3. See Carl G. Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York, 1965), pp. 334, 351, 361, 421–22; and Danny Steinberg, “Nickles on Intensionality and the Covering Law Model,” Philosophy of Science 40 (1973):406.
4. See Michael E. Levin and Margarita Rosa Levin, “Flagpoles, Shadows and Deductive Explanation,” Philosophical Studies 32 (1977):293–99.
5. See Hempel, p. 337.
6. See Wesley C. Salmon, “Theoretical Explanation,” in Explanation, ed. Stephan Körner (New Haven, 1975), pp. 118–45. As Salmon points out, factors can be relevant to the occurrence of an event and therefore have explanatory power even when they do not suggest that the event was to be expected. This is so in certain statistical or inductive explanations. These are not specifically discussed here since the crucial points under consideration apply, mutatis mutandis, to them as well.
7. See Levin and Levin; and also Peter Achinstein, “The Object of Explanation,” in Körner, pp. 1–45; Paul Snyder, Toward One Science (New York, 1978), pp. 71–73, 94–96.
8. The example is adapted from Levin and Levin and ultimately goes back to Bromberger.
9. This is Levin and Levin’s thesis.
10. See Marx W. Wartofsky, “Is Science Rational?” in Science, Technology, and Freedom, ed. Willis H. Truitt and T. W. Graham Solomons (Boston, 1974), pp. 204–6.
11. After the breakthrough, it may even be difficult to see the original problem. See Wartofsky, “All Fall Down: The Development of the Concept of Motion from Aristotle to Galileo,” in Conceptual Foundations of Scientific Thought (New York, 1968), pp. 419–73, pp. 449 and 456 in particular. See also Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind., 1981), pp. 89–91.
12. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1970); also “Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 1–23; and “Reflections on my Critics,” ibid., pp. 231–78.
13. See Paul Feyerabend, “Consolations for the Specialist,” in Lakatos and Musgrave, p. 202. Strictly speaking, incommensurability would make even change unnoticeable and unstatable.
14. Kuhn sees the ontological question but does not believe that a clear answer can be given. See his “Reflections,” p. 265; and Scientific Revolutions, pp. 184 and 206–7.
15. With Feyerabend’s exception, this is stressed in one way or another by all contributors to the Lakatos and Musgrave anthology.
16. For details see Wartofsky’s “All Fall Down.” Wartofsky does not share the thesis presently to be developed. But much of his account is compatible with it and illustrates it.
17. Strictly speaking, the revolutionary scientist’s work also has deictic significance. We may call it global deictic significance to distinguish it from the poet’s singular deictic explanations.
CHAPTER 7
1. For a more detailed and qualified account of the relation of modern science and technology, see Mario Bunge, “Toward a Philosophy of Technology,” in Philosophy and Technology, ed. Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey (New York, 1972), pp. 62–76.
2. For details see Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1970); and Imre Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 91–196.
3. See Chapter 10 for further illustration and discussion.
4. See Gerald Holton, “On Being Caught between Dionysians and Apollonians,” Daedalus 103, no. 3 (Summer 1974):65–81. Judging on the evidence mentioned in Chapter 4, the public attitude at large is soberly positive.
5. Sometimes liberation harbors new enslavement. See Paul K. Feyerabend, “On the Improvement of the Sciences and the Arts, and the Possible Identity of the Two,” in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky, (Dordrecht, 1967), 3:387–415.
6. See Paolo Rossi, Philosophy, Technology and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, trans. Salvator Attanasio (New York, 1970); and Wartofsky, “Is Science Rational?” in Science, Technology, and Freedom, ed. Willis H. Truit and T. W. Graham Solomons (Boston, 1974), pp. 202–10.
7. For arguments pro and con see the selections by Leo Tolstoy, Jacob Bronowski, Karl Deutsch, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Herbert J. Muller in The New Technology and Values, ed. John G. Burke (Belmont, Calif., 1966), pp. 24–49. For discussion see Wartofsky, Conceptual Foundations of Scientific Thought (New York, 1968), pp. 403–15.
8. See José M. R. Delgado, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society (New York, 1969); B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York, 1971); and R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (New York, n.d. [first published in 1969]).
