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New Perspectives on the Science-Technology Relationship. Author: P.
Bakker. Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN:. Category: History. Page: 280.
View: 1228Historians and philosophers of technology are searching for new approaches to the study of the interaction between science and technology. New conceptual frameworks are necessary since the idea that technology is simply applied science is nothing short of a myth. The papers contained in this volume deal primarily with cognitive and social aspects of the science-technology issue.
One of the most salient features of these papers is that they show a major methodological shift in studying the interaction between science and technology. Discussions of the science-technology issue have long been dominated by the demarcartion problem and related semantic issues about the notions `science' and `technology', and the `technology is applied science' thesis. Instead of general `global' interpretation schemes and models of the interaction between science and technology, detailed empirical case studies of cognitive and institutional connections between `science' and `technology' constitute the hard core of this book. The book will be of interest to philosophers of science, historians and philosophers of technology and science and sociologists of science. From Technical Artefacts to Sociotechnical Systems. Author: Pieter E.
Vermaas,Peter Kroes,Maarten Franssen. Publisher: Morgan & Claypool Publishers. ISBN: 160845598X. Category: Technology & Engineering. Page: 126.
View: 5811In A Philosophy of Technology: From Technical Artefacts to Sociotechnical Systems, technology is analysed from a series of different perspectives. The analysis starts by focussing on the most tangible products of technology, called technical artefacts, and then builds step-wise towards considering those artefacts within their context of use, and ultimately as embedded in encompassing sociotechnical systems that also include humans as operators and social rules like legislation.
Philosophical characterisations are given of technical artefacts, their context of use and of sociotechnical systems. Analyses are presented of how technical artefacts are designed in engineering and what types of technological knowledge is involved in engineering.
And the issue is considered how engineers and others can or cannot influence the development of technology. These characterisations are complemented by ethical analyses of the moral status of technical artefacts and the possibilities and impossibilities for engineers to influence this status when designing artefacts and the sociotechnical systems in which artefacts are embedded. The running example in the book is aviation, where aeroplanes are examples of technical artefacts and the world aviation system is an example of a sociotechnical system. Issues related to the design of quiet aeroplane engines and the causes of aviation accidents are analysed for illustrating the moral status of designing, and the role of engineers therein. Table of Contents: Technical Artefacts / Technical Designing / Ethics and Designing / Technological Knowledge / Sociotechnical Systems / The Role of Social Factors in Technological Development / Ethics and Unintended Consequences of Technology. Author: James Trevelyan. Publisher: CRC Press.
ISBN:. Category: Technology & Engineering. Page: 612. View: 8051This book sets out the principles of engineering practice, knowledge that has come to light through more than a decade of research by the author and his students studying engineers at work.
Until now, this knowledge has been almost entirely unwritten, passed on invisibly from one generation of engineers to the next, what engineers refer to as “experience”. This is a book for all engineers. It distils the knowledge of many experts in one volume.
The book will help engineers enjoy a more satisfying and rewarding career and provide more valuable results for their employers and clients. The book focuses on issues often seen as “non-technical” in the world of engineering, yet it shows how these issues are thoroughly technical. Engineering firms traditionally have sought expert advice on these aspects from management schools, often regarding these aspects of engineering practice as something to do with psychology or organisational behaviour. The results are normally disappointing because management schools and psychologists have limited insight and understanding of the technical dimensions in engineering work.
Little if any of the material in this book can be obtained from management texts or courses. Management schools have avoided the technical dimension of workplace practices and that is precisely what characterises engineering practice. The technical dimension infuses almost every aspect of an engineer’s working day and cannot be avoided. That’s why this book is so necessary: there has not yet been any authoritative source or guidance to bridge the gap between inanimate technical issues and organisational behaviour. This book fills this gap in our knowledge, is based on rigorous research, and yet is written in a style which is accessible for a wide audience. Roland. Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media.
ISBN: 940114379X. Category: Science. Page: 383. View: 7681All technologies differ from one another. They are as varied as humanity's interaction with the physical world. Even people attempting to do the same thing produce multiple technologies.
For example, John H. White discovered more than l 1000 patents in the 19th century for locomotive smokestacks.
