A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Technology

Both analytic and Continental philosophy of science are integrated into contemporary philosophy of technology. Within Anglo-American philosophy of science, the post-positivist currents associated with Thomas Kuhn and several others opened various avenues to the analysis and evaluation of technologies that had not been open to approaches beholden to the logical positivist account of science. Just as the mathematical logic-based early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, partially misinterpreted, was appealed to by the original Vienna Circle logical positivists, the later, ordinary-language-based work of Wittgenstein influenced the work of Thomas Kuhn, Norwood Hanson, Stephen Toulmin and a number of other post-positivist philosophers of science. Although these writers of the late 1950s and early 1960s did not originally emphasize the extra-logical social and cultural influences on science, the more contextual and non-formalistic approach of the post-positivists allowed the consideration of non-scientific political, gender and other influences on scientific theories. Although Thomas Kuhn did not develop the occasional brief references to social influences on science in his work, the British social constructivist sociologists of scientific knowledge did so during the next decade.

A weakness of much of the immediate reaction against logical positivism of the followers of the later Wittgenstein mentioned above was over-emphasis on theory, even ...