HESS, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY IN A MULTI-CULTURAL WORLD Introduction Science, technology and innovations ethical dilemmas political conflicts economic impacts. Interdisciplinary nature of STS discipline • Historians • Historians of science • Philosophers • Political scientists Sociologists Anthropologists 1. Hess 2. E. T. Hall Social Constructivism and Cultural Relativism Scientific theories of are social constructs 1. Inclusion/ Exclusion: Decisions as to what to include and exclude are socially driven decisions. 2. Observations. What people expect to observe, are able to observe, and want to observe are all shaped in part by their theories and assumptions and maybe even how they are wired, 3. Methodology, qualitative and quantitative = f ( personal paradigm, social paradigms, cultural paradigms, etc.) 4. Scientific method also a social construct T. S. Kuhn Karl Popper Paul Feyerabend Hess’s Culture-and-Power Perspective Classical Influences Karl Marx Karl Wittfogel Max Weber Thomas Merton
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HESS, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY IN A MULTI-CULTURAL WORLD
IntroductionScience, technology and innovations
ethical dilemmas political conflicts economic impacts.
Interdisciplinary nature of STS discipline• Historians• Historians of science• Philosophers• Political scientists Sociologists Anthropologists
1. Hess2. E. T. Hall
Social Constructivism and Cultural RelativismScientific theories of are social constructs
1. Inclusion/ Exclusion: Decisions as to what to include and exclude are socially driven decisions.
2. Observations. What people expect to observe, are able to observe, and want to observe are all shaped in part by their theories and assumptions and maybe even how they are wired,
3. Methodology, qualitative and quantitative = f ( personal paradigm, social paradigms, cultural paradigms, etc.)
4. Scientific method also a social construct T. S. Kuhn Karl Popper Paul Feyerabend
Theories and Artifacts as Technototems.Theories with content as background tells about
The person who formulated the theory The culture in which the person lives or lived Temporal cultures
o Ancient Greece o Middle Ages o Today
Geographical cultureo United Stateso Chinao India
Hess: The Origins of Western Science: Social Constructs
Science The History of Science
Technototems in the Scientific RevolutionMachine Totems:
Example I Example II Example III
Example of a Personal Construct
Is the lady spinning clockwise or counter clockwise or both? Is the direction of her spin objective or subjective? What is constructed and what is not?
The Scientific Revolution as a Technototem Theoretical Totems = Likely Stories
How to do a reconstruction or tell a likely story IGreeks
Pythagoras Plato Archimedes Aristotle
Romans Galen Engineering
Likely Story: Paradigm Shift Crisis Anomalies Paradigm Conflict Heroes of Modern Science
1. Copernicus 2. Descartes
Plenum Geometry
3. Francis Bacon4. Galileo
inclined plane satellites of Jupiter
5. Kepler6. Newton
EVEN KUHN’S INTERPRETATION OF THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION IS
A LIKELY STORY “The story has been told and retold so many times that it has, to some extent, obtained some of the characteristics of a legend or myth. As with a legend, the story has a historical basis, but the protagonists have achieved a heroic, larger-than-life quality. As with many myths, the story has an etiological quality. In other words, it tells us how something came to be: it is about the origin of modern science and, to some extent, modern society. Like myths and legends, the story is no longer associated with a specific author but has, instead, passed into oral and popular tradition where, like a smooth pebble in a stream, it has become rounded over by the waters of popular consciousness. Rough edges-the historical details that do not fit-have been polished out of the story. What emerges in their place is a narrative of the triumph of reason, which, like a torch passed on from one runner to another in a relay race, is passed on from one heroic Great White Man to another.”
o U.S. Behaviorism and medical psychiatryo France: More Freudiano Image
Inventor of the Calculus:o U.S. and England = Isaac Newtono France: Christian Huygenso Germany: Gottfried Leibniz
6) Nature vs NurtureHerrnstein and Murray
The Bell Curve Psychologists Descriptive Statistical determinists Political debate: government social programs vs laissez faire
Stephen J. Gould The Mismeasure of Man Biologist Socialist Evolutionary biologist Personal life Son with a learning disability
7) ConclusionHess's main contention is that while we are taught in the textbooks that science and technology are objective practices, these examples show that they are not. They are human constructs and because of the human element, the pure and noble pursuit of science and technology without human biases is a myth. These biases may be determined by cultural factors such as race, gender, politics and nationality.
