Structures and machines are related by contrast. Structures are roads, bridges, terminals, dams, harbors, waterworks, power plants, office towers, and public housing blocks, whereas machines are cars, trains, trucks, turbines, ships, pumps, motors, television sets, computers, and window air conditioners.42
Billington contends that both the theory and the practice of technology are preoccupied with machines. Thus we get a distorted view of technology. A fuller and adequate view would allow us, Billington holds, to restore technology to its place as a servant of society.43 Billington’s contention, if taken as an analysis of technology, constitutes a decisive objection to the present enterprise. Billington describes the machine in terms closely akin to those of the device paradigm. Machines, he says, are transient; they quickly become obsolete due to progress in science, research, and development. They are environmentally independent or ubiquitous, as we would say. They encourage restlessness. Structures, on the other hand, are permanent and designed for a particular site. They foster repose and patience. If machines and structures are equally part of technology, then a characterization of technology in terms of the device, given its kinship to machines, would yield a one-sided and misleading picture.
How is a metropolitan office tower related to the device paradigm? It is clearly an imposing structure, and if thought of as machinery it certainly has nothing of the concealed and shrinking character that can be seen in the development of a dentist’s chair, for instance. Though skyscrapers are permanent, massive, and ostentatious and thus very much unlike the machinery of other devices, they exhibit important traits of the paradigm. A high-rise building, though imposing, is still not accessible either to one’s understanding or to one’s engagement. Fuller’s critique of the International Style, that it conceals rather than reveals the functions of the building, holds of architecture to this day, with a few determined exceptions to the rule such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris.44 The appropriation of space through visual and bodily engagement is out of the question in the case of a skyscraper. It makes space available in an abstract three-dimensional grid into which one inserts oneself through an equally abstract transportation system. As always, there are echoes of pretechnological experiences in these devices. Thus a higher location in a high-rise is better and more prestigious as though, being up there, one had mastered a mountain or were lord over those below. But in fact one has no real sense of position or location; one is not oriented to those around one in the other apartments or offices, and one is not related to a center because skyscrapers, as a rule, have none.45 For one’s spatial orientation, a high-rise apartment may as well be suspended in a vicinity of empty space. Compared with the articulation of internal space in a medieval church, that of a skyscraper is normally very primitive indeed. This, of course, is due to the uses for which an office or apartment tower is built; it is to make space available in small and often variable units. But this is to say that architecture in the traditional sense asserts itself with difficulty at best against the reign of the device paradigm. Contrary to Billington’s implication, the spatial indifference that is found within an office tower holds true also of the building as a whole relative to its setting. Robert Socolow has put the point this way:
The downtown office building of the 1960s already stands as a metaphor for the whole society’s desire for independence from the natural setting: temperature, humidity, air exchange, and lighting are all controlled mechanically, independent of season, wind speed, or whether one is on the north or south side of the building. Neither materials nor design change as the location is moved in latitude by thousands of miles. (In physicists’ jargon, the building is invariant under ninety-degree rotations, displacements in space, and translations in time.)46
Thus we find the environmental independence that Billington thought distinctive of machines in certain structures as well. We find it there, as Socolow suggests, because the desire for disburdenment which is the corollary of such independence is a deeply ingrained trait of society. But the reading of Billington’s position that has been given so far is not complete and balanced. Billington’s distinction has the force more of a proposal than of a description. Billington himself notes that the undesirable features of the machine are at times also found in structures. Still structures, he argues, provide a clearer opening for attempts to reorient technology. That is a crucial and helpful point, and it will occupy us more closely in Chapter 25.
We have seen in this chapter that the peculiar means-ends division found in the technological device can be discerned in seemingly conflicting contentions about the significance of machines, means, and ends in technology. But it has been said in Chapter 3 that in the analysis of a concrete phenomenon one formal pattern can never conclusively be made to prevail over another merely by its formal properties. The application of a paradigm finally depends on a substantive concern, and it stands or falls with that concern. Before we develop and apply the device paradigm further, we must pay more attention to the nature and foundation of paradigmatic explanation.
12
Paradigmatic Explanation
To some scholars methodological matters seem sterile, others regard them as decisive. Some are impatient with the endless refinement of tools which forever seems to prevent them from getting on with their work while others abhor the waste of effort and the unhappy confusions they foresee unless one clarifies first how one is to proceed. Both views presuppose that method and subject matter can be addressed separately; I want to argue that this is not so. To talk about one is to discuss the other. It is a matter of pedagogy which is to be taken up. But if one insists on the distinction and wants to know whether the following reflections spring from a methodological or substantive concern, the answer is emphatically that we are ultimately concerned about substantive issues; it is out of a concern to do them justice in dubious times that we must turn to matters of method. This is also the major reason for taking up the question of method when the matter at hand requires it rather than dealing with methods at the start and once and for all. Though such an arrangement would be more orderly, it might suggest that, once principles and procedures are worked out, the fundamental problems are solved and little can go wrong from then on. This position, as will be explained in Part 3, is contrary to the orientation of the present essay. But from the subordination of method to substantive concerns, it does not follow that we can set aside the issue of procedures. To recall earlier remarks, the concern with antecedent and controlling conditions is powerful today. And it is precisely when we want to be equal to substantive concerns that we must do our best to connect them well and fruitfully with established ways of thinking.
