Expertise Articles, Technological News
‘Technology’ is certainly one of the key phrases of our world, but it's also one of the most confused. As an analytical class it appears essential for our understanding of all of humanity’s history, and certainly past. We are probably comfortable with asserting that people have had applied sciences since the Palaeolithic, and a menagerie of animals, from crows to chimps, have even been identified as software users. As an actors’ category ‘technology’ is of surprisingly latest vintage, though cognate terms – techne, arts, and so on – have a for much longer historical past. To make sense of Schatzberg’s name to arms, we have to pay close consideration to how he defines the two ‘sharply diverging traditions’ of talking about know-how. Across the two millennial span of his historical past, Schatzberg places commentators in a single or different of the camps. On the one facet is the ‘instrumental approach’, which adopts the language of means and ends and which thereby ‘portrays know