The Philosophy Of Technology explores the essence and impact of technology, examining its role in shaping society and culture, and pioneer-technology.com provides insightful analysis of these technological trends. This field is crucial for understanding the ethical and societal implications of innovative technologies. It delves into future tech, technology ethics, and the societal impact of technology.
1. What Is The Historical Development Of The Philosophy Of Technology?
Philosophical exploration of technology dates back to ancient Greece, with key themes including technology imitating nature, the ontological distinction between natural things and artifacts, Aristotle’s four causes, and the use of technological images by Plato and Aristotle.
1.1 How Did The Greeks Influence The Philosophy Of Technology?
The Greeks laid the foundation for philosophical reflection on technology, offering insights that still resonate today.
1.1.1 Imitation Of Nature
One early theme is the thesis that technology learns from or imitates nature (Plato, Laws X 889a ff.). According to Democritus, for example, house-building and weaving were first invented by imitating swallows and spiders building their nests and nets, respectively (Diels 1903 and Freeman 1948: 154). Perhaps the oldest extant source for the exemplary role of nature is Heraclitus (Diels 1903 and Freeman 1948: 112). Aristotle referred to this tradition by repeating Democritus’ examples, but he did not maintain that technology can only imitate nature: “generally technē in some cases completes what nature cannot bring to a finish, and in others imitates nature” (Physics II.8, 199a15; see also Physics II.2, and see Schummer 2001 and this encyclopedia’s entry on episteme and techne for discussion).
1.1.2 Ontological Distinction
A second theme is the thesis that there is a fundamental ontological distinction between natural things and artifacts. According to Aristotle (Physics II.1), the former have their principles of generation and motion inside, whereas the latter, insofar as they are artifacts, are generated only by outward causes, namely human aims and forms in the human soul. Natural products (animals and their parts, plants, and the four elements) move, grow, change, and reproduce themselves by inner final causes; they are driven by purposes of nature. Artifacts, on the other hand, cannot reproduce themselves. Without human care and intervention, they vanish after some time by losing their artificial forms and decomposing into (natural) materials. For instance, if a wooden bed is buried, it decomposes to earth or changes back into its botanical nature by putting forth a shoot.
1.1.3 Aristotle’s Four Causes
Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes—material, formal, efficient and final—can be regarded as a third early contribution to the philosophy of technology. Aristotle explained this doctrine by referring to technical artifacts such as houses and statues (Physics II.3). The four causes are still very much present in modern discussions related to the metaphysics of artifacts. Discussions of the notion of function, for example, focus on its inherent teleological or ‘final’ character and the difficulties this presents to its use in biology. And the notorious case of the ship of Theseus—see this encyclopedia’s entries on material constitution, identity over time, relative identity, and sortals—was introduced in modern philosophy by Hobbes as showing a conflict between unity of matter and unity of form as principles of individuation. This conflict is seen by many as characteristic of artifacts. David Wiggins (1980: 89) takes it even to be the defining characteristic of artifacts.
1.1.4 Technological Imagery
A fourth point that deserves mentioning is the extensive employment of technological images by Plato and Aristotle. In his Timaeus, Plato described the world as the work of an Artisan, the Demiurge. His account of the details of creation is full of images drawn from carpentry, weaving, ceramics, metallurgy, and agricultural technology. Aristotle used comparisons drawn from the arts and crafts to illustrate how final causes are at work in natural processes. Despite their negative appreciation of the life led by artisans, who they considered too much occupied by the concerns of their profession and the need to earn a living to qualify as free individuals, both Plato and Aristotle found technological imagery indispensable for expressing their belief in the rational design of the universe (Lloyd 1973: 61).
1.2 What Are The Later Developments In The Philosophy Of Technology?
Later developments include increased appreciation for mechanical arts during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance’s focus on human creative efforts, and critical attitudes during the Industrial Revolution, as seen in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872).
