Embryonic
notion of technology in Greek philosophy
The ancient Greeks often discussed epistēmē
and téchnē together, just as we now mention science and
technology in one breath.[1] Plato sometimes used the two terms
interchangeably. Aristotle distinguished them more carefully.
Epistēmē had several meanings in ancient
Greek. Broadly, it meant knowledge in general. Narrowly, it
referred to a specific kind of knowledge, which is usually
translated as science. Aristotle explored three types of knowledge,
which took on different topics and underlay different rational
activities:
|
Knowledge (epistēmē) |
Topic |
Activity |
|
Science (epistēmē) |
unchanging being |
contemplation (theōria) |
|
Art (téchnē) |
bringing into being |
production (poiēsis) |
|
Prudence (phronēsis) |
ethics |
action (praxis) |
“Téchnē is a state of capacity to
produce with a true logos,” Aristotle defined.[2] Logos
was a central notion in Greek philosophy, broadly meaning reason and
discourse. Because art had its own reasoning and discourse, it was
knowledge, as distinct from opinion (doxa) and mere
experience. Many arts existed, among others Aristotle cited
architecture, medicine, and mathematics.
Aristotle remarked that art originated from
experiences but went well beyond mere empiricism. He explored the
characteristics of téchnē in detail. Among other things, his
explication addressed what we now call education, research, and the
contents of technological knowledge [3].
•
Education: Aristotle said: “It is a sign of the man who knows,
that he can teach, and therefore we think art more truly knowledge
than experience is; for artists can teach, and men of mere
experience cannot.” In the old days, apprentices learned the skills
of trade by working in workshops, where masters not so much taught
via concepts as showed by their own practices. With the rise of
scientific engineering, tacit know-how has been increasingly
articulated, criticized, systematized, and developed, so that they
can be promulgated in books and taught to student away from the
workshops. Since the eighteenth century, when technological
universities first appeared in France, apprenticeship has given way
to education.
•
Research: Aristotle said: “Art arises, when from many notions
gained by experience one universal judgment about similar objects is
produced.” The ability to generalize and uncover principles behind
diverse phenomena is also the hallmark of science. This ability is
honed and practiced mostly in research. Graduate schools and
industrial research laboratories first appeared, almost hand in
hand, in Germany in the late nineteenth century. From the
beginning, many, although far from all, research projects are
applied oriented. Today, engineers stand shoulder to shoulder with
natural scientists at the cutting edge of research.
•
Contents of knowledge: Aristotle said: “Men of experience know
that the thing is so, but do not know why, while artists know the
‘why’ and the cause of thing that is done.” Not to accept what
meets the eye unquestioningly but to seek explanations is another
hallmark of science. Explanations are facilitated by universal
judgments and general concepts, which give tongue to what are
inarticulate in mere experiences.
Aristotle also investigated what kinds of
explanations – causes of things – were acceptable. He analyzed four
kinds of cause: material cause, formal (structural) cause, efficient
(dynamic) cause, and final (purposive) cause. Some historians of
science asserted that of the four Aristotelian causes, only the
efficient cause, which concerned forces, remained “scientific” after
the Scientific Revolution. These historians were too much obsessed
by the glamorous part of Newtonian mechanics to notice the many
applied oriented researches that were going on. The other three
causes continue to be studied and are very much alive in today’s
science and technology. Galileo started his scientific career
investigating the material and structural causes of building
construction. These topics had been developed by natural
philosophers as well as civil engineers all through the eighteenth
and nineteenth century, with conspicuous fruits such as the railroad
bridges that symbolized the landscape of the industrial revolution,
or the skyscrapers that dominate the skylines of modern cities.
Stripped of its metaphysical trapping of finality, questions about
functions of technological products are very important in today’s
engineering.
The Aristotelian definition of practical art is significant
because it insists that téchnē contains its own logos.
When the intrinsic logos of téchnē is systematically
articulated and developed, it naturally grows into technology.
Internal and external notions of
“technology”
Concatenations of téchnē and logos appeared in
Latin writings with ambiguous meanings. According to the Oxford
English Dictionary, the etymology of "technology" is systematic
treatment. As such it can be viewed internally or externally.
In the external view, technology means the systematic discourse
about practical art. Technology is the science about
practical art just as entomology is the science about insects and
geology about planet Earth. Here logos belongs to scholars
who takes practical art and artists as their topics of investigation
but is foreign to and not a part of the art or artists. It neglects
the cognitive ability of the artists and concentrates on their
products and social status. Appeared in the sixteenth century --
French rhetorician Peter Ramus used technologia for
systematic arrangement of all arts -- this sense is mostly
outdated. Today scholarly discourses about practical art or
engineering are called not technology but technology studies,
which include history, philosophy, and sociology of technology.