Age of Asian Technology (AD-700-1100)Geographical Areas
China West Asian Countries Iran Iraq South Asia = India
Causes for technological advancesPopulation increase
Cropping Patterns : dry surface soil to heavy wet black soil
Irrigation Farm technology Necessity is the mother of Invention
Pacey Thesis: Mutual Dialogue Luxury goods Silk = E W Paper = E W Windmills W (Iran) E McNeil and Butterfly Affect
Hydraulic engineering Sophisticated canal system with locks Grand Canal Linked Beijing with the South Replaced ramps with slipways with Hydraulic pound locks = government invention and distribution
China as a hydraulic Society = Wittfogel Thesis Bureaucracy Control of Iron Industry = control of military Control of labor force Agricultural science = champa rice Control of tax trade Babylon (Iran, Iraq) Egypt
Iron Industry China Hebei and Henan H & H also had coal Techniques Crucibles in coal-fired furnaces Blast furnaces = greater production and expansion
Less Civilized Empire: the Liao Threatened Southern Empire Red Cliff War technologies Army of 1 million
War and Technology Crossbow Incendiary weapons (gun powder) Mass production of Heibei iron 1000s of suits of armour 16 million iron arrow heads
Outsider Response Jin (or Jurchen Tarters) Nomadic Peoples Little Technology Tactics Cut canals Disrupted iron works Destroyed infrastructure
Geography is Destiny Shift to the south in agriculture (Gladwell aside) Champa Rice = quick growing Can be planted early = two seasons Uses less water than other varieties Government active in promoting rich = authoritarian government since early times
Agricultural Technology Moldboard plow versus scratch plow Iron shares Iron harrows Winnowing machines Mills
West Asia: Iran and Iraq Hydraulic Society Tigris and Euphrates As advanced or more advanced than China Dams Canals Irrigation works
West Asian Irrigation Impacted by Roman engineering Roman army corps of engineers captured by Persians Qanats (tunnel irrigation) Necessity = mother of invention Building, maintenance and repair = mother of bureaucracy
Iraqi and Iranian Irrigation Navigable rivers Transport canals Irrigation canals Dams Water wheels = power
Cane crushing Fulling woolen colth Pulp for paper making Corn milling Water raising mills Windmill
Cultural Impacts Indian chemists isolated saltpeter gunpowder Buddhism and bells Buddhism and print Moveable type around 1000 Spread of technical information
Technological Diversity Printing not adopted in India or Islamic World Creative societies are diverse in their technological applications Governmental institutions Entrepreneurs Agriculture innovation Technology is lost when conquered by a less civilized conqueror Decline of the Roman Empire and Roman/Greek knowledge and engineering
Invasions and the Decline of Technology Disrupted infrastructure = irrigation Nomads Destruction of intellectual centers In Middle East, scholars moved West to Spain and Morocco
Barbarian Contributions Continuation of Dialogue Mongol bow, harness and stirrup Technology that defeated massive Chinese armies Islamic domination of north India
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Technology and Science ISLAMIC FINE TECHNOLOGY “A Thousand and One Nights” Gardens of Babylon Fountains Astronomical Devices Astrolabe Advanced astronomers
Su Song Clock Drive by Water Wheel Indians and Astronomy Ptolemy Direct correlation behind fine technology and scientific progress
Social Theories: Marshall McluhanMarshal McLuhan (1911-1980)Quotes:
With telephone and TV it is not so much the message as the sender that is”sent.” Money is the poor man’s credit card. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards intothe future. The road is our major architectural form. When you are on the phone or on the air, you have no body. The future of the book is the blurb
Books Understanding Media The Medium is the Massage The Gutenberg Galaxy
Basic ideas:The dominant technology or mode of communication determines our culture
Revising Understanding Media for a second edition Data for the Tetrads: = folders McCluhan had on technology Folders contained only artifacts, that is, things that are humanly made.
Bacon and Vico Francis Bacon and the Four Idols: Giambattista Vico and the New Science
Bias of communication; Rhetoric = oral discourse to persuade Scientific discourse = objective discourse to persuade in a different manner
Bacon and Empirical MethodThere are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment ... And this way is now in fashion The other derives axioms from the senses and from particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried
1725, Giambattista Vico Scienza Nuova (1725): Theories as Social Constructs'But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from
ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind.'
Hess, consciously or unconsciously is retrieving VicoMcLuhan is basing his Laws: on the ancient and medieval laws of grammar
Grammatical Mathematical Logical
The template for all media (hardware or software) are human thoughts.Grammar = the science of thinkingMedieval curriculum
Trivium Quadrivium
James Joyce: Finnegan’s Wake Tetrads are not real “laws” but a form of discourse to try to get one to understand technology in a different manner:
Non-linear Evokes sensibility Looks at technologies more as poets, artists, and (in the old days grammarians)
Purpose again from Vico and Bacon is to modify our way of thinking to clear the mind of human constructs.
Bacon: New Organum Vico: New Science McCluhan: Laws of Media
Each chapter is written in a different style C 1-2: relatively breezy, and it and C3 narrative style. C4 moves towards poetry,
5 chapters form a mosaic of approaches to a single theme. Introduction to Laws of Media Toute vue des choses qui n'est pas strange est fausse.-- Valery... our concern was speech, and speech impelled us to purify the dialect of the tribe-- T.S. Eliot. 'Little Gidding'
o virtual reality = objective reality. It is a science of content and messageso “The message is the medium”
Questions Tetrads answer:o What is the content of this technology?o What is the message of this technology?o What is the ground of this technology?o What is the figure of this technology?o Where did this technology come from?o Where is this technology going?
