Making sense of Questioning Technology

Making sense of Questioning Technology
by Andrew Feenberg
1999

This book is an introduction to the philosophy of technology. While I am a novice student of philosophy I was asked to think about this in the fall of 2008 and in response I co-created a Google Group with Barb Brown. I continue to have some struggles of my own as I adjust and navigate my way through this new territory. After looking at the topic with a rather wide lens I felt it was important for me to focus more deeply on what Andrew Feenberg had to say. He gives us a brief account of the growth of interest in technology. As a culture in the 20th century we became familiar with the notion of technology having an autonomous force separate from society. Two very separate camps began to form. Some took a rather pessimistic view and became concerned that technology seemed to have a life of it's own and would somehow run out of our control. I believe this notion lead people to write to stories of caution such as “2001 a Space Odyssey” and Martin Heidegger to write his essay on the question concerning technology. (I have read this essay but will write about it later.) While at the same time there was a push in our democratic society to expand our use of technology in our homes, schools and businesses. In both camps technology has been tied to the notion of progress.
Feenberg suggests that in the past our culture has looked upon the technical and the social as separate domains but that the fate of future democracy depends on us bridging the two. And that the fate of democracy is bound up with our understanding of technology. He feels that we need to challenge a essentialist philosophy of technology. The belief that technology has a set of characteristics that make what it is and reduces it to how it functions and its raw materials. This philosophy views technology as an instrument for efficiency.
I have just begun the first chapter entitled Technology, Philosophy, Politics. He begins by mapping out the territory of the philosophy of technology. Over time we have paid little attention to technology due largely to the technical being viewed as secondary to more intellectual pursues. In addition with the neutral notion of technology being an instrument society didn't really require and explanation or justification of it.
The other side of this map indicates the promise of technology. It is rooted in this idea of efficiency and carries with it a gift from the tradition of the scientific method. It is progressivism or rather technological determinism.
In opposition to this is a substance theory of technology, a protest against mechanization. In this view technology is not neutral and its spread is fearful. Potentially technological development transforms what it is to be human.
He mentions Langdon Winner and Carl Mitcham as further explanation of this thinking.

Background thinking of Gadamer

It is early days as I begin to understand Gadamer. He uses a lot of terms that I am only now becoming familiar with one of them is Bildung. So I did a little searching to expand my understanding of it. This is what I found using the Literary Encyclopedia.1

The noun “Bildung” has several meanings, which is why the term Bildungsroman is often left untranslated.
By the mid-eighteenth century Bildung had assimilated the humanist-philosophical ideas of the Age of Enlightenment and become a secular term.
Wilhelm von Humboldt, influenced by a botanical and morphological framework from the natural sciences, achieved maybe the most refined and comprehensive definition of Bildung as a combination of Anbildung (acquisition of qualities or knowledge), Ausbildung (development of already existing qualities), Entfaltung (creative broadening of acquired skills or qualities without external restriction) and Assimilation. Goethe 2 defined his idea of Bildung with his own concepts of metamorphosis and morphology as a natural, organic process of maturation as well as a pedagogic principle leading to an overall harmonic wholeness.

So I gather what he means that it is a process but not a procedure or a behaviour. It is a growing or a creation. Gadamer seems to be placing it inside culture or historical tradition (cultivated consciousness). That's a bigger place. We can't forget the place we came from and the collection of voices from that place. Yet we bring with us our own sense of self -right? He calls it developing one's capacities or talents, a transition from becoming to being. The result is not a technical construction but a natural one rather, it grows out of being personally involved in your own life. We educate ourselves within culture (p. 10). It has an element of spirit but not an absolute spirit. A state of development not a means to an end (p.12). He seems to be looking at universality differently than what I understood it to mean. He says it gives us distance, it keeps us open to what is 'other'. To look at something the way an 'other' might (p.15). He does not mean that this can be measured by some fixed rule. We are just open the viewpoints of others.

A little about Gadamer:

It is said that a fusion of the Heideggerian notion of phronesis or “practical wisdom” with the Platonic insight into the dialogical nature of being that provides the basis for the development of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics.

