Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry Read online

  The progress of science is marked by improvements in the scope, precision, and consistency of the laws. In thus gaining greater explanatory power in the deductive-nomological sense, the laws lost their power of world articulation. Einstein’s theories of relativity no longer reflect or point up a singular world. They do have deictic power in the sense of delimiting a set of possible worlds and ruling out certain impossible worlds.17 We can observe a similar pattern in the development from alchemy by way of chemistry to nuclear physics. Alchemy reflected in its laws a definite world of a limited number of stuffs and transformative forces and processes. Nuclear physics, being a microtheory, allows for an indefinite number of molar worlds.

  This pattern in the progress of science has no a priori character. It is an empirical fact that the world can be explained in the powerful scientific theories that we now have. The pace of the discoveries of these theories is a matter of historical fact. But given these two facts, it was inevitable that the deictic power of the sciences waned and all but vanished. This is not a failure of science. Nor is it the case that the deictic achievement of the earlier sciences was unquestionable or unique. Art has always been the supreme deictic discipline. Art in turn has sometimes been one with philosophy, religion, and politics; at other times these disciplines have complemented or competed with one another as disciplines of deictic explanation.

  No marshaling of evidence and no elaborating of arguments are required to support the statement that the traditional deictic explanations have lost their force. Artists, prophets, and philosophers are not among the people who are consulted by government when a crisis is to be met or a course of action is to be charted. Politics itself provides the arena of today’s most common and consequential discourse, to be sure; but it is less clear whether politics also sets the tone and standards for public discussions and decisions. One must at least consider the possibility that technology has robbed politics of its sovereignty and substance. If, on the other hand, laws of modern science do not by themselves bring out the crucial and remarkable features of the modern world and so fail to provide the orientation needed for political action, it appears that there is a gap of explanation and insight opening up between the apodeictic explanations of the sciences and the deictic explanations of our heritage. Perhaps this lacuna can be filled by the paradeictic or paradigmatic explanation of technology. But before I act on this possibility in Part 2, we must consider more concretely and in detail the connections between science and technology. In particular, we must take account of the contentions, contrary to the suggestion above, that the scientific enterprise in conjunction with technology or with technology as its consequence has in fact begotten a new kind of order by which we are destined to live.

  7

  Science and Technology

  Let us begin with this framework and hypothesis for the explanation of modern technology. We may think of modern science as having rendered the world perspicuous by setting it within the matrix of scientific laws. In this matrix it appears as one possible world. It might, within the same matrix, be differently arranged. Or in other words, any definite state or event in the world can be subsumed by way of its initial conditions under scientific laws. And any such state or event might have been prevented or modified if the conditions had been different. Thus, the change of conditions in accordance with scientific laws yields great transformative power. Modern science lets the world appear as actual in a realm of possible worlds. Modern technology reflects a determination to act transformatively on these possibilities.1

  Neither science nor technology, however, has a theory of what is worthy and in need of explanation or transformation. Given an explanandum or transformandum, they will explain and transform the problematic phenomenon; neither has a principled way of problem stating. To be sure, science has authentic access to the problems that arise within a research program.2 But these are not the problems whose solutions constitute the technological transformation of the world. Technology in its turn, merely as the determination to transform, faces an indefinite number of transformative possibilities and cannot provide principled guidance to problems.

  But before we ask what guidance or pattern there is to the technological transformation of reality, we must consider the influence of modern science on modern technology, the latter tentatively defined as the typical way in which one in the modern era takes up with reality. Consider the following illustration. Wine is an ancient drink and has had an important place and rank in the human world. Like many other things, wine began to be analyzed in terms of modern science with the rise of that science, and the research of the nineteenth century led to a first culmination of this development, a sketch of which was given in Chapter 5. But research has continued, of course. Finer and finer details in the production and the composition of wine are being understood. The process from the vine to the bottle is, in light of the laws of physics and chemistry, seen as a finely detailed stream of physicochemical events. Similarly wine, the product, is visible as a complex substance of organic and inorganic chemicals. Some of the phases or features in the traditional process are laborious and time consuming, some are harmful, others inessential. And similarly with wine. Some substances in the traditional product are not palatable, some threaten its stability, others that are desirable are often in short supply. How should we act on such insight? The answer is not difficult when there is a mortal danger to the vine or a persistent problem of wine spoiling. But where should we draw the line in interfering with the traditional process and product?3 To take an extreme possibility, once the chemical composition of traditional wine is fully understood, it becomes possible to produce a substance much like it that is not derived from grapes but in another, more efficient way. Is it just sentimentality that prohibits one from calling the new substance wine also? Is such a prohibition any more consistent than if we refused to call something a table unless it were made of wood?