Tetrad on Space:Kant = time and space are categories of the mind
Visual Space? Acoustic Space
Figure and Ground an area of attention (figure) a very much larger area of inattention (ground).
Difficulty of studying the ground Scientists study the figure of things Artist explores the ground by creating an anti-environment = anti-figure, anti-ground
The Divine Comedy... is therefore a constant reminder to the poet, of the obligation to explore, to find words for the inarticulate, to capture those feelings which people can hardly even feel, because they have no words for them; and at the same time a reminder that the explorer beyond the frontiers of ordinary consciousness will only be able to return and report to his fellow-citizens if he has all the time a firm grasp upon the realities with which they are already acquainted (To Criticize the Critic, 134)
Image Divine Comedy
Figure = nonsense Ground = psychology of our hopes and aspirations, fears, etc.
Biases of the senses: Blind people “see” things differently Ear Touch
Jacques Lusseyran and tactility
If I put my hand on the table without pressing it, I knew the table was there but knew nothing about it. To find out, my fingers had to bear down, and the amazing thing is that the pressure was answered by the table at once. Being blind I thought I should have to go out to meet things, but I found that they came to meet me instead. I have never had to go more than halfway, and the universe became the accomplice of all my wishes if my fingers pressed the roundness of an apple, each one with a different weight, very soon I could not tell whether it was the apple or my fingers which were heavy. I didn't even know whether I was touching it or it was
touching me. As I became part of the apple, the apple became part of me. And that was how I came to understand the existence of things. (And There Was Light, 27)
Lusseyran continued Objective reality as a human construct = ' modifications of his own mind,' (Vico) Visual space = ocular; acoustic space = tactile.
As soon as my hands came to life they put me in a world where everything was an exchange of pressures. These pressures gathered together in shapes, and each one of the shapes had meaning. As a child I spent hours leaning against objects and letting them lean against me. Any blind per- ' son can tell you that this gesture, this exchange, gives him a satisfaction too deep for words.Touching the tomatoes in the garden, and really touching them, touching the walls of the house, the materials of the curtains or a clod of earth is surely seeing them as fully as eyes can see. But it is more than seeing them, it is tuning in on them and allowing the current they hold to connect with one's own, like electricity. To put it differently, this means an end of living in front of things and a beginning of living with them. Never mind if the word sounds shocking, for this is love. You cannot keep your hands from loving what they have really felt, moving continually, bearing down and finally detaching themselves, the last perhaps the most significant motion of all. Little by little, my hands discovered that objects were not rigidly bound within a mold. It was form they first came in contact with, form like a kernel. But around this kernel objects branch out in all directions. I could not touch the pear tree in the garden just by following the trunk with my fingers, then the branches, then the leaves, one at a time. That was only a beginning, for in the air, between the leaves, the pear tree still continued, and I had to move my hands from branch to branch to feel the currents running between them. (And There Was Light, 27-8)
Return to the Tetrads:
'What general, verifiable (that is, testable) statements can be made about all media?' We were surprised to find only four, here posed as questions:
o What does it enhance or intensify?o What does it render obsolete or displace?o What does it retrieve that was previously obsolesced?o What does it produce or become when pressed to an extreme?
Bibliography New Technology: Take Today: The Executive as Dropout:
hardware to software,job-holding to role-playing,centralism to decentralism, in patterns of management and of corporate culture. Enhancements (extensions) and reversals are fundamental to War and Peace in the Global VillageThe Mechanical BrideCulture Is Our Business. The Bride examines advertising before TV had hit North America, CB after.The Gutenberg Galaxy spells out in detail, as it were, one chapter of the later Understanding Media the like needs to be done for each of the others. But the Galaxy primarily reports on the ascendancy of vision over the other senses. Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and in Painting (with Harley Parker)takes the study of the senses to their home ground - the arts - and demonstrates how to use aphorism, probe, and juxtaposition as study techniques. Another approach is tried (with Dick Schoeck) in Voices of Literature. That indispensable tool, figure/ground (and interval, for transformation) analysis, appears in various later works, such as Take Today and City as Classroom (with Kathryn Hutchon). The two laws of obsolescence and retrieval - the whole complex retrieval and renewal process - formed the basis of the study (with Wilfrid Watson) From Cliche to Archetype. Conventional - Old - science, entirely dominated by visual bias, cannot get a foothold in these areas. This New Science is at once a synthesis and a leap into radically new territory. We subjoin it to the Novum Organum of Bacon and the Scienza Nuova of Vico and to the long tradition of which they form a part.
