Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: Few research projects have been as influential in their area as "The dual nature of technical artefacts" has been in the philosophy of technology.Starting in 2000 and led by Peter Kroes and Anthonie Meijers, the project group set out to investigate the nature of technical artefacts.Their work has become important in at least two ways.First, it set a methodological standard for the philosophy of technology.It did this by showing that the discipline becomes much richer when we delve into the details of actual engineering practices such as design, modelling, and standardization.We need bird's-eye views of the relations between technology, science, and society, but these grand views become much more interesting if they are informed by frequent dives into the minutiae of actual engineering.Of course the dual nature project was not the first to investigate engineering practice philosophically, but it was instrumental in instigating an "empirical turn" that has made the philosophy of technology much more relevant for engineering and the technological sciences.The project group's second major achievement was to introduce a new and fruitful approach to the metaphysics of technical artefacts.This approach grew out of dissatisfaction with previous accounts that were found to be inadequate.On the one hand, technical artefacts have often been described in merely physical and structural terms.That is clearly insufficient.You have not understood what a set of chimes is if you only know how it is constructed (with hanging metal tubes of different lengths).A set of chimes has to be understood in relation to its function as a musical instrument.
Author: Sven Ove Hansson
Institution: KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: General Social Sciences
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2001629325