The week, twenty-five years ago, of the Apollo spacecraft's return visit to the moon was described by Richard Nixon as the greatest since the Creation. Across the Atlantic, a French Academician judged the same event to matter less than the discovery of a lost etching by Daumier. Attitudes to technological achievement, then, differ. And they always have. Chuang-Tzu, over 2,000 years ago, relates an exchange between a Confucian passer-by and a Taoist gardener watering vegetables with a bucket drawn from a well. ‘Don't you know that there is a machine with which 100 beds are easily watered in a day?’—‘How does it work?’—‘It's a counter-balanced ladle’—‘Too clever to be good… all machines have to do with formulae, artificiality [which] destroy native ingenuity… and prevent the Tao from residing peacefully in one's heart’. ‘Engines of mischief’, in the words of the Luddite song, or testaments to ‘the nobility of man [as] the conqueror of matter’, in those of Primo Levi, the products of technology continue to inspire phobia and philia.

Familiar to the point of cliché, in such debates, has been the rhetoric of liberation and enslavement. Karl Popper judges nuclear power to have shown that our vaunted ‘control of nature’ is ‘apt to enslave us rather than make us free’; while, for Radhakrishnan, further east, the technology by which man ‘strove to emancipate himself from bondage to nature’ has now become ‘the master’.

Introduction

For as long as realists and instrumentalists have disagreed, partisans of both sides have pointed in argument to the actions and sayings of scientists. Realists in particular have often drawn comfort from the literal understanding given even to very theoretical propositions by many of those who are paid to deploy them. The scientists' realism, according to the realist, is not an idle commitment: a literal understanding of past and present theories and concepts underwrites their employment in the construction of new theories. The theme of this book is philosophy and technology, and here's the connection: new theories point out—and explain—new phenomena. So realism, claim the realists, is at the heart of science's achievement of what Bacon, that early philosopher of technology, identified as science's aim: new knowledge offering new powers.

How does this become an argument for realism? Scientific realism enters the story twice: (tacitly) adopted by scientists, it motivates scientific practice, while the success of the practice might support realism as a philosophical view of science. To fill the story in, we need to know what the realist view is, and an account of how a scientist who accepts it would behave differently from one who does not. But there are many ways to be a realist about science, of which the following is a representative sample: (Aims) Science aims to provide literally true stories about the world, to be a process of discovery and of explanation rather than one of construction and of saving the phenomena.

Masterful Machinery

Technology, according to Derry and Williams's Short History, ‘comprises all that bewilderingly varied body of knowledge and devices by which man progressively masters his natural environment’. Their casual, and unconscious, sexism is not unrelated to my present topic. Women enter the story as spinners, burden bearers and, at long last, typists. ‘The tying of a bundle on the back or the dragging of it along upon the outspread twigs of a convenient branch are contributions [and by implication the only contributions] to technology which probably had a feminine origin’. Everything else was done by men, and what they did was master, conquer, and control. It is also significant that Derry and Williams take it for granted that ‘the men [sic] of the Old Stone Age, few and scattered, developed little to help them to conquer their environment’: until the advent of agriculture, and settled civilization, there was, they say, neither leisure nor surplus. Later investigation strongly suggests, on the contrary, that hunter-gatherers have time to play with, and keep their ‘surplus’ where it belongs—out in the world. Settled civilization brought us—or most of us—discipline, time-keeping and back-breaking labour. Maybe, as they suggest, Sumerian priests were ‘the first leisured class’, but the emphasis should be on ‘class’. In more egalitarian, less ‘civilized’ days, we were all as leisured as any other primate group, and doubtless as preoccupied with mutual grooming, mutual manipulation and the decorative arts.

