Abstract
If we select a typical monograph on the philosophy of technology from the turn of the 20th and 21st century, e.g. (Scharff and Dusek 2003), then its reading must fill a technologist with a tremendous worry. This anthology of philosophy of technology, edited in Oxford, very comprehensive and thus and appearing to be authoritative, contains 55 papers. Most of them are devoted to a criticism of a badly defined entity called ‘technology’ which, after a deeper analyais. turns out to be the criticism of the socio-economic system of using technology in industrial society. This chapter contains a critical discussion with several books of philosophy of technology that are more neutral towards ‘technology’
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Notes
- 1.
The original title of the work of Heidegger suggests that it is technology that enables social changes; the translators of this paper did not want to admit such possibility.
- 2.
Constant explains these differences by more hierarchical nature of technology (correct if not quite penetrating, see Chap. 10 of this book on the contribution of technology to the concept of emergence), by more approximate character of technological solutions (correct, technology is more pragmatic, hence accepts approximate solutions), and by a larger influence of socio-economic factors on the selection of technological solutions (correct, but only in the final selection of applications of technology; original creative selection by a technologist is based more on her/his vision of the future needs, see Chap. 3 of this book).
- 3.
Postmodern social scientists dislike this argument, because they dislike the very concept of a test that does not correspond to their concept of a social discourse.
- 4.
One could argue that the development of software requires other imagination than visual, but even in this case we use e.g. visual algorithmic schemes, block-diagrams of software architecture, etc.
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Wierzbicki, A.P. (2015). Philosophy Versus History of Technology. In: Technen: Elements of Recent History of Information Technologies with Epistemological Conclusions. Intelligent Systems Reference Library, vol 71. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09033-7_13
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