Asia.pub

Technologies, particularly scientific devices, simultaneously invoke and substantiate scales. There is the opening here for a ‘new serious about technology’ . We can nonetheless analysis the richness of ‘technology’ as an actors’ category while sharpening and pondering with ‘technology’ as an analytical class. Yet this was not an alliance of equals, and the ‘trouble with techne’ – that it had the potential to upset the social order – remained. Aristotle, Hugh of St Victor, Johann Beckmann and Talcott Parsons, for example, had been instrumentalists. The Kultur-oriented German engineers of the nineteenth century, Lewis Mumford, and the 1960s critics of technology took the cultural view of expertise. Schatzberg has provided an exquisite service by tracing the conceptual history of know-how so clearly. This intervening power is the character, the essence if you'll, of know-how. It is present in the chic of planetary science but also the mundane of adjusting gear while driving a car,