-Vincent et al. 2016).
- 22.
In a programmatic paper, this hint to Giambattista Vico cannot be articulated. We know the things that we have made in virtue of having made them – this general idea appears also in the works of Francis Bacon and plays a role in contemporary synthetic biology (there it is often attributed, somewhat misleadingly, to Richard Feynman). This knowledge is public and objective, thus different from skill or personal knowledge. It does not rely on correct representations of the things we have made. Before or after the making, such representations may well be possible, even necessary but, as such, different from the knowledge of how things work together in a working order.
References
Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Baird, D. (2004). Thing knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Baird, D., & Nordmann, A. (1994). Facts-well-put. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 45, 37–77.
Batterman, R. (2009). Idealization and modeling. Synthese, 169, 427–446.
Bensaude-Vincent, B. (2009). Les Vertiges de la Technoscience: Façonner le Monde Atome par Atome. Paris: La Découverte.
Bensaude-Vincent, B., Loeve, S., Nordmann, A., & Schwarz, A. (2011). Matters of interest: The objects of research in science and technoscience. Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 42, 365–383.
Bensaude-Vincent, B., Loeve, S., Nordmann, A., & Schwarz, A. (Eds.). (2016). Research objects in their technological setting. Abingdon: Routledge. forthcoming.
Bijker, W., Hughes, T., & Pinch, T. (Eds.). (1987). The social construction of technological systems: New directions in the sociology and history of technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Boon, M. (2012). Scientific concepts in the engineering sciences: Epistemic tools for creating and intervening with phenomena. In U. Feest & F. Steinle (Eds.), Scientific concepts and investigative practice (pp. 219–243). Berlin: De Gruyter.
Carrier, M. (2011). ‘Knowledge is power’, or how to capture the relationship between science and technoscience. In A. Nordmann, H. Radder, & G. Schiemann (Eds.), Science transformed? Debating claims of an epochal break (pp. 43–53). Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press.
Cartwright, N. (1999). The dappled world: A study of the boundaries of science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chang, H. (2007). Inventing temperature: Measurement and scientific progress. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Daston, L., & Galison, P. (2007). Objectivity. New York: Zone Books.
Descartes (1979). Discourse on Method. (transl. D.A. Cress). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
Descartes (1996). Meditations on first philosophy. (transl. J. Cottingham, rev. ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Forman, P. (2007). The primacy of science in modernity, of technology in postmodernity, and of ideology in the history of technology. History and Technology, 23, 1–152.
Friedman, M. (2010). A post-Kuhnian approach to the history and philosophy of science. The Monist, 93, 495–515.
Galison, P. (1997). Image and logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Galison, P. (2016). The pyramid and the ring: A physics indifferent to ontology. In B. Bensaude-Vincent, S. Loeve, A. Nordmann, & A. Schwarz (Eds.), Research objects in their technological setting. London: Routledge. forthcoming.
Glennan, S. (1992). Mechanisms, models, and causation. Ph.D. Dissertation. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Hacking, I. (1983). Representing and intervening: Introductory topics in the philosophy of natural science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harré, R. (2003). The materiality of instruments in a metaphysics of experiments. In H. Radder (Ed.), The philosophy of scientific experimentation (pp. 19–38). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Heidegger, M. (1967). What is a thing? (transl. W.B. Barton & V. Deutsch). Chicago: Henry Regnery Company.
Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology. In D. F. Krell (Ed.), Basic writings. New York: Harper & Row.
Heinemann, A.-S. (2013). Kalkül der Logik und Logische Maschine: George Boole und William Stanley Jevons. In R. Krömer & G. Nickel (Eds.), Siegener Beiträge zur Geschichte und Philosophie der Mathematik (Vol. 1, pp. 4–78). Siegen: Universitätsverlag Siegen.
Heßler, M. (2013). Die technisierte Lebenswelt: Perspektiven für die Technikgeschichte. Zeitschrift Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 64(5–6), 270–283.
Hughes, T. (2004). Human-built world: How to think about technology and culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Humphreys, P. (2004). Extending ourselves: Computational science, empiricism, and scientific method. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Keller, E. F. (2000). Models of and models for: Theory and practice in contemporary biology. Philosophy of Science, 67, 72–86.
Kornwachs, K. (2012). Strukturen technologischen Wissens: Analytische Studien zu einer Wissenschaftstheorie der Technik. Berlin: Edition Sigma.
Kroes, P., & Meijers, A. (2006). The dual nature of technical artefacts. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 37(1), 1–4.
Lenhard, J. (2011). Mit allem rechnen. Habilitationsschrift: Universität Bielefeld.
Lenhard, J., Küppers, G., & Shinn, T. (Eds.). (2007). Simulation: Pragmatic constructions of reality (Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook). Dordrecht: Springer.
Leonelli, S. (2015). What counts as scientific data? A relational framework. Philosophy of Science, 82, 1–12.
Machamer, P., Darden, L., & Craver, C. (2000). Thinking about mechanisms. Philosophy of Science, 67, 1–25.
Morrison, M. (1999). Models as autonomous agents. In M. Morgan & M. Morrison (Eds.), Models as mediators (pp. 38–65). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nordmann, A. (2006). Collapse of distance: Epistemic strategies of science and technoscience. Danish Yearbook of Philosophy, 41, 7–34.
Nordmann, A. (2012a). Im Blickwinkel der Technik: Neue Verhältnisse von Wissenschaftstheorie und Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 35(3), 200–216.
Nordmann, A. (2012b). Object lessons: Towards an epistemology of technoscience. Scientia Studiae: Revista Latino-Americana de Filosofia e História da Ciência, 10, 11–31.
Nordmann, A. (2013). Metachemistry. In J.-P. Llored (Ed.), The philosophy of chemistry: Practices, methodologies, and concepts (pp. 725–743). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.
Nordmann, A. (2015a). Review of “Léna Soler, Sjoerd Zwart, Michael Lynch, and Vincent Israel-Jost (eds.) Science after the practice turn in the philosophy, history, and social studies of science”, Notre dame philosophical reviews: An electronic journal, 21 June 2015, https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/58957-science-after-the-practice-turn-in-the-philosophy-history-and-social-studies-of-science/
Nordmann, A. (2015b). Werkwissen oder how to express things in works (Jahrbuch Technikphilosophie, Vol. 1, pp. 81–89). Zürich: Diaphanes.
O’Malley, M. (2011). Exploration, iterativity and kludging in synthetic biology. Comptes Rendus Chimie, 14, 406–412.
Roush, S. (2005). Tracking truth: Knowledge, evidence, and science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schwarz, A., & Krohn, W. (2011). Experimenting with the concept of experiment: Probing the epochal break. In A. Nordmann, H. Radder, & G. Schiemann (Eds.), Science transformed? Debating claims of an epochal break (pp. 119–134). Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press.
Tal, E. (2016). Making time: A study in the epistemology of measurement. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 67, 297–335.
van Fraassen, B. (2008). Scientific representation: Paradoxes of perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Waters, C. K. (2008). How practical know‐how contextualizes theoretical knowledge: Exporting causal knowledge from laboratory to nature. Philosophy of Science, 75, 707–719.
Winsberg, E. (2010). Science in the age of computer simulation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1993). Appendix C: How can ‘knowing’ fit a physical fact? In Philosophical Occasions: 1912–1951 (pp. 422–426). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
Wittgenstein, L. (1994). Philosophische Betrachtungen. Wien: Springer.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Nordmann, A. (2016). Changing Perspectives: The Technological Turn in the Philosophies of Science and Technology. 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_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33717-3_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-33716-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-33717-3
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)