Is Technology an Autonomous Process? Technology, Scientific Experiment, and Human Person
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Is Technology an Autonomous Process? Technology, Scientific Experiment, and Human Person Marco Buzzoni1 Received: 15 July 2020 / Accepted: 4 September 2020 Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Despite the many turns that philosophy of technology has undergone in recent decades, the question of the nature and limits of technological determinism (TD) has been neglected, because it was considered as solved and overcome, and therefore not worth further discussion. This paper once again raises the problem of TD, by trying to save the opposing, but complementary elements of truth of the two main forms of TD that I shall call ‘‘nomological’’ and ‘‘normative’’: (a) technology is allpervasive and has an inexorable capacity for extending itself into every field of human life, and (b) we have a capacity to counteract and orient technology, at least in some measure. In order to reconcile these seemingly inconsistent claims, the key move for my argument is a brief analysis of the notion of scientific experiment from the perspective of the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. As a result, two senses of technology are distinguished, which I shall call respectively ‘‘reflective’’ and ‘‘methodological.’’ From the point of view of this distinction, the all-pervasiveness and inexorability of technology and the in principle irreducibility of human persons to technology—which nomological and normative TD assert dialectically one against the other—can be reconciled. Among other things, this requires the rejection (in one fundamental sense) of the widely held assumption, made both by nomological and normative TD, that technology is a cultural field whose contents can be neatly separated from the rest of human culture. This thesis should be replaced by the more qualified claim of the reflective unity and the methodological multiplicity of technology. Keywords Technological determinism Technology Ethics Scientific experiment Person Design Turn
& Marco Buzzoni [email protected]; [email protected] 1
Department of Humanistic Studies, University of Macerata, via Garibaldi 20, 62100 Macerata, Italy
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Axiomathes
1 Introduction As a first approximation to a more adequate definition, we may say that the term ‘‘technological determinism’’ (TD) generally designates in today’s philosophy of technology any perspective that considers technology as an autonomous and decisive factor in the explanation of social, political and ethical development (see e.g. Hauer 2017, p. 1; Dafoe 2015, p. 1047). In general, the many turns that philosophy of technology has undergone in recent decades have neglected the question of the nature, value, and limits of TD, because this was considered as already solved, and therefore not worth further discussion. This is true not only of the main exponents of the less recent but always important Social Studies of Science and Technology (see e.g. Hackett et al. (eds) (2008), where further references may b
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