Toward a Pragmatic Philosophy of Technology Pt.2: Pragmatism, Philosophy of Technology

Let's start changing our relationship with technology

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko: https://www.pexels.com/photo/light-people-industry-metal-5846091/

There is a Spotify playlist that I am making for this series, check it out here. It will develop as I continue to refine this set of ideas.

Click here to see the first part of the series where I start highlighting the reasons why we need a pragmatic philosophy of technology.

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Pragmatism, a Reintroduction

Pragmatism suffers from a bad reputation. It has been used to describe utilitarian bad actors and to describe a sort of cold detachment in our media. We confound pragmatic and practical.

Suspend what definitions you have on pragmatism for a second (unless you’re a well-studied person on pragmatism, then please let me know where I err). I was listening to a part of The World of Philosophy series on “William James, Charles Pierce and American Pragmatism”, and this helped me to a better definition of pragmatism. Pragmatism is not about cold-blooded practicality, nor is it an anti-intellectual pursuit based only on “what works”. It is a philosophical theory embedded in critical thinking and validation through testing that emphasizes practical results and experience in determining what is valuable and true. Instead of being stuck in the quandary of a particular metaphysical question, pragmatism beings that back down into the world of consequences and experience.

There is a lot about pragmatism that I can’t cover here, including the ways that Peirce talks about the intersection of pragmatism and science, but more will come into play as I detail the method in the next part.

Philosophy of Technology

In 1986, a man by the name of Langdon Winner wrote a book, and in that book was the story of overpasses in Long Island, New York. Winner, among others, noticed that these overpasses only had a clearance of 9 feet, effectively discouraging buses from entering Long Island. To some, this would look like an urban planning mistake, or otherwise a lack of foresight. But there was another perspective. These bridges and roads were largely designed by a man named Robert Moses, a “master builder of roads, parks, bridges, and other public works” whose work spanned 5 decades of work in New York. Moses’ biographer, Robert Caro explains that the reasoning was a social one: Moses had an explicit bias against both poor people and Black people. This bias was a conscious part of the design actively excluding those who would travel by other-than-automobile means.

The book I’m referencing is Winner’s work "The Whale and the Reactor”. This book was the first I was acquainted with that dared to venture into technology as an object of philosophical analysis. For Winner, technology was any means of human aid. This definition spanned language and writing, to the thing we typically see as technology today such as computers and software. A philosophy of technology would critically analyze both the “nature and the significance” of these human aids.

We are all sleepwalking, according to Winner, not literally sleepwalking but in our dealings with technology. He argued that our pace of technological advancement has far surpassed our ability to cognitively analyze the effects of their consequences. We are stuck in a making and use the paradigm of technology, where the makers of technology (the tech firms, etc.) are responsible for using their expert knowledge to make a thing, and where users are tied to a good use/bad use dichotomy. I’ve heard the argument many times over and it goes something like this, “Did somebody do something bad with this technology? Yes. But it depends on who is using it whether it is bad.” In fact, this is a common refrain when we talk about guns; they say “Guns aren’t bad, it depends on who is using it.” Winner called this theory the “social determination of technology”, and states that it has “obvious wisdom” but also has shortcomings in suggesting that things in themselves don’t matter. A notion that Winner rejected.

We are in-relationship with technology constantly. Even as I type this out, I am expressing a relationship with myriad technologies: computers, keyboards, desks, electric lights, doors, phones, clocks, and the list goes on even down to the invisible bolts and screws that help keep this building that I’m writing in together.

The challenge, which I mentioned at the outset, is not that I have relationships with all of these technologies, but rather that I need to determine as a layperson (potentially) in this technology, whether I should become enrelationed to this technology.

Okay Okay, Now a Pragmatic Philosophy of Technology

So, you should be able to see by now that when I’m talking about a pragmatic philosophy of technology I’m not talking about a new way to characterize the nature of technology, nor am I talking about forming an abstract theory of technology. When I talk about a pragmatic philosophy of technology, I am not talking about creating a framing based on critical thinking and testing that helps us navigate the many ways that we as individuals and as groups enter and continue these relationships with technology.

In the final(?) part of this exploration, I will go into detail about my view of a pragmatic philosophy of technology and give you a couple of practices that will help you navigate your relationship with technology in a critical manner.