“All understanding is historically situated in a number of ways: for example, interpretations always come out of a way of life that shapes expectations; and interpretations are always configured in relation to some linguistic and conceptual schema; in addition, interpretation always arises in the form of specific hypotheses that relate to the particular events or beings to be understood. It is this situatedness to which Gadamer refers when he claims that any understanding is always already laden with pre-judgements. These pre-judgements are not theoretical positions, but un-reflective interests, orientations, and attitudes. Thus they are more being than being-conscious: “history does not belong to us; we belong to it [. . .]. The individual’s self-reflection is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life”.3

It is my desire to be reflective in my attitudes and my understanding of my place in the world.

Thoughts to remember from today:

• the notion of truth as the event of disclosure, or un-concealment (aletheia)

• What is fixed in writing has detached itself from the contingency of its origin

• no interpretation can be definitive

• finite play of disclosure and concealment does not prevent intelligibility; rather it is what allows interpretation in the first place

• dialogue - if it is to be reasonable - must possess the attitude of hermeneutical openness to what is utterly foreign

• It is only the transformative experience of the shattering of expectations that allows true insight

Gadamer teaches me that in order to judge an event I must take into account the accompanying circumstances (p.17). So I gather that if I am to understand why some teachers are successfully infusing technology into their practice I guess I need come to an understanding of that place.

---

1 Literary Encyclopedia http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=119
(Free to many universities)
2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) Playwright, Novelist, Poet.
Born 1749; died 1832. Active 1767-1832 in Germany, Continental Europe
3 Wood, Kelsey. "Hans-Georg Gadamer". The Literary Encyclopedia. 21 December 2003.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1663, accessed 9 May 2009.]

Think

think

So I have been thinking... What kind of knowledge is it that understands that something is so because it understands that it has come about so? The road we travel in our understanding must be part of our understanding. No? How did we get here? Scotty did not beam us here. And why do we often discribe this knowledge in a negative way. I mean we often spend more time talking about what something is not than what it is. True we are in a different place with new understanding but why not include in the history of the journey there?

Introduction to Gadamer

So there I was just a few moments ago sitting for the first time this spring in the warmth of my garden. Spring happens slowly in Calgary with many false starts and this year is no exception. There are a few green promises of growth but largely the ground in baron just waiting.
I have made a decision to read Truth and Method by Hans-Georg Gadamer. It's a tough one but there I was sitting in my garden with the promise of spring hoping for the promise of understanding.
So here it is. I just give it a go..
In the introduction Gadamer expresses that the problem of hermeneutics deals with the phenomenon of understanding. He says that the correct interpretation of what has been understood has little to do with methodology but everything to do with human experience in the world. It also is not concerned with amassing verified knowledge such as we find withing the scientific community. Legitimacy is found only in a deep investigation of the phenomenon of understanding. I have equated this kind of understanding to slow cooking on the back burner. It takes longer but it tastes better.
The introduction just seems to be setting the landscape for me. One thing I hope to gain is an understanding of what role tradition plays in my own understanding of my place in the world. What is this notion of tradition, the ghostly voices from our ancestors? I feel I must spend some time exploring my heritage as it relates to own understanding of self.
Part one deals with the question of truth as it emerges in the experience of art. I plan on reading that next week end.

The Nature of Knowledge

Epistemology in the Garden
A New Nature of Knowledge

The following is a personal reflection on the nature of knowledge. Think of it as a metaphoric photo poem. Enjoy

Personal Professional Development

As you walk through your professional life what strategies do you use to support yourself with wisdom?

If you go to this website you can view it with the audio.http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?presentation=217

Personal Professional Development

View more presentations from Stephen Downes.

Teaching and Learning

So I have been thinking today rather deeply about teaching and learning. Or rather teaching is learning. I mean isn't it? For me they are so very intertwined I can't separate them. My job is teacher but I am a learner. I believe my role in this job is to demonstrate how the learning should happen or what it should look like. To be good at it I must open possibilities and pathways for those learning. I expect the learner to practice and think about what they are learning. I expect then to take what I share with them and remix it into their own life. I myself can not stop and take off my teacher hat when I need to learn because if I am to be a good teacher I must also be open to the possibilities and pathways that present themselves while I am teaching. Do we need a new word for the teacher/learner? How about the TLearcher?