  Given the very limited common knowledge of science, it is clear that there cannot be on the part of the public either an explicit knowledge of the fine structure of things or any grounded knowledge of just how these things may be technologically modified, replaced, or supplemented. It seems, however, that there is a general and implicit understanding of the scientific perspicuity and technological malleability of our world. The public takes in stride scientific breakthroughs and technological innovations because they occur within a horizon of general familiarity. We might venture to say that with all the scientific illiteracy there is a public understanding of the sciences as a principled or lawful illumination of reality which opens up new possibilities for dealing with the world. To be sure, that understanding rests on a narrow base. All of us know at least bits and pieces of science. But most of us are only peripherally in touch with the body of scientific theories and with the social organization that undergirds it. But tenuous as the connections may be, as long as there are no inconsistencies or severe disruptions, the public seems to have a sufficient warrant for its correct if vague understanding of science.

  Though it is true that science in revealing the lawful fine structure of reality provides new insight and possibilities, one may easily take a second and unwarranted step by inferring that modern science has thereby ushered in a new world view. This inference is greeted by some with triumph and by others with distress. Little is known about the public view in precisely this regard, but the distinction is well worked out as regards the scholarly and literary community.4 The pursuit of this problem allows us, at any rate, to come to a conclusion about the relation of modern science and technology.

  What about the thesis that the scientific enterprise embodies a substantive way of taking up with the world, positively or negatively? Historically, the positive case can be made by showing that science was a liberating event, a breaking of the fetters of superstition, ignorance, and dogmatism.5 These forces science replaced with rationality, honesty, and a public and inquisitive attitude.6 A more straightforward argument holds that an inspection o
f the scientific enterprise reveals that the practitioners of science are held to singularly stringent and august criteria of achievement.7 Finally, an application to the problem of technology is made when it is held that the deplorable chaos of the contemporary world results from our failure to carry the scientific enterprise to its conclusion by explaining and shaping human behavior according to the best available scientific knowledge.8

  The first of these three arguments is the strongest because it can point to the very real clashes of scientists with traditional world views. In light of our earlier remarks on the progress of science, it must be admitted that, as the scientific theories advance, they more and more withdraw their endorsement of established world views. If a totalitarian power demands such an endorsement, withdrawal is often both undertaken and acknowledged as a revolution. But it is one thing no longer to fulfill a task and quite another to fulfill a task in a new way. Scientific progress can at most be liberation from; it can never constitute or provide the thing that it is a liberation for.

  More specifically, when scientific endorsement is withdrawn from a world view, the latter is required to abandon in light of that withdrawal those of its elements that hitherto provided or implied deductive-nomological explanations, those elements, i.e., from which, together with particular conditions, empirically testable predictions could be derived. For the withdrawal of endorsement in scientific progress is not a wanton shift of allegiance but the reflection of the discovery of new and more powerful laws and new explanations that are thereby possible. But it is a mistake to think that a world view must shrink to nothing after it has given up its scientific elements. The Aristotelian hierarchy of being need not be given up with Aristotelian mechanics and dynamics. Accordingly, Einstein’s relativity theory has no counterpart or counterargument to the Aristotelian hierarchy. To be sure, withdrawal of scientific endorsement forces a world view back to its deictic resources. If these were slim or unwholesome to begin with, this will now become apparent, and the world view may collapse. Conversely, the more purely and fully a world view is by its nature articulated in a deictic manner, the less it is affected by scientific progress. That is true of poetry and art in general. The more complex world views of politics and religion, however, are required not only to expel their outdated scientific elements but also to rearticulate themselves in light of new scientific laws. Both enterprises are laborious and encourage conservatism. But it is pointless to call for a substantive controversy between science and theology as Paul Feyerabend does.9 That call will be frustrated not necessarily by the meekness of theology but inevitably by the fact that modern science cannot embody a substantive world view of a scientifically authenticated sort.

  We can leave it undecided whether the scientific enterprise as a sociological or psychological phenomenon is singularly edifying or pernicious, whether it would lead us to happiness or ruin.10 In neither case would the guidance originate from the center of the enterprise, i.e., from the body of the established laws and theories of science. But the rise of science as a power without guidance for the world may have substantive consequences in its own right, and technology may be foremost among them. A world whose articulation disintegrates may as such display definite and consequential traits. This is roughly the thesis of Hans Jonas.11 More particularly, he holds that modern science has not only withdrawn its support of established world views but promoted their dissolution and the establishment of an alternative vision. The world’s cosmic architecture is denied and replaced by the infinite manifold of one homogeneous substrate. Manipulation and novelty are integral parts of this promotion, and it has technology as an inevitable if not immediate consequence. Technology ceaselessly transforms the world along abstract and artificial lines.

  This is a considerable argument, and it can be complemented by pointing up the close sociological and disciplinary ties between science and technology.12 It is important to consider, as Paul Durbin has done, the empirical facts and consequences of this association.13 Still, it is possible, as Joseph Agassi and Mario Bunge have shown, to distinguish in a principled manner the scientific from the technological procedure.14 In particular, the scientific methodology is shown to be detached from the common criteria of success as one would expect from a discipline not committed to the establishment of a particular world view.

