John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology

Chapter 2: Knowing as a Technological Artifact

Chapter Two: Knowing as a Technological Artifact Inference, or the use of things as evidence of other things, is a constant and important function of behavior, as much so as any other in life. This is a minimum statement, suffering from exaggerated overcaution . If such acts as walking, plowing, eating, blacksmithing, etc., need and evolve distinctive instrumentalities, organs, structures, for their prosecution, especially for their successful prosecution, the presumption is strongly in favor of the statement that the operation of inference has its own peculiar characteristic tools and results. (MW10:92) Teehne, the ancestor of "technology," was used by Greek contemporaries of Plato and Aristotle to designate any productive skill. More specifically, the term was used in a demotic sense as "a kind of professional competence as opposed to instinctive ability (physis) or mere chance (tyehe)."1 Teehne was thus used to designate a realm of activity that occupied a place between two extremes: the order of nature (or supernature) and the disorder of chance. For the Greeks, productive skill was said to act with respect to both extremes. For Aristotle and Plato alike, teehne was said to imitate nature by modifying and bringing to completion natural events and objects for the sake of human purpose and use. At the same time it was said to perform the quasi-divine function of establishing order where there had been only chance. Although Aristotle found much in Plato's treatment of teehne with which to disagree, it is clear that both men would have accepted this general characterization of the term. In addition to its intermediate position between nature and chance, teehne stood, for the Greeks, between two other extremes. Since it involved knowledge and ability directed toward production and construction, it occupied "a sort of intermediate place between mere experience or know-how, empeiria, and theoretical knowledge, episteme."2 Unlike episteme, technology did not have to do with the 18 John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology immutable. Instead, productive knowledge was thought to concern the processes of becoming and what comes to be. Unlike empeiria, productive skill was said to go beyond the loose associations retained in memory, and to be concerned with more than just particular instances and their connections. In his rich paraphrase of Aristotle, Wolfgang Schadewaldt contrasted productive skill with its opposite, atechnia: "Thus techne is expressly defined as a knowledge and ability which has come about by habit, Le. has passed into flesh and blood, and which is directed to a producing, but in connection with a clear course of reasoning concerning the thing itself, which the man of mere experience does not have in view. A knowledge that is likewise productive but which, however rich and diverse it may be, has a false idea of the thing itself remains simply atechnia, blunder."3 Techne was for the Greeks a pro-duction, a leading toward, and a con-struction, a drawing together, of various parts and pieces in order to make something novel. Techne was thus central to the thought of the Greeks in the sense of having been an important element in their form of life. But it was also centrally located for them between state of nature and finished artifact, between necessity and chance, and between theoretical certainty and· unstructured experience. Technology in the sense of "active productive skill" is likewise a central element in John Dewey's philosophy, but in ways that constitute a radical departure from the thought of the Greeks. For one thing, he rejected Aristotle's foundationalism. Aristotle treated theoretical knowledge-theoretike-as knowledge of what could not be otherwise.4 Dewey argued instead that absolute certainty and immutability are chimerical. He thought that belief in existential necessity, necessity apart from thought, amounted to a kind of superstition. He contended that the construction of theories is a special case of the use of productive skill, that is, a special type of technical production. But he also argued that Aristotle's practical knowledge, praktike, when it is divorced from real production, becomes humdrum and lifeless. Active productive skill is thus, for Dewey, at center stage because it includes and informs both the theoretical and the practical whenever and wherever they are effective. Dewey also rejected the Greeks' essentialism. Aristotle held the view that there are essences to which qualities are appended or in which they inhere.5 By hypostatizing both essences and qualities (at least according to one long tradition of interpretation), Aristotle was able to pigeonhole them into a grid constituted horizontally...