Nevertheless, technology studies have a tendency to emphasize the
external stance of seeing technology mainly as mindless physical or
social systems. In many studies, technology is drained of science,
engineering, and intellectual contents. Scientists and engineers
are treated on the same status as catalysts and scallops in the
“actor-network model,” one of the most influential sociological
models in science and technology studies.[4]
The internal view inherits the Greek notion of téchnē
containing its own logos, so that technology means the
systematic reasoning of practical art itself. In this view,
art and reasoning are not separate entities that later enter into a
marriage. They are intertwined cognitive potentials inherent in
every human being, because living in, coping with, and modifying the
real world is primordial to all human life. Technology is the
explicit rendition of reasoning inherent in practical art; the
systematic abstraction of essentials; the articulation,
generalization, refinement, and development of knowledge involved in
productive and creative activities. Thus practical art --
engineering and technology -- became scientific not by imitation but
by self development. This view was expressed by Galileo in Two
New Sciences, one of his two major books: "in this department
[the Venetian arsenal] all types of instruments and machines are
constantly being constructed by many artisans, among whom there must
be some who, partly by inherited experience and partly by their own
observations, have become highly expert and clever in
explanation.”[5]
Some seventeenth-century puritan theologians
argued that what was nature to us was God’s creation. Therefore
they rejected the Aristotelian distinction between natural science
and productive art and proposed technologia that encompassed
both. Among the puritans was William Ames, whose ideas were
influential in Massachusetts.[6] In 1829, Boston botanist Jacob
Bigelow observed that the word "technology," found in some old
dictionaries, was revived among practical men. He delivered a
series of lectures entitled Elements of Technology, in which
gave a definition with Aristotelian ring: Technology is “the
principle, processes, and nomenclatures of the more conspicuous
arts, particularly those which involve application of science.”[7]
He later sat on the board of trustees of Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, the foundation of which in 1861 publicized the concept
of technology.
Technology and modern technology
The internal view of technology spread in the
nineteenth century. It has two connotations. In the broad sense,
favored by anthropologists and historians, technology embraces all
practical arts primitive and sophisticated. In a narrower sense,
favored by engineers and scientists, technology includes only those
practical arts that incorporate a significant body of explicitly
articulated knowledge and explanation that is scientific in the
modern sense.
Both internalist senses were used by Karl Marx,
the first great economist to expound the deep relation between modes
of production and human welfare. He wrote: “Technology reveals the
active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the
production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of
the production of the social relations of his life, and of the
mental conceptions that flow from those relations.” Containing
man’s relations both to nature and society and incorporating all
skills and knowledge about material creation and production,
technology in this sense has a very broad scope. However, Marx also
observed that “right down to the eighteenth century, the different
trades were called ‘mysteries.’” Then, he continued, the veil of
mystery was torn apart by “the modern science of technology.”[8] In
this narrowed-down sense, technology is the science in which
practical artists articulate and explain their own work.
Both the broad and narrow meanings of
technology are currently used. For instance, the five-volume A
History of Technology covers practical arts since antiquity, but
its editors observe that “not until the nineteenth century did the
term [technology] acquire a scientific content and come ultimately
to be regarded as almost synonymous with ‘applied science.’”[9]
This intrinsic relationship between technology and science is
revealed in the organization of many universities with School of
Engineering and Applied Science.
Technology as intellectual, human,
physical, and social capital
In the internal view,
technology is a scientific capacity to produce and create. A
society’s technological capacity is one of its major assets. It
resides in four areas:
- Intellectual
capital: factual knowledge, theories, patents, algorithms,
science.
- Human capital:
understanding, skills, and practices of scientists, engineers,
and other workers.
- Physical capital:
machines and their operating principles, plant layouts,
infrastructures.
- Social capital:
organization of educational, research, industrial, and other
social institutions.
These capitals are
products of technological activities: education, research,
development, industry, and other productive works. Some products of
these activities, notably high-tech goods and services, are consumed
by people and most familiar to them as the essence of “technology.”
Not all products are consumed, however. Many are plowed back as
social investments that expand technological capacities.[10]
Of the four kinds of
technological capacity, science is explicitly articulated and can be
promulgated rather easily. Other kinds of knowledge are more
difficult to spread because they are tacit and embodied in living
people, physical infrastructures, and social organizations.
Transmission of tacit knowledge in “technology transfer” depends
heavily on the travel or migration of engineers and managers, the
establishment of firms or educational institutions, or the moving or
building of physical plants. Tacit and embodied knowledge is the
most valuable asset of technologically advanced nations, their
greatest comparative advantage over catcher-ups, because it can only
be patiently accrued in concrete beings as a major form of capital
accumulation.
Notes
- Edel, A. 1982.
Aristotle and His Philosophy, Chapel Hill: The University
of North Carolina Press.
- Aristotle, Ethics, 1140.
- Aristotle, Metaphysics 981.
- See, for example, Bijker, W. E., Hughes,
T. P., and Pinch, T. J. eds. 1987. The Social Construction
of Technology Systems. Cambridge: MIT Press.
- Galilei, G. 1638. Dialogues Concerning
Two New Sciences. New York: Dover; p.1.
- Edel, op cit, p. 338.
- Bigelow, J.
1829. Elements of Technology. Boston: Boston Press,
pp.iii-iv.
- Marx, K. 1867.
Capital, I. New York: Vintage Books, pp. 493;
616).
- Singer, C.,
Holy, E. J., and Holmyard, E. J., and Hall, A. R., eds. 1954.
A History of Technology. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, p. vii).
-
Auyang, S. Y. 2004. Engineering – An Endless Frontier.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Section 2.1.
by Sunny Y. Auyang
|