The definition of technology is a much controverted topic. At one extreme, the word is used for an intellectual discipline, analogous to biology or psychology. This is a refined use, emphasizing the Greek root logos (word or meaning) combined with techne (artifice), to focus on the study or science of arts and artifices. Thus, distinguished institutions that offer sustained investigation of practical arts are often called institutes of technology. But at the other extreme, the word technology is often used to refer to concrete objects, tools, and implements themselves, or their workings. When archaeologists speak of digging up samples of a culture's technology, they are not referring to learned studies but to pots, tools, or weapons. Historians and anthropologists refer to the technologies of a society as the practical arts and implements themselves, not studies about them. And ordinary usage tends also toward the concrete. When one is baffled by the technology in a new car, it is the knobs and switches that are at issue, recalcitrant things.

Another polarity is found regarding the involvement of science in technology. Is technology (whether a study or a set of artifacts) simply applied science? If so, then science must have come first, to be applied, and there could be no prescientific technologies. The distinguished institutes of engineering tend to lean toward this understanding, but historians of human craftsmanship tend to see important continuities between pre- and post-scientific arts, and emphasize vital technological achievements (such as the telescope and microscope) that made science possible, thus predating and empowering the rise of modern science, not shrinking to its mere application.

There are other significant disputes over the essential nature of technology: for example, whether it must be embodied, somehow, perhaps in metal or plastic, or whether it can be entirely conceptual, as in the important Arabic invention of the number zero, which greatly advanced the calculational power of mathematics. Another example is the question whether technology can be said to exist outside the human context, as in the sometimes elaborate constructions of animals like beavers and many birds, or must it by definition be the product of human making? This raises the broader issue whether technology is ever a natural phenomenon or is necessarily artificial. Unfortunately, the relatively new field of philosophy of technology has yet to come to consensus on these definitional issues.

Technology and language

In the absence of consensus, the process of constructing and evaluating a definition is actually clarified. One cannot pretend that a proposed definition is inevitable, or is the only one that stands to reason. It becomes more obvious that language is conventional, that a definition is a rule for linking concepts together in ways that are clarifying or helpful. Since what is clarifying or helpful is always relative to some context-giving purpose, there may be as many differently helpful resolutions for using words as there are purposes for doing so. Deans of distinguished institutions for the systematic study of industrial arts may find it helpful to use words in one way; aircraft maintenance personnel may find it more helpful to use them in another.

Since the purpose in this entry is philosophical, its aim will be for as much comprehensiveness as reasonably possible, combined with as much critical coherence as can be achieved in light of the variety of data in hand. The norm of adequate comprehensiveness will warn against premature exclusions of whole domains from the extension of the term under discussion, and the norm of critical coherence will warn against such excesses of inclusion as might make the term vacuous by referring uncritically to everything. For example, if we are to understand technology from the broad philosophical perspective, it will probably be more useful to include prescientific craft traditions within the concept of technology, to see the internal similarities and differences brought by modern science, than to exclude the earlier practical arts from notice by definition. But, contrariwise, since understanding a subject must allow for contrast with what is not that subject, it will probably not be useful to accede to such all-inclusive definitions as would identify the mind-activated body as the primary all-purpose tool. This would imply that a conscious human being is never without tools, is never in a nontechnological condition. With an over-broad definition it is harder to express the significant difference that the introduction of a tool makes to the naked hand; with an over-narrow definition it is harder to notice significant similarities between tools of different types.

Venturing our own definition, in this context, must be an exercise in balance. We must be conscious of what we will include and what exclude by our proposed linguistic rule, and must be ready to stand by these consequences as long as we support the rule. For example, the concept of the practical has been central in all the discussion thus far. If we make this concept essential, then we exclude from the concept of technology what is purely theoretical or aesthetic or otherwise done for its own sake, without practical motives. If this seems appropriate, we are entitled to make this decision. Again, the concept of the purposive runs throughout, implying intelligent goals as essential to the idea of technology. If this cluster of concepts is taken as essential, then we shall be excluding the purely instinctive from our definition. This need not eliminate a priori all animal constructive activities from the domain of the technological, but it draws the line at a new place: To what extent are the apparent artifacts of animals actually the result of art, or intelligence? If the human species is not alone intelligent, then the concept of technology will apply quite naturally to flexible, environmentally responsive implementations of animal aims, but will not apply to behaviors that are hard-wired, immune to modification in changing conditions. Is this an appropriate distinction? If so, we may legitimately adopt it. Finally, the concept of physical embodiment remains to be resolved, whether technology must necessarily be implemented in material things. If we so decide, then purely conceptual discoveries or inventions, like the Arabic zero, will be excluded from the technological, while the abacus, another great aid to calculation, implemented variously by pebbles in sand or beads on wires, will be included. Like all the other decisions, this is a judgment call. Will it be more helpful for understanding technology to require that it be implemented, especially if that requirement can be understood to include not just metal or plastic but also social and biological implementations, as in the invention of armies and corporations or in the selective breeding of new strains of grain or livestock? If the answer is positive, then this resolution may reasonably be made.