1.2.1 Scholastic Philosophy
In the realm of scholastic philosophy, there was an emergent appreciation for the mechanical arts. They were generally considered to be born of—and limited to—the mimicry of nature. This view was challenged when alchemy was introduced in the Latin West around the mid-twelfth century. Some alchemical writers such as Roger Bacon were willing to argue that human art, even if learned by imitating natural processes, could successfully reproduce natural products or even surpass them (Newman 2004). The result was a philosophy of technology in which human art was raised to a level of appreciation not found in other writings until the Renaissance. However, the last three decades of the thirteenth century witnessed an increasingly hostile attitude by religious authorities toward alchemy that culminated eventually in the denunciation Contra alchymistas, written by the inquisitor Nicholas Eymeric in 1396 (Newman 2004).
1.2.2 Renaissance Era
The Renaissance led to a greater appreciation of human beings and their creative efforts, including technology. As a result, philosophical reflection on technology and its impact on society increased. Francis Bacon is generally regarded as the first modern author to put forward such reflection. His view, expressed in his fantasy New Atlantis (1627), was overwhelmingly positive. This positive attitude lasted well into the nineteenth century, incorporating the first half-century of the industrial revolution. Karl Marx, for example, did not condemn the steam engine or the spinning mill for the vices of the bourgeois mode of production; he believed that ongoing technological innovation allowed for the necessary steps toward the more blissful stages of socialism and communism of the future. A discussion of different views on the role of technology in Marx’s theory of historical development can be found in Bimber 1990. See Van der Pot 1985 [1994/2004] for an extensive historical overview of appreciations of the development of technology generally.
1.2.3 Industrial Revolution
A turning point in the appreciation of technology as a socio-cultural phenomenon is marked by Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), written under the influence of the Industrial Revolution, and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). Butler’s book gave an account of a fictional country where all machines are banned and the possession of a machine or the attempt to build one is a capital crime. The people of this country had become convinced by an argument that ongoing technical improvements are likely to lead to a ‘race’ of machines that will replace mankind as the dominant species on earth. This introduced a theme that has remained influential in the perception of technology ever since.
1.3 What Is Humanities Philosophy Of Technology?
Humanities philosophy of technology, as defined by Carl Mitcham, focuses on technology’s relationship to society and culture, often adopting a critical perspective.
1.3.1 Critical Attitude
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century a critical attitude predominated in philosophical reflection on technology. The representatives of this attitude were, overwhelmingly, schooled in the humanities or the social sciences and had virtually no first-hand knowledge of engineering practice. Whereas Bacon wrote extensively on the method of science and conducted physical experiments himself, Butler, being a clergyman, lacked such first-hand knowledge. Ernst Kapp, who was the first to use the term ‘philosophy of technology’ in his book Eine Philosophie der Technik (1877 [2018]), was a philologist and historian. Most of the authors who wrote critically about technology and its socio-cultural role during the twentieth century were philosophers of a general outlook, such as Martin Heidegger (1954 [1977]), Hans Jonas (1979 [1984]), Arnold Gehlen (1957 [1980]), Günther Anders (1956), and Andrew Feenberg (1999). Others had a background in one of the other humanities or in social science, such as literary criticism and social research in the case of Lewis Mumford (1934), law in the case of Jacques Ellul (1954 [1964]), political science in the case of Langdon Winner (1977, 1980, 1983) and literary studies in the case of Albert Borgmann (1984).
1.3.2 “Humanities Philosophy Of Technology”
The form of philosophy of technology constituted by the writings of these and others has been called by Carl Mitcham (1994) “humanities philosophy of technology”, because it takes its point of departure from the humanities and the social sciences rather than from the practices of science and engineering, and it approaches technology accepting “the primacy of the humanities over technologies” (1994: 39), since technology originates from the goals and values of humans.
1.3.3 Scope
Humanities philosophers of technology tend to take the phenomenon of technology itself largely for granted; they treat it as a ‘black box’, a given, a unitary, monolithic, inescapable phenomenon. Their interest is not so much to analyze and understand this phenomenon itself but to grasp its relations to morality (Jonas, Gehlen), politics (Winner), the structure of society (Mumford), human culture (Ellul), the human condition (Hannah Arendt), or metaphysics (Heidegger). In this, these philosophers are almost all openly critical of technology: all things considered, they tend to have a negative judgment of the way technology has affected human society and culture, or at least they single out for consideration the negative effects of technology on human society and culture. This does not necessarily mean that technology itself is pointed out as the principal cause of these negative developments. In the case of Heidegger, in particular, the paramount position of technology in modern society is rather a symptom of something more fundamental, namely a wrongheaded attitude towards Being which has been on the rise for almost 25 centuries. It is therefore questionable whether Heidegger should be considered as a philosopher of technology, although within the humanities view he is considered to be among the most important ones. Much the same could be said about Arendt, in particular her discussion of technology in The Human Condition (1958), although her position in the canon of humanities philosophy of technology is not as prominent as is Heidegger’s.