9. See his “On the Improvement of the Sciences and the Arts,” p. 404.
10. For illustrations, see n. 7 above.
11. See Hans Jonas, “The Scientific and Technological Revolutions: Their History and Meaning,” Philosophy Today 15 (1971):76–101. (A revised version is given in Jonas’s Philosophical Essays [Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1974], pp. 45–80.)
12. See Boris Hessen, “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia,” in Truitt and Solomons, pp. 89–99.
13. Paul T. Durbin, “Toward a Social Philosophy of Technology,” Research in Philosophy and Technology 1 (1978):67–97.
14. Joseph Agassi, “The Confusion between Science and Technology in the Standard Philosophies of Science,” Technology and Culture 7 (1966):348–66. For Bunge see n. 1 above.
15. Science must be something more than an instrument if it has the kind of power Jonas ascribes to it. He speaks in fact of “the ontological breakthrough” at the beginning of the modern age and modern science (p. 77). But Jonas speaks like an instrumentalist when he compares the scientific view with the view of the life world (pp. 87, 88–89, 90), Jonas is similarly divided on the question of whether the new scientific world view has dissolved human spontaneity or rendered it omnipotent (pp. 92–94).
CHAPTER 8
1. See Richard Rorty, “Keeping Philosophy Pure,” Yale Review 65 (1976):342, 352. Thomas S. Kuhn is also concerned with the inaccessibility of paradigms though it is usually of a different sort; the paradigm is not invisible but inaccessible to a formulation in a set of rules. See The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1970), pp. 191–98. Langdon Winner stresses the invisibility of technology in Autonomous Technology (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), p. 6.
2. See Francis Bacon, The New Organon and Related Writings, ed. Fulton H. Anderson (Indianapolis, 1960), pp. 3–4; René Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. Laurence J. Lafleur (Indianapolis, 1956), pp. 4, 39.
3. See Bacon, The New Organon, p. 16.
4. See Descartes, Discourse, p. 40.
5. For background and a discussion of this notion, see William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (New York, 1972).
6. See Descartes, Discourse, p. 40.
7. Quoted by Mulford Q. Sibley in Technology and Utopian Thought (Minneapolis, 1971), p. 40.
8. See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York, 1944).
9. See Granville Stuart, Forty Years on the Frontier, ed. Paul C. Phillips (Cleveland, 1925), 1:159.
10. Ibid., p. 160.
11. Ibid., p. 161.
12. See Eugene S. Ferguson, “The American-ness of American Technology,” Technology and Culture 20 (1979):16.
13. Ibid. For a reflective and perceptive statement of the promise of technology see Langdon Gilkey, “The Religious Dilemma of a Scientific Culture,” in Being Human in a Technological Age, ed. Donald M. Borchert and David Stewart (Athens, Ohio, 1979), pp. 74–78. As the second quotation from Ferguson indicates, in the United States particularly the notion of democracy and technology became intertwined. See Hugo A. Meier, “Technology and Democracy,” Mississippi Historical Review 43 (1957):618–40; and Carroll Pursell, “The American Ideal of a Democrati
c Technology,” in The Technological Imagination, ed. Teresa De Lauretis, Andreas Huyssen, and Kathleen Woodward (Madison, Wis., 1980), pp. 11–25. This relationship is analyzed in Chapters 14 and 16. For further American versions of the promise of technology, see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (Oxford, 1964), pp. 181–242.
14. On p. 11 of that issue. The promise of technology takes its commonest but also its vaguest and most confusing form in the notion of scientific and technological progress.
15. In Passages (November 1979):111.
16. In the New York Times Magazine, 4 November 1979, p. 69.
17. In Frontier (May/June 1978):1. This example now seems to be obsolete since one can now have “sixteen pads that transmit computerized impulses to stimulate muscle groups. Lying still, you obtain the benefits of 970 sit ups, 970 push ups, 1940 lateral twists, or jogging 12 miles.” See Missoulian (August 7, 1982): A-7.
18. See the Wall Street Journal, 13 April 1976, p. 11. Ferguson’s faith in technology (taken broadly) is not unqualified either. See his article, pp. 23–24.
