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‘Technology' is one of our world's buzzwords, but it's still one of the most misunderstood. It appears to be a necessary empirical category for our understanding of all of humanity's past, and indeed beyond. We're likely confident in saying that humans have had technologies since the Palaeolithic, and a variety of species, from crows to chimps, have even been known as toolmakers.
‘Technology' is one of our world's buzzwords, but it's still one of the most misunderstood. It appears to be a necessary empirical category for our understanding of all of humanity's past, and indeed beyond. We're likely confident in saying that humans have had technologies since the Palaeolithic, and a variety of species, from crows to chimps, have even been known as toolmakers.
end-users Technology is a relatively new actor category, despite cognate words – techne, arts, and so on – having a much longer history. Even the relatively new English term "technology" has come to include a variety of interpretations. I have three goals in mind for this essay analysis. First, I'll be able to include a synopsis of Eric Schatzberg's major new work Technology. untangles and clarifies the past of the divisions of ‘technology' and its cognates as performers. Second, I will be able to perform a critical evaluation, arguing that, while Schatzberg is correct in classifying past ways of thinking about technology into two camps, which he refers to as the "cultural" and "instrumental" methods, he is mistaken in favoring the former over the latter. Third, I have an alternative. extension of my preferred instrumentalist concept, one that emphasizes a key property of technologies – their ability to intervene across scales – in a way that, I believe, provides a new and exciting research path for science and technology historians. Eric Schatzberg's books have long been a valuable resource for that teaching technology history. His essay, ‘Technik Comes to America: Shifting Definitions of Technology Before 1930,' published in Technology and Culture in 2006, was required reading for students and the best introduction to the topic. 1 Schatzberg extends and deepens the concept of technology in Technology: Critical History of a Concept. He effectively draws on the best of current historiography while providing his own observations in the overview given in that article. For several years, it will be a regular job.
‘Technology' is derived from the Indo-European root ten, which means a word that probably referred to the construction of wooden houses by wattling, that is, weaving sticks together (p. 19). That is why the words ‘textile' and ‘texture' are used. ‘know-how,' or the ability to create something that might not otherwise exist. As a result, Techne was concerned with the artificial. Despite this, there were still disagreements. At least according to some of the Hippocratic writers, medicine was a type of techne. But, for example, was rhetoric techne? Aristotle said yes, while Plato said no. Aristotle went even further in the Nicomachean Ethics: while techne was a type of intelligence, It was to be distinguished from phronesis (moral knowledge, knowledge of how to behave well) and episteme (knowledge of how to create, an art) (knowledge of the eternal). These three were, crucially, arranged in a hierarchy. Knowing how to behave was preferable to knowing how to produce. The division of means and ends resulted from this hierarchy. The simple means of getting there would not be respected, but the ends themselves would.
More communication between clerical elites and craft workers was needed, enabling the former to focus more deeply on the latter. As a consequence, a new category was born: the'mechanical arts.' Like Lynn White and Elspeth Whitney, Schatzberg attributes the prominent use of this category to the twelfth-century theologian Hugh of St Victor, but unlike White, he stresses the importance of the mechanical arts. was always regarded as secondary to the liberal arts.
The growing reliance of expanding political, military, and commercial influence on artisanal skills, which Schatzberg refers to as the "modern alliance of techne and praxis" (pp. 43–4), spawned a "surge in authorship about the mechanical arts" (pp. 43–4), some by a humanist elite and some by artisans themselves. However, this was not an altruistic act. Francis Bacon's works, such as The New Organon and New Atlantis, exemplified scholars' turn to "reject the categorical separation of science and material practise [... ] without rejecting the existing hierarchy of head over hand" (pp. 48, 50). Technicians, as we know from Steven Shapin's arguments, were written out of the picture.
Two further developments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reinforced the hierarchy. First, the definition of a distinct category of ‘fine arts' separated aesthetic creativity from the mechanical arts' mere craft skills. The terms 'artist' and 'artisan' diverged. Second, the relationship between'science' and industry has undergone significant change. As scientists and engineers became more professional, they did a lot of boundary work. Engineers, particularly American engineers, could claim ‘applied science' as their own autonomous body of knowledge, owing to its higher status. According to Schatzberg, the term "mechanical arts" became less common after 1850 as the term "applied science" became more popular. However, as Leo Marx identified, the result was a "semantic void," or "the lack of adequate language to capture"
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