1.3.4 Modern Views
To be sure, the work of these founding figures of humanities philosophy of technology has been taken further by a second and third generation of scholars—in particular the work of Heidegger remains an important source of inspiration—but who in doing so have adopted a more neutral rather than overall negative view of technology and its meaning for human life and culture. Notable examples are Ihde (1979, 1993) and Verbeek (2000 [2005]).
1.3.5 Influences
In its development, humanities philosophy of technology continues to be influenced not so much by developments in philosophy (e.g., philosophy of science, philosophy of action, philosophy of mind) but by developments in the social sciences and humanities. Although, for example, Ihde and those who take their point of departure with him, position their work as phenomenologist or postphenomenologist, there does not seem to be much interest in either the past or the present of this diffuse notion in philosophy, and in particular not much interest in the far from easy question to what extent Heidegger can be considered a phenomenologist. Of particular significance has been the emergence of ‘Science and Technology Studies’ (STS) in the 1980s, which studies from a broad social-scientific perspective how social, political, and cultural values affect scientific research and technological innovation, and how these in turn affect society, politics, and culture.
1.4 What Is The Basic Ambiguity In The Meaning Of Technology?
A basic ambiguity exists in the meaning of technology, reflected in the contrast between humanities and analytic philosophy of technology. Technology encompasses both instrumentality and productivity.
1.4.1 Instrumentality
Instrumentality covers the totality of human endeavors to control their lives and their environments by interfering with the world in an instrumental way, by using things in a purposeful and clever way.
1.4.2 Productivity
Productivity covers the totality of human endeavors to bring into existence new things through which certain things can be realized in a controlled and clever way. For the study of the dimension of instrumentality, it is in principle irrelevant whether the things that are made use of in controlling our lives and environments have been produced by us first; if we somehow could rely on natural objects to always be available to serve our purposes, the analysis of instrumentality and its consequences for how we live our lives would not necessarily be affected. Likewise, for the analysis of what is involved in the making of artifacts, and how the notion of artifact and of something new being brought into existence are to be understood, it is to a large extent irrelevant how human life, culture and society are changed as a result of the artifacts that are in fact produced. Notwithstanding its fundamental character, the ambiguity noted here seems hardly to be confronted directly in the literature. It is addressed by Lawson (2008, 2017) and by Franssen and Koller (2016).
2. What Are The Key Concepts Of Analytic Philosophy Of Technology?
Analytic philosophy of technology focuses on technology itself, examining the practice of engineering, design processes, and the nature of artifacts.
2.1 How Does Technology Relate To Science In Philosophy?
Science and technology, though closely related, have different relationships with philosophy. Science emerged from philosophy, while technology’s connection is less direct, leading to unique philosophical considerations.
2.1.1 Relations To Society And Culture
It might be claimed that it is up to the philosophy of technology, and not the philosophy of science, to target first of all the impact of technology—and with it science—on society and culture, because science affects society only through being applied as technology. This, however, will not do. Right from the start of the scientific revolution, science affected human culture and thought fundamentally and directly, not with a detour through technology, and the same is true for later developments such as relativity, atomic physics and quantum mechanics, the theory of evolution, genetics, biochemistry, and the increasingly dominating scientific world view overall. All the same philosophers of science for a long time gave the impression that they left questions addressing the normative, social and cultural aspects of science gladly to other philosophical disciplines, or to historical studies. This has changed only during the past few decades, by scholars either focusing on these issues from the start (e.g. Longino 1990, 2002) or shifting their focus toward them (e.g. Kitcher 2001, 2011).