19. See the Wall Street Journal, 13 April 1976, p. 11.
20. Ibid. Wiesner gives a longer and more qualified statement of his view on technology in “Technology is for Mankind,” Technology Review 75, no. 6 (May 1973):10–13.
21. A brief sketch can be found in Mitcham’s article, cited in n. 1 of Chapter 3, pp. 282–85. See also his “Philosophy and the History of Technology” in The History and Philosophy of Technology, ed. George Bugliarello and Dean B. Stoner (Urbana, 111., 1979), pp. 163–201. Important materials are assembled in Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York, 1963); and in Paolo Rossi, Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, trans. Salvator Attanasio (New York, 1970).
22. In “The Question of Heidegger and Technology,” a paper I wrote with Carl Mitcham (forthcoming in Philosophy Today), references and further discussion can be found.
23. Here I have Otto Pöggeler on my side. See his Philosophie und Politik bei Heidegger (Freiburg, 1972), pp. 45 and 62.
CHAPTER 9
1. Earlier versions of this notion of technology can be found in “Technology and Reality,” Man and World 4 (1971):59–69; “Orientation in Technology,” Philosophy Today 16 (1972):135–47; “The Explanation of Technology,” Research in Philosophy and Technology 1 (1978):99–118. Daniel J. Boorstin similarly describes the character of everyday America in terms of availability and its constituents. See his Democracy and Its Discontents (New York, 1975).
2. See Emmanuel G. Mesthene, Technological Change (New York, 1970), p. 28.
3. See Melvin M. Rotsch, “The Home Environment,” in Technology in Western Civilization, ed. Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell, Jr. (New York, 1967), 2:226–28. For the development of the kitchen stove (the other branch into which the original fireplace or stove developed), see Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York, 1969 [first published in 1948]), pp. 527–47.
4. See George Sturt’s description of the sawyers in The Wheelwright’s Shop (Cambridge, 1974 [first published in 1923]), pp. 32–40.
5. In economics, “commodity” is a technical term for a tradable (and usually movable) economic good. In social science, it has become a technical term as a translation of Marx’s Ware (merchandise). Marx’s use and the use here suggested and to be developed agree inasmuch as both are intended to capture a novel and ultimately detrimental transformation of a traditional (pretechnological) phenomenon. For Marx, a commodity of the negative sort is the result of the reification of social relations, in particular of the reification of the workers’ labor power, into something tradable and exchangeable which is then wrongfully appropriated by the capitalists and used against the workers. This constitutes the exploitation of the workers and their alienation from their work. It finally leads to their pauperization. As stressed in Chapters 13–16, I disagree that this transformation is at the center of gravity of the modern social order. The crucial change is rather the splitting of the pretechnological fabric of life into machinery and commodity according to the device paradigm. Though I concede and, in Chapter 25, stress the tradable and exchangeable character of commodities, as I use the term, their primary character, here intended, is their commodious and consumable availability with the technological machinery as their basis and with disengagement and distraction as their recent consequences. On Marx’s notion of commodity and commodity fetishism, see Paul M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York, 1968), pp. 34–40.
6. See Morton Kaplan, “Means/Ends Rationality,” Ethics 87 (1976):61–65.
7. Martin Heidegger gives a careful account of the interpenetration of means and ends in the pretechnological disclosure of reality. But when he turns to the technological disclosure of being (das Gestell) and to the device in particular (das Gerät), he never points out the peculiar technological diremption of means and ends though he does mention the instability of the machine within technology. Heidegger’s emphasis is perhaps due to his concern to show that technology as a whole is not a means or an instrument. See his “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York, 1977), pp. 3–35, pp. 6–12 and 17 in particular.
8. It also turns out that a generally rising standard of living makes personal services disproportionately expensive. See Staffan B. Linder, The Harried Leisure Class (New York, 1970), pp. 34–37.
