Ideas of 'Technology' From Applied Science to the Cold War - Scholar's Award

本项目将从两个方面考察技术概念的历史，主要是在美国。第一个方面涉及从两次世界大战之间到20世纪50年代，将技术定义为应用科学的兴起。这种将技术视为应用科学的想法与将技术定义为现代工业社会的程序、技能和设备的定义结合在一起，这一定义是由德国的Technik概念形成的。该项目的第二个方面侧重于出现一种关于与冷战有关的技术的论述。这一论述与政府政策问题密切相关，特别是与苏联争夺声望的问题。但与此同时，冷战期间出现了一种关于技术的批评性话语，这在一定程度上是由于欧洲对技术的批评的影响。冷战时期技术话语的这一关键方面帮助这些知识分子在20世纪60年代为更持续地质疑技术奠定了基础。在该项目的这两个部分中，PI将展示技术含义的变化是如何从学科内部的具体辩论和美国文化中更广泛的趋势中产生的。智力价值本项目建立在PI最近的工作的基础上，该工作描述了二战前德国技术话语对美国技术含义的影响。当美国社会科学家在德国社会理论中遇到技术的概念时，他们将这个概念吸收到先前存在的术语技术中，从而改变了它的含义。然而，技术作为艺术的科学的原始含义仍然存在，并反过来转变为技术作为应用科学的想法。技术作为技术，技术作为应用科学，这两个互不相容的含义共存于一个尴尬的混合体中，这导致了对技术含义的概念混乱。更广泛的影响澄清这段历史不仅对专家有重要意义，它还将有助于公众对科学和技术的理解。技术这一术语的历史有助于解释一些持续存在的困惑，甚至在受过教育的公众中也是如此，他们对技术的性质及其与科学的关系感到困惑。通过创建一个简单的网页来总结这一项目的成果，私营部门将向更广泛的公众广泛提供这些成果。

IntroductionThis project will examine two aspects of the history of the concept of technology, primarily in the United States. The first aspect concerns the rise of a definition of technology as applied science from the interwar years into the 1950s. This idea of technology as applied science became combined with the definition of technology as the procedures, skills and equipment of modern industrial society, a definition shaped by the German concept of Technik. The second aspect of this project focuses on the emergence of a discourse about technology linked to the Cold War. This discourse was closely connected the questions of government policy, in particular the competition for prestige with the Soviet Union. But at the same time, a critical discourse about technology emerged during the Cold War, in part due to the influence of European critiques of technology. This critical side of the Cold-War discourse of technology helped set these intellectual stages for more sustained questioning of technology in the 1960s. In both these parts of the project, the PI will show how changes in the meanings of technology arose from specific debates within disciplines and from broader trends within American culture.Intellectual MeritThis project builds on the PI's recent work, which describes the influence of the German discourse of Technik on the American meanings of technology before World War II. When American social scientists encountered the concept of Technik in German social theory, they absorbed this concept into the pre-existing term technology, thereby transforming its meanings. Yet the original meaning of technology as the science of the arts persisted, and was in turn transformed into the idea of technology as applied science. These two incompatible meanings of the term, technology as Technik and technology as applied science, coexisted in an awkward hybrid that contributed to conceptual confusion over the meanings of technology. Broader ImpactClarifying this history will be of significance to more than just specialists; it will also contribute to the public understanding of science and technology. This history of the term technology helps explain some of the persistent confusion even among educated members of the public about the nature of technology and its relationship to science. By creating a simple web page summarizing the results of this project, the PI will make these results widely available to a broader public.