2.1.2 Historical Development
There is a major difference between the historical development of modern technology as compared to modern science which may at least partly explain this situation, which is that science emerged in the seventeenth century from philosophy itself. The answers that Galileo, Huygens, Newton, and others gave, by which they initiated the alliance of empiricism and mathematical description that is so characteristic of modern science, were answers to questions that had belonged to the core business of philosophy since antiquity. Science, therefore, kept the attention of philosophers. Philosophy of science can be seen as a transformation of epistemology in the light of the emergence of science. The foundational issues—the reality of atoms, the status of causality and probability, questions of space and time, the nature of the quantum world—that were so lively discussed during the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century are an illustration of this close relationship between scientists and philosophers. No such intimacy has ever existed between philosophers and engineers or technologists. Their worlds still barely touch.
2.1.3 Emergent Single Dominant Way
To be sure, a case can be made that, compared to the continuity existing between natural philosophy and science, a similar continuity exists between central questions in philosophy having to do with human action and practical rationality and the way technology approaches and systematizes the solution of practical problems. To investigate this connection may indeed be considered a major theme for philosophy of technology, and more is said on it in Sections 2.3 and 2.4. This continuity appears only by hindsight, however, and dimly, as the historical development is at most a slow convening of various strands of philosophical thinking on action and rationality, not a development into variety from a single origin. Significantly it is only the academic outsider Ellul who has, in his idiosyncratic way, recognized in technology the emergent single dominant way of answering all questions concerning human action, comparable to science as the single dominant way of answering all questions concerning human knowledge (Ellul 1954 [1964]).
2.2 What Is The Relationship Between Technology And Science?
The relationship between technology and science is complex, challenging the notion that technology is merely applied science. Technology concerns itself with what is to be, distinguishing it from science’s focus on what is.
2.2.1 Questioning The Relation
A questioning of the relation between science and technology was the central issue in one of the earliest discussions among analytic philosophers of technology. In 1966, in a special issue of the journal Technology and Culture, Henryk Skolimowski argued that technology is something quite different from science (Skolimowski 1966). As he phrased it, science concerns itself with what is, whereas technology concerns itself with what is to be. A few years later, in his well-known book The Sciences of the Artificial (1969), Herbert Simon emphasized this important distinction in almost the same words, stating that the scientist is concerned with how things are but the engineer with how things ought to be. Although it is difficult to imagine that earlier philosophers were blind to this difference in orientation, their inclination, in particular in the tradition of logical empiricism, to view knowledge as a system of statements may have led to a conviction that in technology no knowledge claims play a role that cannot also be found in science. The study of technology, therefore, was not expected to pose new challenges nor hold surprises regarding the interests of analytic philosophy.
2.2.2 Technology As Applied Science
In contrast, Mario Bunge (1966) defended the view that technology is applied science, but in a subtle way that does justice to the differences between science and technology. Bunge acknowledges that technology is about action, but an action heavily underpinned by theory—that is what distinguishes technology from the arts and crafts and puts it on a par with science. According to Bunge, theories in technology come in two types: substantive theories, which provide knowledge about the object of action, and operative theories, which are concerned with action itself. The substantive theories of technology are indeed largely applications of scientific theories. The operative theories, in contrast, are not preceded by scientific theories but are born in applied research itself. Still, as Bunge claims, operative theories show a dependence on science in that in such theories the method of science is employed. This includes such features as modeling and idealization, the use of theoretical concepts and abstractions, and the modification of theories by the absorption of empirical data through prediction and retrodiction.
2.2.3 Epistemological Status
In response to this discussion, Ian Jarvie (1966) proposed as important questions for a philosophy of technology what the epistemological status of technological statements is and how technological statements are to be demarcated from scientific statements. This suggests a thorough investigation of the various forms of knowledge occurring in either practice, in particular, since scientific knowledge has already been so extensively studied, of the forms of knowledge that are characteristic of technology and are lacking, or of much less prominence, in science. A distinction between ‘knowing that’—traditional propositional knowledge—and ‘knowing how’—non-articulated and even impossible-to-articulate knowledge—had been introduced by Gilbert Ryle (1949) in a different context. The notion of ‘knowing how’ was taken up by Michael Polanyi under the name of tacit knowledge and made a central characteristic of technology (Polanyi 1958); the current state of the philosophical discussion is presented in this encyclopedia’s entry on knowledge how.
technology and science
2.3 How Central Is Design To Technology?
Design is central to technology, forming the core of engineering practice. Understanding the design process helps in grasping the drivers of technological innovation and its societal role.
