A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

Toward an Integrated Philosophy of Technology

Philosophy of technology has been approached through a variety of philosophical perspectives and “schools.” These include post-positivist philosophy of science, phenomenology, hermeneutics, social constructivism, critical theory and pragmatism discussed above.

One of the impacts of the philosophy of technology is to encourage and, in the context of problem-solving, in some cases to force the integration of various philosophical approaches. In jointly deploying the methods of these various approaches to deal with philosophy of technology, the shared features of many of these schools of philosophy become more evident.

One feature of the various schools of recent philosophy applied to the philosophy of technology is their sensitivity to the issue of context. Ordinary language philosophy, in contrast to earlier logical positivism and formal-logic-oriented analytical philosophy, emphasizes the context of utterances. Deweyan pragmatism likewise is a thoroughgoing contextualism.

Another feature of the philosophies deployed in the philosophy of technology is the emphasis on the role of language and meaning as structuring perceptual experience. Ordinary language philosophy of the later Wittgenstein stands to the earlier logical positivism and empiricism as hermeneutics and the hermeneutic phenomenology of the later Heidegger stand to earlier phenomenology, in that both emphasize the inextricable relatedness of linguistic meaning to the description ...