9. See Sturt, The Wheelwright’s Shop, p. 132; see also pp. 31 and 38.
10. Ibid., p. 66.
11. Ibid., p. 23.
12. Ibid., p. 25.
13. Ibid., p. 45.
14. Ibid., p. 31.
15. Ibid., p. 24.
16. Ibid., p. 192.
17. Ibid., pp. 17–18.
18. Ibid., p. 41.
19. See Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (New York, 1965), pp. 22–52.
20. See Sturt, p. 25.
21. Ibid., p. 28. See also the portrait of the sawyers, pp. 32–40.
22. Ibid., pp. 30, 43, 175–81.
23. Ibid., pp. 53 and 200.
24. Ibid., pp. 53–55.
25. Ibid., p. 23.
26. Ibid., p. 45.
27. Ibid., p. 153; see also pp. 201–2.
28. Ibid., pp. 201–2.
29. Ibid., p. 201.
30. Ibid., p. 113.
31. Ibid., pp. 154, 201.
32. Ibid., p. 201.
33. A sketch and an analysis of technological illiteracy can be found in Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), pp. 282–95. While ignorance (of the machinery) is to be admitted and stressed, one must add that this ignorance goes hand in hand with an understanding (discussed below) of the overall pattern of technology.
34. Robert M. Pirsig describes this aversion to technology and contends that we can find wholeness at the center of technology if we begin to understand, maintain, and care for our devices. See his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York, 1974), pp. 11–35, 49–50, 97–106, 276, 290–92, 300–326. For further discussion see Chapter 20 below.
35. Joseph Weizenbaum argues that certain computer programs have altogether escaped comprehensibility. See his Computer Power and Human Reason (San Francisco, 1976), pp. 228–57.
36. See “Wonders of ’89,” Newsweek, 19 November 1979, p. 151; and “And Man Created the Chip,” Newsweek, 30 June 1980, p. 50. Further discussion of microelectronics can be found in Chapter 19.
37. See Weizenbaum, Computer Power, p. 103.
CHAPTER 10
1. See Judson Gooding, “Hot off the Vine,” New York Times Magazine, 1 August 1976, pp. 16–20.
2. Ibid., pp. 18–20.
3. Ibid., p. 20.
4. Ibid., p. 18.
5. In Consumer Reports 37 (1972):746.
6. Like “commodity,” “device,” and other familiar terms, I am using “consumption” in a narrow and definite sense which is developed and determined within the device paradig
m and made to serve the clarifying and critical function of the paradigm. Still, the explication of the term’s meaning captures, I believe, a large and crucial sense of what we usually mean by consumption.
7. In the New York Times Magazine, 4 November 1979, pp. 68–69. Jeffrey Schrank has gathered interesting observations on the decomposition and artificial reconstitution of food and of other phenomena and on the disorienting character of that development. But he wrongly suggests that corporate greed is the major cause and that overt harms (such as poor nutrition) are the major effect. He does not see how deeply grounded this transformation is, nor does he see the extent of people’s agreement with this large and profound tendency. See his Snap, Crackle, and Popular Taste: The Illusion of Free Choice in America (New York, 1977).
8. See Daniel J. Boorstin, Democracy and Its Discontents (New York, 1975), p. 28.
9. See Stephen Kline and William Leiss, “Advertising, Needs, and ‘Commodity Fetishism,’” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 2 (1978):21–22; John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 2d ed. (Boston, 1972), pp. 204–7.
10. See Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York, 1976).
11. See Galbraith, pp. 59–71 and passim.
12. Boorstin’s contribution to the laying bare of those roots can be found in The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York, 1973), pp. 89–164.
13. See Kline and Leiss, pp. 17–18.
14. Ibid., p. 17.
15. Ibid., pp. 17–18 and 25.
16. Ibid., p. 25.
17. See Leiss, The Limits to Satisfaction (Toronto, 1976), p. 63.
18. See Kline and Leiss, pp. 22–25.
19. In Time, 1 March 1976, inside back cover.
20. See Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York, 1970), pp. 219–37, 303–22.
21. See Gooding, p. 18; and the advertisement referred to in n. 7 above.
22. See Kline and Leiss, p. 23; and Ewen, pp. 95–102.
23. “Attenuation of experience” is Boorstin’s term, and he describes the phenomenon in Democracy and Its Discontents, pp. 103–12 and 119–20.
24. See Martin H. Krieger, “What’s Wrong with Plastic Trees?” Science 179 (February 2, 1973):446–55; Toffler, pp. 219–37.
Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry Page 41