2.3.1 The Design Process
Technology or engineering as a practice is concerned with the creation of artifacts and, of increasing importance, artifact-based services. The design process, the structured process leading toward that goal, forms the core of the practice of engineering. In the engineering literature, the design process is commonly represented as consisting of a series of translational steps; see for this, e.g., Suh 2001. At the start are the customer’s needs or wishes. In the first step these are translated into a list of functional requirements, which then define the design task an engineer, or a team of engineers, has to accomplish. The functional requirements specify as precisely as possible what the device to be designed must be able to do. This step is required because customers usually focus on just one or two features and are unable to articulate the requirements that are necessary to support the functionality they desire. In the second step, the functional requirements are translated into design specifications, which the exact physical parameters of crucial components by which the functional requirements are going to be met.
2.3.2 The Blueprint
The design parameters chosen to satisfy these requirements are combined and made more precise such that a blueprint of the device results. The blueprint contains all the details that must be known such that the final step to the process of manufacturing the device can take place. It is tempting to consider the blueprint as the end result of a design process, instead of a finished copy being this result. However, actual copies of a device are crucial for the purpose of prototyping and testing.
2.3.3 Iterations
Prototyping and testing presuppose that the sequence of steps making up the design process can and will often contain iterations, leading to revisions of the design parameters and/or the functional requirements. Even though, certainly for mass-produced items, the manufacture of a product for delivery to its customers or to the market comes after the closure of the design phase, the manufacturing process is often reflected in the functional requirements of a device, for example in putting restrictions on the number of different components of which the device consists. The complexity of a device will affect how difficult it will be to maintain or repair it, and ease of maintenance or low repair costs are often functional requirements. An important modern development is that the complete life cycle of an artifact is now considered to be the designing engineer’s concern, up till the final stages of the recycling and disposal of its components and materials, and the functional requirements of any device should reflect this. From this point of view, neither a blueprint nor a prototype can be considered the end product of engineering design.
2.3.4 Technological Fix
The biggest idealization that this scheme of the design process contains is arguably located at the start. Only in a minority of cases does a design task originate in a customer need or wish for a particular artifact. First of all, as already suggested, many design tasks are defined by engineers themselves, for instance, by noticing something to be improved in existing products. Nevertheless design often starts with a problem pointed out by some societal agent, which engineers are then invited to solve. Many such problems, however, are ill-defined or wicked problems, meaning that it is not at all clear what the problem is exactly and what a solution to the problem would consist in. The ‘problem’ is a situation that people—not necessarily the people ‘in’ the situation—find unsatisfactory, but typically without being able to specify a situation that they find more satisfactory in other terms than as one in which the problem has been solved. In particular it is not obvious that a solution to the problem would consist in some artifact, or some artifactual system or process, being made available or installed. Engineering departments all over the world advertise that engineering is problem solving, and engineers easily seem confident that they are best qualified to solve a problem when they are asked to, whatever the nature of the problem. This has led to the phenomenon of a technological fix, the solution of a problem by a technical solution, that is, the delivery of an artifact or artifactual process, where it is questionable, to say the least, whether this solves the problem or whether it was the best way of handling the problem.
2.3.5 Social Engineering
These wicked problems are often broadly social problems, which would best be met by some form of ‘social action’, which would result in people changing their behavior or acting differently in such a way that the problem would be mitigated or even disappear completely. In defense of the engineering view, it could perhaps be said that the repertoire of ‘proven’ forms of social action is meager. The temptation of technical fixes could be overcome—at least that is how an engineer might see it—by the inclusion of the social sciences in the systematic development and application of knowledge to the solution of human problems. This however, is a controversial view. Social engineering is to many a specter to be kept at as large a distance as possible instead of an ideal to be pursued. Karl Popper referred to acceptable forms of implementing social change as ‘piecemeal social engineering’ and contrasted it to the revolutionary but completely unfounded schemes advocated by, e.g., Marxism. In the entry on Karl Popper, however, his choice of words is called ‘rather unfortunate’. The notion of social engineering, and its cogency, deserves more attention that it is currently receiving.
