2.3 Knowledge vs practice
and uncontroversial that artisans could never possibly qualify as knowers with respect to their artefacts” (2011d, 286). Modern philosophers — including American pragmatist John Dewey and Floridi himself — argue the reason why Plato held
“maker’s knowledge” (2011d) under such poor esteem was because the Greek was “a slave-owning culture” (Haack2003, 781). And since it was slaves who were in charge of virtually all manual labour, scholarly gentlemen such as Plato considered it to be
“base, impure and degraded.” (Kelly2010, Chapter 1).
But despite his contempt for “maker’s knowledge”, Plato’s callousness was not orig-inally directed at craftsmen, but against,imitators whom “intentionally replace[d] re-ality by a chimera”, as philosopher Paul Feyerabend (1996, 24) noted.¹⁷ According to Floridi (2011d, 287), Plato’s downplaying oftechnêwas not intentional; it was more like
“collateral damage” produced by his attacks against his true foe: artists. In Plato’s view — to paraphrase Feyerabend (1996) — theoreticians found truths, artisans created use-ful objects, but artists did neither. In this sense, the artisan or craftsperson is merely a “first-class imitator” (Floridi2011d, 287) and therefore is not as dangerous as the ar-tisan. Since what the artisan does is making physical reproductions of ideal forms (created by thedemiurgeor god), the knowledge he can provide about such objects is necessarily imperfect. For Plato, the user of the object is better prepared to judge and give feedback regarding how good of an imitation is the object created by the artisan (2011d).
In hindsight, it is not difficult to argue against Plato’s characterisation. Because up-holding the Platonic dogma would be akin to suggesting that a person who buys an iPod knows more about it than Apple, or that the occasional user of Wikipedia is more acquainted with the information than those who generated it (2011d, 289). Nonethe-less, the Platonic dogma still had a profound impact in the development of Western thought — particularly over epistemology — well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Following the Platonic distinctions between epistêmê andtechnê, and be-tween apparent and real, came the oppositions bebe-tween body and mind, objective and subjective, and knowledge and opinion (Feyerabend1996, 23) that proved so influen-tial for Western thought. These separations became distinctive traits of what Floridi (2011d) refers to asthe user’s knowledgephilosophical tradition, which includes rational-ism, empiricism and logical positivism. To the “user’s knowledge” approach we owe the disregard for the epistemological and cultural role of technology throughout many centuries.
¹⁷(1924–1994) A key and controversial figure in contemporary philosophy of science.
2.3 Knowledge vs practice
2.3.1 The user’s knowledge tradition
Continental rationalism is one of the most influential “discursive practice[s]” (Coyne 1997, 18) in Western thought; it has generally been associated with René Descartes,¹⁸ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz¹⁹and Baruch Spinoza.²⁰ Like Platonism, rationalism saw cognition as independent of the material world; as something that belonged to an ab-stract plain and thus could dispense of a physical medium (1997, 18). This is the root of Cartesian dualism: the notion that body and mind existed independently of each other. Rationalism postulated that knowledge was either acquireda prioritrough in-tuition and deduction or that it was (to varying extents) innate and that experiences merely triggered its “remembrance”. For rationalists, experience could not provide the knowledge offered by reason and, therefore, it wasinferior.²¹In summary, rationalism argued the human mind must contain some innate structure that allowed it to acquire knowledge independently of experience. Rationalism believed in the superiority of theory over practice.
Conversely, British empiricism, which is commonly associated with John Locke,²² George Berkeley,²³and David Hume²⁴rejected the thesis that knowledge was either the product of intuition and deduction or that it was innate (Markie2015). For empiri-cists, knowledge was always acquireda posteriori; thus it always depended on sensorial experience. Like Aristotle, they endorsed the idea of the mind as atabula rasaor blank slate, i.e., as a receptor of sensory data devoid of innate structures (Gualeni2015, 29–
30; Markie2015). For the empiricists, sensory experience was the sole source of ideas, meaning they did not only argue in favour of “empirical knowledge” but postulated that knowledge, in general, couldonlybe acquired through experience. Despite priv-ileging experience as the source of knowledge, British empiricists were no different from Continental rationalists when it came to how they regarded practical skills and technical knowledge.
Both rationalists and empiricists simply assumed that passive, contemplative thought, as opposed to active practical engagement was the sole means to acquire knowledge.
¹⁸1596–1650
¹⁹1646–1716
²⁰1632–1677
²¹Descartes, for example, argued a priori knowledge is certain beyond any doubt, whereas knowledge acquired through our senses was always uncertain (Markie2015).
²²1632–1704
²³1685–1753
²⁴1711–1776
Their “user’s knowledge” approach remained highly influential well into the twentieth century, playing a crucial role in — amongst other things — the development of early philosophy of science. This is somewhat surprising since one of the precursors of both British empiricismandthe scientific method was Francis Bacon,²⁵a key figure for British Enlightenment. Unlike his successors — which include the most prominent empiricists already mentioned, Bacon was one of the few thinkers that recognised the crucial role technology plays in human life and development. Bacon continues to be a rare exception in this regard.
