Know-how Articles, Technological Information
Technologies, especially scientific instruments, concurrently invoke and substantiate scales. There is the opening here for a ‘new serious about technology’ . We can still research the richness of ‘technology’ as an actors’ class while sharpening and pondering with ‘technology’ as an analytical class. Yet this was not an alliance of equals, and the ‘trouble with techne’ – that it had the potential to upset the social order – remained. Aristotle, Hugh of St Victor, Johann Beckmann and Talcott Parsons, for instance, had been instrumentalists. The Kultur-oriented German engineers of the nineteenth century, Lewis Mumford, and the Sixties critics of technology took the cultural view of expertise. Schatzberg has offered a beautiful service by tracing the conceptual history of know-how so clearly. This intervening power is the character, the essence if you will, of expertise. It is current in the sublime of planetary science but also the mundane of changing gear whereas driving a automobil...