Let us begin with a summary of what we have learned about methods of argument and explanation in Part 1. The physical sciences today provide the standard of explanation. As a body of laws and theories they give the most general and precise description of the world. By subsuming particular events under these laws we explicate the lawfulness or intelligibility of those events. But the physical sciences fail to provide a theory in the sense of a steady and orienting view of our world. The laws of science circumscribe a possibility space which allows for many actualizations. We must introduce limits or constraints into the possibility space to obtain a view of the actual world. David Layzer puts the matter this way:
Laws and constraints are complementary aspects of the physicist’s description of nature. Laws describe the regularities underlying phenomena; they are few in number and each applies over a wide domain. Constraints serve to select from the set of all events governed by a given law the particular phenomenon of interest. The laws define what is possible, the constraints what is actual or relevant. The constraints can take the form of initial conditions, boundary conditions or symmetry conditions.1
The sciences as a body of laws and theories have no criteria of relevance or selection; so they are necessary but not sufficient to provide a view of our world. But how significant is that insufficiency? Layzer illustrates his poi
nt by showing how Newton’s laws must be constrained to give a picture of the solar system. Is not the ascertaining of these special conditions a straightforward scientific matter also? The conditions after all are given, they are data; there is nothing arbitrary or mysterious about them. We must remember, however, that to speak of the solar system is to single out for consideration a very small part of the universe and a very large setting in relation to our everyday world. The problem of selecting constraints is not that the givenness or objectivity of conditions is in doubt but that there is a disorienting overabundance of given conditions. It is the microcharacter of most physical theories that has revealed the infinitely intricate structure of things and dissolved the contours that gave prescientific worlds a surveyable coherence and determinacy. But there is no hope of charting all the details of the world that we know to obtain at the physicochemical level. Even if we restrict the compass of inquiry to a matter of great interest such as the human brain and to a tiny speck within it, a complete description remains out of reach. “It is no use,” F. H. C. Crick says, “asking for the impossible, such as, say, the exact wiring diagram of a cubic millimeter of brain tissue and the way all its neurons are firing.”2
But research and explanations at many levels are in fact undertaken all the time. How then is the selection of constraints being accomplished? At the frontiers of physicochemical research, matters of relevance and problem selection are intrinsic to the search for new laws. At higher levels of complexity as in mineralogy and biology it is an empirical fact that things fall into natural kinds with general properties and predictable patterns of behavior. It is at the level of human beings and human society that complexity becomes forbidding. Even crude and molar features of social behavior such as the rate of inflation or the outcome of elections defy precise explanations and predictions. Humans are composed of physical particles arranged in particular ways which instantiate and constrain the laws of natural science, and human beings are part of nature and exhibit the regularities of a natural kind. But resting on this orderly basis, there is a complexity in and between humans that allows no precise and penetrating summaries. Mainstream social science in this country has vigorously and vainly sought to discover laws of human society that would approximate in rigor and comprehensiveness those of the physical and biological sciences.3
We have come to identify science with the search for empirical laws and regularities. Given the intimate tie between lawfulness, intelligibility, and reality, there is no special or hidden motive in the scientific approach to the world. To do science is to be equal to the character of reality in the intensive and perspicuous way which sets human beings apart from other creatures. I want to insist on a realist view of science and on the nobility of scientific knowledge for its own sake that goes along with realism. At the same time we must recognize that the search for laws can be motivated by a desire for control. The question of motivation is moot where the search is fruitful and successful. But when the search is pressed, as it has been in much social science, against substantial and continuous evidence of failure, one may infer that the concern is not with laws but with control. The search for laws in the social sciences often takes the form of the pursuit of lawlike connections between independent and dependent variables. If such connections are found, the phenomenon that is captured in the dependent variable may be controlled through the selection of an appropriate value for the independent variable. A phenomenon so captured becomes available, and the laws or functions of social science are the devices that procure it. The significance of what is so made available is thought to be antecedently given. Social scientists would not deny the need of given ends and goals, but they take them to be unproblematic or inscrutable. Their concern is with the machinery of laws that takes account of the given as inputs and outputs, as raw materials and commodities. There is a technological bias in the social sciences whenever they search for once-and-for-all devices of explanation and control. The claim to generality has different forms and degrees. The concern may be with the a priori, timeless, cross-cultural, transcendental, invariant, or universal. There is no a priori reason why such approaches must fail; they do so in fact and in light of the given complexity of human society. The resulting theories fail either straightforward in being falsified or more subtly in being vague, vacuous, or uninterestingly narrow. There is only one way in which they can succeed, i.e., when they capture a phenomenon in the sense of making it captive, of confining and reducing it. If mental well-being is defined as a kind of euphoria induced by direct stimulation of the brain, then we may well be able to devise a function of contentment. If the work world is taken over and streamlined by a state apparatus, we can design regulations to control employment and productivity. The success of such social theories will depend on the extent to which we accept an equivalence of the reduced and the original phenomenon. The discussion in Chapter 10 has suggested that tolerance for such equations is already remarkable. But in the social sphere our allegiance to the full-bodied original phenomena is still strong enough to let social theories of lawlike aspirations suffer shipwreck.