This is not the first time the title ‘Art and Technology’ has been used, but to distinguish what I have to say from Walter Gropius's Bauhaus exhibition of 1923, I am subtitling my paper ‘an old tension’, where the architect spoke of ‘a new unity’. In a way, Gropius has been proved right; the structures of the future avoiding all romantic embellishment and whimsy, the cathedrals of socialism, the corporate planning of comprehensive Utopian designs have all gone up and some come down. We have a mass media culture also largely made possible by technology. Corporatist architecture, whether statist ‘social housing’ or freemarket inspired, films, videos, modern recording and musical techniques are all due to technological advances made mostly this century. Only in a very puritanical sense could what has happened be thought of as inevitably bringing with it enslavement. All kinds of possibilities are now open to artists and architects, which would have been imaginable a few decades ago. No one is forced to use these possibilities in any specific way.

If I have a complaint about what has happened in the arts this century, it is not that technology is constraining imagination, or making slaves of us. It is rather that it isn't constraining it enough, that technology is removing those very constraints which made art a matter of craft, rather than an unfettered display of expression and imagination.

In recent years there has been an increasing focus on the role of instruments in the study of nature, both by historians and by philosophers of science, and even by a few art historians who are interested by the images produced by these devices.

My own approach is that of the historian of science with an interest in the philosophical implications. To the instrument historian, science is applied technology, put to the task of understanding nature by revealing the kinds of beings of which she is ultimately composed.

Scientific instruments have become indispensable in collecting and ‘dissecting’ natural phenomena from the seventeenth century when the techniques were developed that are at the roots of modern western technology-orientated science. At the most general level, these instruments made visible that which could not be seen by the unaided senses: Galileo Galilei's surface of the moon as seen through his primitive telescope, or Robert Hooke's compound eye of the fly as seen through his microscope, and in more recent times, C. T. R. Wilson's particle tracks in the cloud chamber.

None of the images produced by these devices was, of course, strictly neutral, in the sense that in their making a complex relationship existed between the observer and the observed.

Introduction: The Medical and Legal Background

There are many conflicting attitudes to technological progress: some people are fearful that robots will soon take over, even perhaps making ethical decisions for us, whilst others enthusiastically embrace a future largely run for us by them. Still others insist that we cannot predict the long term outcome of present technological developments. In this paper I shall be concerned with the impact of the new technology on medicine, and with one particularly agonizing ethical dilemma to which it has already given rise.

A patient lies in a hospital bed. He is not in a coma. He sleeps, wakes, sleeps again. His limbs remain crooked and taut but are capable of primitive reflex movements. The touch of bedclothes can elicit a grasp reflex. He sometimes chews, scratches, swallows, grinds his teeth. He may even grunt and groan. The patient's family, in hope, interprets these movements as signifying the stirrings of renewed mental activity. But the neurological experts shake their heads. They know that the patient is not clinically dead because the brain stem is intact. But he has suffered the almost total disintegration of his cerebral cortex. He is thus in a state of wakefulness without any kind of awareness: he neither sees, feels nor hears. He cannot communicate in any way. He is profoundly and permanently insensate. For, a person in this condition, the medical profession has coined an acronym: PVS. The patient, usually an accident victim, is in a ‘persistent vegetative state’.

Morals and politics occupy themselves, if not exclusively, then at any rate centrally, with questions of value. Politicians and moralists deplore the alleged decline of values while pressing supposedly new ones upon us. The fiercest sympathies and antipathies, whether between individuals or between societies, are those which stem either from a community or from a divergence of values. ‘So natural to mankind,’ said Mill, ‘is intolerance in whatever they really care about.’

Let us ignore the obvious question, raised in their different ways by both Marxism and sociobiology, as to whether values are ultimately reducible to interests. It might even be a somewhat dull question, since whatever one really cares about must almost by definition constitute an interest. So what, practically speaking, is gained by grounding it in some other kind of interest, when one already has all the information about it one needs? Why should one's caring about a thing require any explanation, so long as it belongs to the class of things commonly recognized, even by Mill, to be worth caring about?

