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The Nature of Technology: What it is and How it Evolves: Difference between revisions
The Nature of Technology: What it is and How it Evolves (view source)
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Because he doesn't have to, Arthur doesn’t go there, but he does cast a kindly glance at {{author|Thomas Kuhn}}. (I like people who cast kindly glances at {{author|Thomas Kuhn}}: these days they’re few and far between). | Because he doesn't have to, Arthur doesn’t go there, but he does cast a kindly glance at {{author|Thomas Kuhn}}. (I like people who cast kindly glances at {{author|Thomas Kuhn}}: these days they’re few and far between). | ||
Arthur doesn’t have to go there (at first) because technology, as implemented, is almost by definition infra-paradigmatic: if “{{tag|science}}” is its philosophical principle, {{tag|technology}} is its practical implementation — very much the sort of thing {Author|Nancy Cartwright}} would call a [[nomological machine]]: a construction designed to give a dependable result in a constrained set of circumstances, where the machine not only prescribes the parameters for a “successful” result, but constrains the environment and operating circumstances in which outcomes are generated to ensure the result is within those parameters, and then, reliably, forces that outcome. (A technology that is unable to force an outcome within its own parameters for a successful result is simply a machine that doesn’t work). | Arthur doesn’t have to go there (at first) because {{tag|technology}}, as implemented, is almost by definition infra-paradigmatic: if “{{tag|science}}” is its philosophical principle, {{tag|technology}} is its practical implementation — very much the sort of thing {Author|Nancy Cartwright}} would call a [[nomological machine]]: a construction designed to give a dependable result in a constrained set of circumstances, where the machine not only prescribes the parameters for a “successful” result, but constrains the environment and operating circumstances in which outcomes are generated to ensure the result is within those parameters, and then, reliably, forces that outcome. (A technology that is unable to force an outcome within its own parameters for a successful result is simply a machine that doesn’t work). | ||
But this leaves a gap. If technology is merely the practical implementation of [[normal science]], it has a hard time explaining innovation. As Arthur puts it: | But this leaves a gap. If technology is merely the practical implementation of [[normal science]], it has a hard time explaining innovation. As Arthur puts it: | ||