The lawfulness of reality gives the world its steady and intelligible character. The firmness and accessibility of the world are reinforced where the laws of nature are instantiated in typical and recurring ways as in the species of plants and animals and in the cycle of the seasons. The world is remarkable or significant because the conditions or givens that instantiate the laws are heterogeneous, articulated in distinct and eminent ways. Significance is heightened when distinct conditions are unique and therefore not predictable as a phase in a recurring pattern or subsumable merely as a specimen of a kind. That conditions must be considered if we are to obtain explanations is granted by every scientist. But the conditions are not accidentally called initial or boundary conditions. The explanandum is in the shadow of the explanans, and we would not speak of the explanandum as the wholeness of the final or central conditions.
The emphasis in the social sciences on laws and regularities is of a piece with the stress on the first members of the following pairs:
is—ought
fact—value
theoretical—practical
description—prescription
analysis—advocacy
empirical—normative
Some kind of significance of the second members is granted by the social scientist; but what those terms stand for is either disregarded or attempts are made to extend the realm of the first members to encompass that of the latter. Those attempts take the form of efforts to capture values and norms as variables. But we can say that as a matter of fact norms and values have, due to their complexity, eluded the snares of functional devices. It seems to me that we can do justice to norms and values only if we turn our attention from laws to conditions as given in their own right. This suggestion may sound like strange counsel, issuing from scientific realism. But really it converges with the prephilosophical and prescientific experience of unique and decisive things and practices, of persons, works of art, prophecies, political deeds, and more humble ones such as the exercise of a craft, the celebration of a meal, of birth, of marriage, and of death.
If to explain is to provide understanding, then, as suggested in Chapter 6, there must be in addition to the kind of explanation that subsumes under laws another kind of explanation that traces and brings into relief the significance of a thing or event in its uniqueness. Subsumptive explanations are apodeictic. This vocable designates both the deductive nature of such explanations, the fact that one deduces the explanandum as a conclusion from laws and conditions, and the cogent force of such explanations. If the premises are accepted, the conclusion cannot be refused. Explanations, on the other hand, which do not derive what is to be explained from laws and conditions but simply point up something in its significance, we have called deictic. These two kinds of explanation take one another for granted. Something that I set out to explain apodeictically must have come to my attention as significant, as worthy
or in need of explicit subsumption under laws. The significance of the explanandum has been or is capable of being established through a deictic explanation. Conversely, when I trace the significance of something and point it up, I presuppose that the thing as it is given embodies the lawfulness of reality and that the various strands of this lawfulness could be explicated through apodeictic explanations.
We can now restate earlier points by saying that the natural sciences have an apodeictic orientation and that the social sciences, inasmuch as they model themselves after the natural ones, exhibit the same inclination. That tendency shows itself in the stress on the first members of the dichotomies listed above. The complexity of the explananda, however, with which the social sciences have to deal, resists apodeictic explanations. One might now conclude that this predicament requires the social sciences to turn to deictic explanations, i.e., to endeavors that are designed to exhibit and clarify the phenomena of the social sphere. But as we have used the term, deictic explanations are more specific. A deictic explanation articulates a thing or event in its uniqueness. “Articulation” has an appropriate ambiguity for our purposes. To articulate is both to establish a unique thing or event as does the artist or the prophet and to disclose or reenact it as does the teacher or the celebrant. The distinctive feature of a deictic explanation is not its method but its subject, something unique and concrete that is at the center of attention and of its world, a holy place, for instance, that focuses and orients the world about it. The notion of deictic explanation must seem impossibly ambiguous until one sets one’s methodological bias aside and grants the primacy of the subject matter. But precisely when that is allowed, it appears that there is today no subject matter for the social sciences that would call for deictic explanations. The traditional focal things and events of religion, art, and daily practice have lost their commanding places in our world, the firmness of their contours, and their orienting force. We have seen brief illustrations of this in the preceding discussions of the hearth, of the festive meal, of wine, of the work world. And the general thesis of the eclipse of religion and art in our world is too widely accepted to require detailed substantiation here. Nor have the traditional focuses yielded to new ones. We have seen in the preceding chapter that the attempt to advance a machine or a structure as the embodiment of the new age has not been convincing. The interstate highway system in this country is surely a monumental and farflung structure in Billington’s sense. But hardly anyone would argue that through its construction and use we place ourselves in our world just as did the Medievals in theirs when they built and prayed in cathedrals.
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