  The distinction between science and technology is also eminently desirable for a critique of technology. Jonas’s thesis is so strong because he does not derive technology primarily from science as a sociological phenomenon, i.e., from the habits and characteristics of the scientific community. Rather he derives it from the core of science, from the nature of the scientific laws and theories and of the explanations they make possible. But this strength is also a weakness by is consequences. Current science at its core is true; true in the sense that its theories give us the best representation of the general structure of reality. The truth a realist claims for science can be denied from an instrumentalist position; but the latter is plausible only as long as it avoids precision. The instrumentalist cannot, as we have seen, draw a definite line between everyday knowledge which has access to supposedly real states of affairs and scientific knowledge which, it is claimed, merely deals with convenient and useful formalisms. Yet if we accept the realist view of science and admit that what our current scientific theories and explanations say of the world is true, then we must also admit that technology, if it is the necessary consequence or companion of science, is equally true. Putting it more discursively, technology on that view is a mode of taking up with the world, which is entirely and necessarily in accord with the true nature of the world. One can then deplore the truth of science and technology. But one can criticize technology only in violating the truth.

  As we have seen, however, a proper appraisal of the core of science and of the methodology immediately surrounding and serving that core does not warrant an inference from science to technology. That inference does not fail a priori, but it certainly does in fact. A concise and consistent formulation of Jonas’s principal thesis fails to agree with crucial features of the technological world. The thesis holds that modern science renders the world homogeneous, infinite, devoid of an encompassing structure and goal. If these processes and their results are not just necessary for technology but sufficient, then technology is nothing but the reduction of the world to unbounded, unstructured homogeneity. Any thesis can be saved by modification, and the present thesis holds if the presence and effects of technology are restricted appropriately. But it is clear from Jonas’s discussion of the Industrial Revolution, of mechanics, chemistry, electricity, and electronics that he does not accept the drastic restriction of the significance of technology which the consistency of the thesis would require.15

  But if technology harbors formative forces that cannot be delineated through recourse to modern science, how can they be delineated? Surely the modern world does not in any plain and indisputable sense tend toward greater homogeneity and loss of structure. On the contrary, where technology is most advanced, the world is most radically and tightly restructured. We can conclude then that the sciences reveal in a principled manner the general structure of reality and that the resulting insight is known to provide great transformative power. Scientific knowledge is a necessary condition of modern technology; it is not, however, sufficient. The question remains of how technology acts on the transformative possibilities provided by science, and the description of the character of technology is a task in its own right. In Part 2 we will try to discover and explicate the basic pattern of technology and determine how and with what consequences we have transformed our world according to that pattern.

  PART 2

  The Character of Technology

  Part 2 of this study deals with the character of technology. I have said all along that our conflicting and confusing experiences of technology can be clarified if we are able to recognize an underlying pattern in technology. And such a recognition should in turn help us to act constructiv
ely on our deeper aspirations. The constructive task is to be taken up in Part 3. In this part we must work out the technological pattern or paradigm. I begin with an introductory chapter which brings the character of our time into broad relief by viewing technology from the standpoint of the beginning of the modern era where the promise of technology was first formulated.

  This is followed by a group of four chapters (Chaps. 9–12) whose purpose is to describe and articulate the paradigm of technology. The stages of this enterprise are the following. I begin by considering clear instances of the technological pattern, namely, technological devices; I point up the distinctive features of such devices and highlight them against a pretechnological background. What distinguishes a device is its sharp internal division into a machinery and a commodity procured by that machinery. Next, to give a first indication of the power of the technological paradigm, I turn to one of its global manifestations, namely, the assembly of commodities that constitutes the world of consumption and the prominent foreground of technology. I then articulate the systematic standing of the technological pattern or the device paradigm, first by comparing the latter with competing modes of analysis and then by examining the status of paradigmatic explanation explicitly.

  Given a reasonably firm and clear understanding of the decisive pattern of technology, we can raise the question of how we have come to terms with technology socially and politically. This is the task of Chapters 13–16. Again I begin with an introductory chapter in which I consider the problem of orientation in a general way and then discuss two well-known but misdirected attempts at orienting ourselves in regard to technology; the first of these is “raising the value question,” and the second the Marxist analysis of Western democracy. I then turn to the political and social understanding that today is dominant in this country, namely, to the liberal democratic view of society and politics. My concern here is to show that the technological culture is the largely unspoken but pivotal issue of liberal democracy. Without modern technology, the liberal program of freedom, equality, and self-realization is unrealizable. But with a technological specification of liberal democracy, the ideal of the liberally just society, where the question of the good life is to remain open, has been surrendered to the establishment of a society that is good in a definite and dubious sense. In Chapter 14 I try to advance this claim through a discussion of some of the eminent renditions of the liberal democratic view. I then try to show that the tensions and contradictions of liberal theory can be resolved if we envision the device paradigm explicitly. And in Chapter 15 I suggest that such a vision is in accord with the concrete circumstances of life and with what empirical data there are on this issue. In Chapter 16, the last of these four, I give a summary description of technological politics in which I propose that politics today has become the metadevice of the technological society; and I attempt to show that this view accounts well for two problems that trouble liberal theorists deeply, political apathy and social injustice.