Thus, once we are alert to the conceptual consequences, and accept them, a possible definition of technology, one that could reconcile a number of clashing linguistic intuitions and lay a foundation for further clarifications in this important domain, could be: Technology is the practical implementation of intelligence.

Technology and science

Approaching technology as implemented intelligence aimed at practical goals helps to resolve the contentious question of its relationship to science. There is no doubt that the character of technologies changed radically after the emergence of modern science. There is also no doubt that prescientific technologies, such as the art of lens making and glass-blowing, were indispensable to that emergence, since without them there would have been no telescopes, microscopes, thermometers, or barometers to serve the new goals of precise theoretical intelligence represented by the scientific revolution.

But the differences between the type of intelligence embodied in ancient craft technologies and in modern high technologies are not in kind but in goals and norms. Practical intelligence, as old as our species, is interested in getting jobs done and clinging to techniques that have been found (usually by luck, or trial and error) to work. The norm for such intelligence is practical success, with deep reluctance to fix what is not broken. Simplicity is preferred over complication, the how is elevated over the why, and close enough is favored over abstract precision. In contrast, theoretical intelligence (rooted in the same ancient quest that sometimes leads to myth-making and sometimes, as in classical Greece, is disciplined by logic) thirsts for understanding why, is not satisfied by successful results alone but wants to know in addition what makes things happen so, and is willing to take great pains to achieve precision despite whatever complexity is required. These two contrasting expressions of intelligence, usually isolated by socioeconomic class, made an improbable marriage in seventeenth century Europe, through which the demand for theoretical precision could be served by instruments provided by ancient craft traditions, and the quest for why could be disciplined by attention to the how.

For the first time, practical wants could be suggested by theoretical understanding of the hidden workings of things. The radio could not even be desired without first conceiving abstractly of radio waves. Atomic energy could not be a goal without the modern theory of the atom. After the emergence of modern science, so-called high technologies could be led by theoretical intelligence powerfully outfitted by practical intelligence.

Technology and culture. Technology is the implementation not only of intelligence in various interacting modes but also equally of values, goals, wants, and fears. Without motivating values, intelligence would not be moved to make or do anything. But in culture, values often clash. Early biblical pessimism about technological hubris is shown in the story of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11: 1–9), foreshadowing modern negative theological and philosophical attitudes such as those expressed by Jacques Ellul and Martin Heidegger. Science-led high technologies stimulate even stronger condemnation from those suspicious of the practical implementations of human intelligence, but the involvement of modern science is not essential to setting off warnings. Agricultural technology, and urban living itself, is seen as corrupting by the nomadic and sheepherding author, called J, in early biblical thought.

More positive theological assessments, ranging from Harvey Cox's early enthusiastic embrace of the liberating technologies of the secular city to W. Norris Clarke's more measured approval of human co-creation through selective technology, also abound in the literature. Philosophers and social commentators like Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Bernard Gendron defend in different ways the technological impulse and its impacts on culture.

The technological impulse, to intervene intelligently in nature by implementing means for achieving valued ends, is extremely general, however, and open to indefinitely many expressions. The qualities of the intelligence being implemented, as well as the values being embodied, are worthy of analysis and assessment epistemologically no less than ethically and theologically. Though the activities of intelligence may bind all sorts of technologies into a single wide domain, its implemented expressions through modern science are strikingly different in standards and consequences from its prescientific embodiments. Artificiality comes in many degrees, depending on the extent to which the artificial object is dependent on the intervention of intelligence for its production. A neatly planted orchard, for example, is more artificial than a primal forest, but less artificial than the shopping mall that may replace it. On such a scale, modern high technology is artificial to the highest degree because it is completely dependent on the intervention of theoretical intelligence for its existence. Some of the felt discomfort directed toward such technologies may be rooted in the cognitive gap between ordinary experience of the world, familiar to our species from earliest times, and the theoretical structures inhabited by scientific intelligence and materialized in scientific engineering.

Importantly, too, the internal goals of scientific intelligence tend to favor quantification. Much science-led technology may not surprisingly, then, embody the tendency to favor quantity over more ineffable qualities, such as the aesthetic or traditional. Further, scientific values, though powerful in advancing knowledge, are conspicuously lacking in compassion for its subjects of investigation. The typical technological implementations of scientific thought, with some exceptions (e.g., anesthesia) have not been especially kind or gentle. We may speculate that if we are to hope for a kinder, gentler postmodern variety of high technology, sensitive to qualitative concerns in culture, there may need to rise a new, postmodern variety of scientific thinking as well.

See also BIOTECHNOLOGY; INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY; REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY; TECHNOLOGY AND ETHICS; TECHNOLOGY AND RELIGION; VALUE,
SCIENTIFIC

FREDERICK FERRÉ