Some more questions: what is it to say that something is valuable, or a value? Is there a difference between a thing's having a value and its being a value? If I say I prefer x to y, I am saying that I set a higher value on x; but is that quite the same as saying that as far as I personally am concerned x constitutes or embodies a value?

In a recent book devoted to giving an overview of cognitive science, Justin Lieber writes:

It is the aim of hundreds of workers in the allied fields of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence to unmask these computation processes and install them in digital computers.

Professor Kevin Warwick of the University of Reading says that within fifteen years there will be machines appreciably more intelligent than any human being and, echoing John McCarthy, he foresees: ‘a machine-based intelligent environment, and we're just what we would regard as animals within that’.

The image of the computer or robot endowed with genuine mentality resonates deeply in the collective psyche of late twentieth-century Western culture, and that image often has the dark overtones hinted at by Professor Warwick and made explicit in films such as Westworld. And no wonder. The computer is the most complex technology ever devised by man, and we hold it up as a mirror to our own souls.

Introduction

This paper, I am afraid, advocates the philosophy of technology without actually doing it. It can best be seen as a plea for the philosophical importance of technology; in this case, importance to one of the most widely discussed problems in philosophy of physics—the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. What I want to do here is to lay out a point of view that takes the measurement problem out of the abstract mathematical structure of theory, where we discuss questions about unitary operators or conditions for the disappearance of certain inner products supposed to represent interference terms, and locate it elsewhere. Where is the measurement problem? Answer: It had better be found in the quantum technology or it is not to be found at all. My view in many respects follows ideas I have learned from Willis Lamb.

The evolution of states is supposed to be governed by the Schroedinger equation. The measurement problem arises when we become convinced that there are a range of cases in which we no longer want to assign the state dictated by the Schroedinger equation but want to assign a different state instead. Why do we want to assign this second state? We call the problem “the measurement problem” and this canonical example is a good illustration. You can't measure a quantum system without coupling to it.

Borrowing perhaps from mathematics, there is a custom of speaking of science as pure science and applied. Platonism, and other classical positions in the philosophy of mathematics, did not think of the applications of mathematics as a test of the truth of its theorems. But the picture is otherwise for science and technology. It is initially tempting to say that the theories of pure science are empirical generalizations and that the applications of these theories in the makings and doings of technology, accordingly as they succeed or fail, test the theories. Qualifying factors and counter-acting causalities needing to be allowed for, falsification will not be immediate, but inexplicable and apparently irremediable technological failure is likely to be taken as falsifying a theory, and a continued and expanding pattern of technological achievement, a triumph of technology, as the superannuated trope has it, will be taken as a confirmation of a theory, from the inductivist perspective, adding in spadesful to the evidence for its truth.

That such a view of the relation of science to technology has been held is clear from an argument that has familiarly been made against Karl Popper's account of scientific method. G. J. Warnock and Hugh Mellor, amongst others, have put the following argument against Popper. Popper claims to have solved Hume's problem of induction, and to have solved it by showing that there is no such thing as induction, either as a logical principle, or as a mode of reasoning, or as a method of discovery.

Even though the subject of my paper is ‘Technology and Culture in a Developing Country’, it seems appropriate to preface it by examining science itself in the cultural traditions of a developing country, such as Ghana, in view of the fact that the lack of technological advancement, or the ossified state in which the techniques of production found themselves, in the traditional setting of Africa and, in many ways, even in modern Africa, is certainly attributable to the incomprehensible inattention to the search for scientific principles by the traditional technologists. I begin therefore with observations on how science and knowledge fared in the traditional culture of a developing country.

Science and Our Culture

In a previous publication I pointed out—indeed I stressed—the empirical orientation of African thought: maintaining that African proverbs, for instance, a number of which bear some philosophical content, addressed—or resulted from reflections on—specific situations, events or experiences in the lives of the people, and that even such a metaphysical concept as destiny (or fate) was reached inductively, experience being the basis of the reasoning that led to it. Observation and experience constituted a great part of the sources of knowledge in African traditions.