Yet all technologies are processes by which humans seek to control their physical environment and bend nature to their purposes. All technologies are alike. The tension between likeness and difference runs through this collection of papers. All focus on atmospheric flight, a twentieth-century phenomenon. But they approach the topic from different disciplinary perspectives. They ask disparate questions.
And they work from distinct agendas. Collectively they help to explain what is different about aviation - how it differs from other technologies and how flight itself has varied from one time and place to another.
The importance of this topic is manifest. Flight is one of the defining technologies of the twentieth century. Jay David Bolter argues in Turing's Man that certain technologies in certain ages have had the power not only to transform society but also to shape the way in which people understand their relationship with the physical world. 'A defining technology,' says Bolter, 'resembles a magnifying glass, which collects and focuses seemingly disparate ideas in a culture into one bright, sometimes piercing ray.' 2 Flight has done that for the twentieth century. Essays in a Pragmatist Spirit.
Author: Joseph C. Pitt. Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN: 204. Category: Philosophy. Page: 222.
View: 1213As science becomes more deeply embedded in a complex technological infrastructure, has this changed the relationship between the sciences and the various technologies that support them? As our technologies help shrink our world, can we restrict our ethical concerns or must we find a way to face the fact that we are now one world? What do new forms of architecture say about whom we are? Is the design process the new epistemological paradigm?
The answers to all of these is 'yes' according to Joseph C. Pitt (VirginaTech). Doing Philosophy of Technology presents an updated and integrated overview of the most important thinking from this prominent philosopher of technology. Throughout his career Joseph C. Pitt has defended the view that to say anything meaningful about the value of a technology one must know something about that technology and how it functions in the world. This starting point leads naturally to a pragmatist philosophical stance, since it is the real world consequences of introducing a technology that must be the basis for any further normative judgements.
In the book we find an extended set of arguments that challenge the idea that there are eternal philosophical issues that transcend the impacts that technologies make on human beings and their world. Rather, it is claimed that as our technologies transform our world they transform us and the kinds of questions we find important to answer. The University of Akron and the Emergence of the Polymer Age, 1909-2007. Author: Mark D. Bowles.
Publisher: The University of Akron Press. ISBN:. Category: Science. Page: 357. View: 9811While 'plastics' was a one-word joke in the 1967 movie The Graduate, plastics and other polymers have never been a laughing matter at the University of Akron, with its world-renowned College of Polymer Science and Polymer Engineering. Chains of Opportunity: The University of Akron and the Emergence of the Polymer Age, 1909-2007 tells the story of the university's rise to prominence in the field, beginning with the world's first academic course in rubber chemistry almost a century ago. Chains of Opportunity explores the university's pioneering contributions to rubber chemistry, polymer science, and polymer engineering.
It traces the school's interaction with Akron rubber giants such as Goodyear and Firestone, recounts its administration of the federal government's synthetic rubber program during World War II, and describes its role in the development and professionalization of the academic discipline in polymers. The University of Akron has been an essential force in establishing the polymer age that has become a pervasive part of our material lives, in everything from toys to biotechnology.
Adventures in Engineering. Author: Henry Petroski.
Publisher: Vintage. ISBN:. Category: Technology & Engineering. Page: 256. View: 5947This collection of informative and pleasurable essays by Henry Petroski elucidates the role of engineers in shaping our environment in countless ways, big and small. In Remaking the World Petroski gravitates this time, perhaps, toward the big: the English Channel tunnel, the Panama Canal, Hoover Dam, the QE2, and the Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia, now the tallest buildings in the world.
He profiles Charles Steinmetz, the genius of the General Electric Company; Henry Martyn Robert, a military engineer who created Robert's Rules of Order; and James Nasmyth, the Scotsman whose machine tools helped shape nineteenth-century ocean and rail transportation. Petroski sifts through the fossils of technology for cautionary tales and remarkable twists of fortune, and reminds us that failure is often a necessary step on the path to new discoveries. He explains soil mechanics by way of a game of 'rock, scissors, paper,' and clarifies fundamental principles of engineering through the spokes of a Ferris wheel. Most of all, Henry Petroski continues to celebrate the men and women whose scrawls on the backs of envelopes have immeasurably improved our world.