To: technology-AT-world.std.com
From: SONDHEIM-AT-newschool.edu
Date:         24 May 94 14:24:17 EDT
Subject:      Re: The broad and the narrow


> Kirez writes:
>
> > I'm making arguments about the broad
> > principle, that the human capacity to reason and thus make tools
> > evolved because it proved to be beneficial, and that it is still
> > beneficial, and that in fact humans can't be truly human, and live
> > as humans, unless they employ their distinctive means of survival:
> > science.
>
> It is not at all clear to me _why_ you are making these broad
> arguments.  I don't think anybody here has spoken against reason,
> tools, or science, and therefore I don't see why those things need
> a general defense.  What is of more interest is the particular
> _directions_ that reason, technology and science take -- how these
> directions get established, what controls them, how they can be
> evaluated, whether they could or should be changed, and so on.
> Not: "Should there be technology?"  But: "What _kind_ of technology
> should there be?"
>
>
> - malgosia

But there ARE problems with this that bear directly on technology -
first, the idea that there is something "truly human" as opposed
presumably to something else - which is already an ideological and
suspect claim, and second, the notion of a "distinctive means of
survival: science," which not only plays into a problematic Darwinism
but also into an particularly technocratic way of defining the
"human." Buddhism is obviously another path which might wreak less
havoc on the environment, for example. And as Husserl pointed out
there are indeed problems with mathematization of the world. Finally,
there is no NECESSARY connection between technology and science;
technology can be considered any extension of human behavior into the
environment using mediating materials.

I am completely "for" beneficial technologies, etc. but I see no
reason whatsoever to support scientism as ultimate means or anything
else. (Please don't misundertand: I am also "for" science, but there
is a need to separate it from a broad evolutionary perspective.
Otherwise one returns to an extremely dubious ethnocentrism.)

Alan who knows not of what he speaks, Mother:







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