Technology And Knowledge Essay

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“Technology both enables us to produce knowledge and limits the knowledge that is produced.” Discuss with reference to two areas of knowledge.

“Technology” was a tool that made humans to the top of the food chain, a tool that allowed us to move from backdoor farming to large industrial factories, a tool that allowed to us live on every continent on the Earth and even explore Space, yet nobody ever asked “isn’t it just too much for a simple “tool” to accomplish”? Is it our human knowledge that lies within this tool and is the key factor behind the acquired results? To explore the etymological connection between the technology and knowledge generated through it, the question of “what we refer to and call as technology” has to be answered first. After the point of interest is defined and clearly stated, we will descend and examine technologies connection to the acquired knowledge through the prism of history and natural sciences.

The “linking” of the knowledge and technology is a very old concept that could be traced back to the “Nicomachean Ethics” of Aristotle: “Now since the architecture has become the art and is essentially a reasoned state of capacity to make, ... , art is identical with the state of capacity to make, involving the true course of reasoning”. The reference to architecture makes it clear that the point of our interest “technology” falls under Aristotle’s term of “art”, it is also equally clear what association of “art” and “knowledge” was created. Aristotle was the first philosopher to realize the connection between two Greek philosophical ideas of “episteme” (knowledge) and “techne” (art), to him these terms might have been manifested, but he would not have them confused with the things produced. It is also ...

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...new knowledge and the technologist’s role becomes to apply to the knowledge generated elsewhere to practical use. And this sentence is precisely the core of the theory that influenced Alfred Rupert Hall’s “History of Technology”, and ascertain other historians to be introduced into the writing of the history of technology.

It is quite possible that some historians of science were led to such view on the science-technological relations in an attempt to reduce the influence coming from the Marxists and Communist beliefs putting the science to the level of the superstructure for material forces. Technology itself might have possibly be the biggest reason for “paradigm shifts” during entire course of human history. Be at Galileo, Copernicus, Marxism or Capitalism technology has shaped within itself not only the view of the human minds, but the way that the world works.

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