A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

2. A Neglected Topic

Reflections on the nature of technological knowledge are fairly recent in the philosophy of technology. In more general epistemological debates, technological knowledge hardly ever features as an object of serious considerations. Laudan (1984) presented possible reasons for this. The first is the popularity in philosophy of the view that technology is primarily a form of applied natural science. This idea was advocated in a “classic” article by Bunge (1966). It has also been the dominant view in science and technology policy in the decades following the Second World War. The idea of technology as just the application of natural science implicitly suggests that technology is not a separate field of knowledge. Maybe knowledge in technology differs somewhat from scientific knowledge in that it contains empirical elements that complement the idealized concepts and theories taken from science, but that can hardly be a justification for regarding technological knowledge as a separate kind (Layton 1974). According to Laudan, a second possible explanation for the lack of interest is that part of technological knowledge has a tacit character. The lack of an in-depth analysis of technological knowledge may also be explained by the fact that the engineering sciences themselves have not been the object of study in philosophy of science, which is traditionally biased toward physics, and more recently also toward biology.

If technological knowledge has been studied at all, ...