It makes straightforward sense to ask a person ‘Why did you decide to become a solicitor?’ (or a carpenter, shopkeeper, teacher or professional musician). There is no mystery about the question ‘Why did you decide to become a British citizen?’ (or a member of the Liberal Party, the Roman Catholic Church or the Aristotelian Society). It may be difficult to answer any of these questions. We may not remember, or may be unable to articulate, what first led us to seek ordination, join the Army or stand for Parliament; but the questions themselves are clear, and they ask for fair comment on matters of public or private interest. There are other questions that sound like these but raise difficulties of another order.

‘What made you decide to become a woman?’ This question can be intelligibly asked only of a woman. It cannot be asked of any woman, or of many women. For it can be asked only of a woman who has decided to become a woman. But has there ever been a woman who has become a woman by her own decision? What the newspapers call a sex-change is understood by the new woman as the revelation and acknowledgement and confirmation of a womanhood that was there from birth, unrecognized or disguised and disfigured by shame or shock.

‘What made you decide to become an Englishman?’ This question could be sensibly addressed only to a man who had decided to become an Englishman, and there is no such animal.

The essays collected here do not constitute a philosophy of technology, in the sense which, for instance, Don Ihde requires. According to Ihde the philosopher of technology must reflectively analyse technology in such a way ‘as to illuminate features of the phenomenon of technology itself’. The contributors to this volume do not concern themselves with the essentialist enterprise of defining technology; they more or less take it for granted that the reader is familiar with a variety of technologies such as Information Technology, and proceed from there. Hence the title is the conjunctive one of Philosophy and Technology.

That contemporary philosophy has become more self-consciously concerned with the impact of technology on human nature and society is undeniably. Witness for instance the philosophical growth areas of Environmental and Medical Ethics. This interest is surely in part a consequence of environmental disasters such as the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and advances in medical technology such as organ transplantation. Again, advances in computer science and technology have suggested new ways for self-understanding and the re-organisation of society.

The modern world contains a vast array of technologies, and the contributors to this book respond to some of them with different concerns, so there is no one underlying theme running throughout. Nevertheless, one may discern that, in general, the contributors adopt one of two approaches. The first is concerned, quite generally, with the impact of technology on culture and society, and the second is concerned with philosophical questions raised by particular technologies.

As we have seen confidence in the notion of progress was widespread among the middle class of France during the first part of the sixteenth century. No one expressed this idea more fully than the humanist Louis Le Roy. It is in his work that the sixteenth-century idea of progress was most completely developed. In his Consideration sur l'histoire … universelle of 1568, Le Roy expressed himself as follows with respect to the achievements of his own age:

For many years the history of France in the ancien régime has been written from the perspective of the Annales. Particularly important to the conceptualization of this epoch have been the writings of Fernand Braudel and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who have emphasized the importance of the notion of la longue durée or of long-term economic and cultural factors in shaping the history of early modern France. The following work represents a critique of this perspective based on a renewed appreciation of the role of the state, on Marx's concept of primitive accumulation, and recent research on early modern proto-industrialization.

I am especially indebted to my colleague Mark Gabbert, who has helped me to think through some of the theoretical problems raised in the course of this investigation. I am grateful to James McConica and Gillian Lewis for permitting me to present some of the ideas in this book in their research seminar on early modern Europe at All Souls College, Oxford University, in 1992. I recall with pleasure the hospitality of Bob Scribner at Clare College, Cambridge, who allowed me to try out my ideas on his graduate students as well. I would also like to thank the librarians of the Bibliothèque Nationale and Bodleian and University of Manitoba libraries, without whose assistance this work would have been impossible. The editorial skill of Margaret Deith of the Cambridge University Press must be acknowledged. My scholarly efforts over the years have been generously supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council.