Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding It Empty: Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology
Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding It Empty: Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology
复制标题
打开黑匣子并发现它是空的：社会建构主义与技术哲学
DOI：
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发表时间：
1993
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
L. Winner
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
L. Winner
关于技术，哲学家需要知道什么？我们需要什么样的知识？多少钱？也许仅仅生活在一个广泛使用各种技术的社会中就足够了。根据对这些问题的日常理解，我们可以继续发展一般的观点和理论，这可能使我们能够回答关于一般技术的重要问题。问题是，一个人的把握可能是肤浅的，不能公正地解释和解释他想要解释的现象。一个人可能会抓住有限范围内的模糊理解的技术应用例子——河流上的大坝，工厂里的机器人，或者其他一些典型的例子——并试图从一个可能太小而无法承载其重量的样本中得出普遍的含义。另一种选择是更仔细地集中注意力，成为某一特定领域的技术知识专家，获得对工人、工程师或技术专业人员更深入的理解。然而，即使这样也可能被证明是有限的，因为在一个实践领域中可用的经验可能对理解其他领域的技术实践的起源、特征和后果没有帮助。现代社会中技术的绝对多样性给任何寻求全面把握技术社会中人类经验的人带来了严重的困难。然而，另一种策略可能是以学术模式研究特定种类的技术，利用现有的历史和当代技术变革的社会研究作为理解的基础。和一个
What do philosophers need to know about technology? What kind of knowledge do we need to have? And how much? Perhaps it is enough simply to have lived in a society in which a wide variety of technologies are in common use. Drawing upon an everyday understanding of such matters, one can move on to develop general perspectives and theories that may enable us to answer important questions about technology in general. The problem is that one's grasp may be superficial, failing to do justice to the phenomena one wants to explain and interpret. One may seize upon a limited range of vaguely understood examples of technical applications-a dam on a river, a robot in a factory, or some other typification-and try to wring universal implications from a sample that is perhaps too small to carry the weight placed upon it. An alternative would be to focus one's attention more carefully, becoming expert in the technical knowledge of a specific field, attaining the deeper understanding of, say, a worker, engineer, or technical professional. Even that may prove limiting, however, because the experience available in one field of practice may not be useful in comprehending the origins, character, and consequences of technical practices in other domains. The sheer multiplicity of technologies in modern society poses serious difficulties for anyone who seeks an overarching grasp of human experience in a technological society. Yet another strategy might be to study particular varieties of technology in a scholarly mode, drawing upon existing histories and contemporary social studies of technological change as one's base of understanding. And one