2.3.6 Prescriptive Knowledge
Apart from this very specific scientific knowledge, engineering design involves various other sorts of knowledge. In his book What Engineers Know and How They Know It (Vincenti 1990), the aeronautical engineer Walter Vincenti gave a six-fold categorization of engineering design knowledge (leaving aside production and operation as the other two basic constituents of engineering practice). Vincenti distinguishes
- Fundamental design concepts, including primarily the operational principle and the normal configuration of a particular device;
- Criteria and specifications;
- Theoretical tools;
- Quantitative data;
- Practical considerations;
- Design instrumentalities.
Of these categories, Vincenti claims that they represent prescriptive forms of knowledge rather than descriptive ones. Here, the activity of design introduces an element of normativity, which is absent from scientific knowledge.
engineering design
2.4 How Is Design Viewed As Decision Making?
Design can be viewed as a decision-making process subject to rational scrutiny, incorporating practical rationality and creativity. It involves choosing among various courses of action to bring the world closer to a desired state.
2.4.1 Theories of Rational Action
Theories of rational action generally conceive their problem situation as one involving a choice among various course of action open to the agent. Rationality then concerns the question how to decide among given options, whereas creativity concerns the generation of these options. This distinction is similar to the distinction between the context of justification and the context of discovery in science. The suggestion that is associated with this distinction, however, that rational scrutiny only applies in the context of justification, is difficult to uphold for technological design. If the initial creative phase of option generation is conducted sloppily, the result of the design task can hardly be satisfactory.
2.4.2 Bounded Rationality
Unlike the case of science, where the practical consequences of entertaining a particular theory are not taken into consideration, the context of discovery in technology is governed by severe constraints of time and money, and an analysis of the problem how best to proceed certainly seems in order. There has been little philosophical work done in this direction; an overview of the issues is given in Kroes, Franssen, and Bucciarelli (2009). The ideas of Herbert Simon on bounded rationality (see, e.g., Simon 1982) are relevant here, since decisions on when to stop generating options and when to stop gathering information about these options and the consequences when they are adopted are crucial in decision making if informational overload and calculative intractability are to be avoided. However, it has proved difficult to further develop Simon’s ideas on bounded rationality since their conception in the 1950s.
2.4.3 Multi-Criteria Decision Problem
Choosing the design option that maximally meets all the functional requirements (which may but need not originate with the prospective user) and all other considerations and criteria that are taken to be relevant, then becomes the practical decision-making problem to be solved in a particular engineering-design task. This creates several methodological problems. Most important of these is that the engineer is facing a multi-criteria decision problem. The various requirements come with their own operationalizations in terms of design parameters and measurement procedures for assessing their performance. This results in a number of rank orders or quantitative scales which represent the various options out of which a choice is to be made. The task is to come up with a final score in which all these results are ‘adequately’ represented, such that the option that scores best can be considered the optimal solution to the design problem. Engineers describe this situation as one where trade-offs have to be made: in judging the merit of one option relative to other options, a relative bad performance on one criterion can be balanced by a relatively good performance on another criterion.
2.5 What Are The Metaphysical Issues Regarding Artifacts?
Metaphysical issues concern the status and characteristics of artifacts. Artifacts are man-made objects made to serve a purpose, distinguishing them from byproducts and works of art.
2.5.1 Technical Artifacts
Technical artifacts, then, are made to serve some purpose, generally to be used for something or to act as a component in a larger artifact, which in its turn is either something to be used or again a component. Whether end product or component, an artifact is ‘for something’, and what it is for is called the artifact’s function. Several researchers have emphasized that an adequate description of artifacts must refer both to their status as tangible physical objects and to the intentions of the people engaged with them. Kroes and Meijers (2006) have dubbed this view “the dual nature of technical artifacts”; its most mature formulation is Kroes 2012. They suggest that the two aspects are ‘tied up’, so to speak, in the notion of artifact function. This gives rise to several problems.