2.3.2 Bacon and the “maker’s knowledge” tradition
In Francis Bacon’s time philosophy had become stagnated; focused on hair-splitting discussions and calcified by centuries of scholasticism, its role had been reduced to de-bating morality. Meanwhile, civil life, spurred by the ideas of the Renaissance, was in-creasingly focused on the practical applications of knowledge. Understandably, “phi-losophy was widely regarded as a useless discipline which fostered argument for its own sake, never getting anywhere and never producing anything of value” (Gaukroger 2003, 634). Trained as a lawyer and skilled in rhetoric, Bacon found in these two ar-eas the inspiration for his inductive method (2003), the basis of which would become the scientific method. Contrary to Plato’s dismissal of sensory perception as illusory, Bacon believed experience was, in fact, crucial for reaching truths about the world since pure reasoning and speculation often lead to errors (Dusek 2006, 42). Bacon argued knowledge of Nature should be actively and methodically acquired through test and observation, and not passively deduced from ancient general and immutable principles. Ultimately, he believed an understanding of Nature’s principles along with knowledge of practical techniques were the most effective way to human progress.
Bacon took upon himself the task of reforming natural philosophy to give it a more practical purpose. To begin with, he sought to make natural philosophy the new core subject of conceptual analysis, thus displacing moral philosophy. At the time, natu-ral philosophy was roughly divided into two major domains: alchemy and scholastic natural philosophy (Gaukroger2003). Alchemy was esoteric but practical, and had lit-tle epistemic connection to established philosophy; Bacon considered it to be lacking in structure and consistency because most of its “results” were often the product of chance. Whereas the highly theoretical and systematic scholastic natural philosophy
²⁵1561–1626
2.3 Knowledge vs practice
was incapable of producing anything of practical use beyond its verbal sophistication (2003, 635). Bacon thus resolved to combine the strength of the two disciplines to for-mulate the basis of his project of philosophical reform. He believed the theoretical rigour of scholasticism and the practical application of alchemy could join forces to provide superior knowledge of Nature and the means to transform it for the good of society. In doing so, Bacon not only established the foundation of the scientific method but also set the tone for the modern conception of science as an intrinsically progressive and morally high-grounded enterprise — which intellectuals such as C. P.
Snow ([1964]2012) imagined and promoted.²⁶Given his emphasis on technical knowl-edge and practical experience, Bacon is, according to Floridi (2011d, 291), a precursor of the “maker’s knowledge” tradition.
The “maker’s knowledge” tradition constitutes a significative break from Platonic epistemology and its downplaying of experience. This philosophical strain may be traced back to Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy, which — amongst other things — postulated that true knowledge implied understanding thecausesbehind that which is known (Floridi 2011d). For Aristotle, genuine knowledge wasontic, meaning that it implied knowing the intrinsic nature of the known. Unlike Platonic rationalism (according to which, knowledge is innate or, at the very least, acquired through induction) Aristotle advanced the notion of the mind as a blank slate, thus empha-sising the crucial role played by direct observation and experience in the acquisition of knowledge. It followed that if true knowledge is ontological and it is not innate, then knowing something (an object or phenomenon) and being able to account for it means being able to construct and reconstruct it (2011d, 290). Nonetheless, it was not Aristotle but Bacon who arrived to this conclusion. Aristotle still saw the acquisition of knowledge as a passive process of discovery, but it was Bacon who is credited with realising that we can only know what we can make. Knowledge for the
“maker’s” tradition ispoietic: an act of (collective) creation. Unlike “user’s knowledge”
which is atemporal and subjective (the product of a highly intelligent and unique mind), maker’s knowledge is more similar to engineering: it is accumulative, it has a component of trial and error and, above all it is a collaborative process that spans across generations (Floridi2011a, 291).
²⁶SeeChapter 1.
2.3.3 Phenomenology and pragmatism
Two major representatives of the maker’s knowledge approach are phenomenology and pragmatism. These two philosophical traditions were developed more or less simultaneously, the former in Europe — particularly in Germany — by Edmund Husserl²⁷ and Martin Heidegger, and the latter in the United States by Charles S.
Peirce,²⁸William James,²⁹ and John Dewey. Both phenomenology and pragmatism regard putexperienceat the centre of their analyses (Ihde2009a), although for different reasons.
As its name implies, pragmatism emphasises practice over theory and action over contemplation. For pragmatists the more appropriate way to generate and evaluate knowledge is direct, concrete experience and practical implementation; not detached, abstract rationalisation. Whereas phenomenology emphasises not practice itself, but therepresentationof experience and how it affects practices.
Phenomenology is concerned with “how things appear”; with the description of human sensory experience as actual objects or phenomena³⁰ (Proudfoot and Lacey 2010, 300; Gualeni2015). Like the Aristotelian tradition, phenomenology’s approach is mainly ontological (Dahlstrom 2010). Phenomenology wishes to discern what is the (ultimate) essence of phenomena as experienced intuitively by the human mind.
Thus, phenomenology’s method is dialectical; it sees phenomena as a collaborative construction between the mind of the subject (with all of its conceptual and historical baggage) and the essential features of the object. Overall, phenomenology wishes to articulate how and why we conceptualise experiences the way we do, without focusing on mere emergent causal explanations.
For its part, pragmatism represents the strongest break with the Platonic and user’s knowledge tradition. Originally developed as a theory of meaning by Peirce, prag-matism was later expanded by James into a theory of truth — basically claiming that truth could be understood as “agreed reality” (Capps 2011). But it was Dewey who turned pragmatism into a general framework for analysing the social, epistemic, and pedagogical impact and role of science and technology. Unlike phenomenology,
prag-²⁷(1859–1938) German, born into a Jewish family in present-day Czech Republic, mentor of Heidegger.
In the latter days of his life, with the Nazis in power, he was forbidden to publish.
²⁸(1839–1914) Best known for his contributions to semiotics.
²⁹1842–1910
³⁰A phenomenon may be “any object, quality, or occurrence that is the subject of sensory experience”
(Gualeni2015, 167).