Abstract
There are at least two assumptions which, except for very few occasions, have not been discussed by philosophers who have written on the metaphysics of technological objects. The first assumption is that to be a technology is an absolute matter and that all technological objects are equally technological. The second assumption is that the property of being technological is abstracted from existing things which happen to have this property in common. I appeal to the definition of technological objects as problem-solving physical instruments to show that (i) things can be technological to different degrees, and that (ii) the property of being technological is more fundamental than being a technology.
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Notes
See, for instance, the special issue of the journal of Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 2006, Vol. 37, no.1 on the “dual nature” of technical artefacts.
The second assumption has remained less intact than the first one. Pablo Schyfter (2009) has questioned this second assumption by emphasizing the role of the social practices which give an object a technological status. I will clarify Schyfter’s view and illustrate the difference between his view and mine later on in this essay.
This definition is borrowed from (Soltanzadeh 2015).
Note that this definition only deals with the topic of the general categorization of technologies and not with their particular categorization. It only focuses on what makes an object a technological object as distinct, say, from an aesthetic object. This is a different point from deciding whether an object, for example, is a table or a photocopier. What makes something a table as distinct from a photocopier, of course, is another philosophically interesting question. However, that needs to be discussed in a separate work on the topic of (technical) functions.
For a detailed discussion on how a metaphysical theory can help us assess the rationality of acts done by means of material objects, refer to (Houkes and Vermaas 2004).
Obviously, if we want our passports and driving licences to be secure, the objects we use would have to be more complex. But in that case, the problems we are trying to solve is not merely being able to internationally identify a person or knowing whether a person can legally drive or not: we want to solve those problems as well as being secure about it.
There are villages in the world where people wash their dirty laundry in the water of a diverted river. A certain spot of the river may be even accepted by the villagers to be the washing spot. (I owe this example to Dr. Adam Henschke).
Martin Heidegger too has questioned the assumption that ‘technology’ should be understood as a noun (Heidegger 1977). In his view, if we want to understand ‘the essence of technology’, we should conceive ‘essence’ as a verb rather than a noun. The essence of technology, according to him, is the way in which we en-frame reality, a mode of revealing in which we see objects as standing reserved for us to exploit them.
Although there are differences in the terminology, the focus, and the method of Heidegger’s philosophy and mine, similar to Heidegger, I believe that what is technological about an object cannot be described by the object’s intrinsic properties, but by the way we approach it. This technological approach is only one among different approaches that we can have towards the things which surround us. For Heidegger, this approach is a hermeneutic one; it is in the way we interpret reality. For me, it is in the type of activity we engage in.
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Soltanzadeh, S. Questioning Two Assumptions in the Metaphysics of Technological Objects. Philos. Technol. 29, 127–135 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-015-0198-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-015-0198-7