2.5.2 Artifact Function
One, which will be passed over quickly because little philosophical work seems to have been done concerning it, is that structure and function mutually constrain each other, but the constraining is only partial. It is unclear whether a general account of this relation is possible and what problems need to be solved to arrive there. It may be interesting connections with the issue of multiple realizability in the philosophy of mind and with accounts of reduction in science; an example where this is explored is Mahner and Bunge 2001.
2.5.3 Intentionality
Against the view that, at least in the case of artifacts, the notion of function refers necessarily to intentionality, it could be argued that in discussing the functions of the components of a larger device, and the interrelations between these functions, the intentional ‘side’ of these functions is of secondary importance only. This, however, would be to ignore the possibility of the malfunctioning of such components. This notion seems to be definable only in terms of a mismatch between actual behavior and intended behavior.
2.5.4 Proper and Accidental Function
Closely related to this issue to what extent use and design determine the function of an artifact is the problem of characterizing artifact kinds. It may seem that we use functions to classify artifacts: an object is a knife because it has the function of cutting, or more precisely, of enabling us to cut. On closer inspection, however, the link between function and kind-membership seems much less straightforward. In the latter case, which is a sort of middle way between the two other options, one commonly distinguishes between the proper function of an artifact as the one intended by its designer and the accidental function of the artifact as the one given to it by some user on private considerations. Accidental use can become so common, however, that the original function drops out of memory.
2.5.5 Cutter
This distinction between artifact kinds and functional kinds is relevant for the status of such kinds in comparison to other notions of kinds. Philosophy of science has emphasized that the concept of natural kind, such as exemplified by ‘water’ or ‘atom’, lies at the basis of science. On the other hand it is generally taken for granted that there are no regularities that all knives or airplanes or pistons answer to. This, however, is loosely based on considerations of multiple realizability that fully apply only to functional kinds, not to artifact kinds. Artifact kinds share an operational principle that gives them some commonality in physical features, and this commonality becomes stronger once a particular artifact kind is subdivided into narrower kinds. Since these kinds are specified in terms of physical and geometrical parameters, they are much closer to the natural kinds of science, in that they support law-like regularities; see for a defense of this position (Soavi 2009).
metaphysical artifacts
3. What Are The Ethical And Social Aspects Of Technology?
The ethical and social aspects of technology involve considering technology’s impact on society, including issues of responsibility, values in design, and technological risks.
3.1 How Has The Ethics Of Technology Developed?
The ethics of technology developed as a systematic subdiscipline in the 20th century. This late development may seem surprising given the large impact that technology has had on society, especially since the industrial revolution. A plausible reason for this late development of ethics of technology is the instrumental perspective on technology that was mentioned in Section 2.2. This perspective implies, basically, a positive ethical assessment of technology: technology increases the possibilities and capabilities of humans, which seems in general desirable. Of course, since antiquity, it has been recognized that the new capabilities may be put to bad use or lead to human hubris. Often, however, these undesirable consequences are attributed to the users of technology, rather than the technology itself, or its developers. This vision is known as the instrumental vision of technology resulting in the so-called neutrality thesis.
3.2 What Approaches Exist In The Ethics Of Technology?
There are three basic approaches or strands that might be distinguished in the ethics of technology, including cultural and political approaches, engineering ethics, and ethics of specific technologies.
3.2.1 Cultural and Political Approaches
Both cultural and political approaches build on the traditional philosophy and ethics of technology of the first half of the twentieth century. Whereas cultural approaches conceive of technology as a cultural phenomenon that influences our perception of the world, political approaches conceive of technology as a political phenomenon, i.e., as a phenomenon that is ruled by and embodies institutional power relations between people.
Cultural approaches are often phenomenological in nature or at least position themselves in relation to phenomenology as post-phenomenology. The approaches are usually influenced by developments in STS, especially the idea that technologies contain a script that influences not only people’s perception of the world but also human behavior, and the idea of the absence of a fundamental distinction between humans and non-humans, including technological artifacts (Akrich 1992; Latour 1992, 1993; Ihde & Selinger 2003).
Political approaches to technology mostly go back to Marx, who assumed that the material structure of production
