The TSK Email Forum
Thread 0026: On technological knowing
entry 0001:
LOK, p. 18: Each culture held out its own model of what was true or real or good; each asserted that it provided the best or most satisfying answers or experiences or products. . . . As such interactions have proliferated over the past decades, science and technology have emerged as the single most dominant model.
LOK, p. 19: As citizens of modern society, we follow a trend toward measuring success and achievement in materialistic terms, according to which this society's knowledge is the most advanced the world has ever known.
LOK, p. 19: The success of this style of knowledge has had an unanticipated consequence: increasing uniformity of thought and understanding. . . . People throughout the world have begun to behave in similar ways, and to share the same values and understanding as well.
LOK, p. 20: . . . there has also 'developed' a keen sense that technological knowledge has its limitations. We have learned that knowledge of how to accomplish specific ends does not necessarily prevent conflict or confusion; instead it may actually promote certain kinds of dislocation and danger. . . . We have begun to wonder whether the growth in technological knowledge may not conceal the absence of other kinds of knowing.
LOK, p. 21: The technological model for knowledge is at its most effective in showing us ways to attain desired ends within the material realm. Yet new possessions, advances in science, or even better health and longer lives may mean little if we lack the knowledge to choose our actions wisely, with a full understanding of their consequences. . . . it remains unclear whether it is bringing us any closer to understanding the purpose of human activity or to the goal of perfecting our capacities as human beings.
LOK, p. 22: . . . technological knowledge is neither good nor bad. Like all conventional ways of knowing, it simply lacks the capacity to offer human beings complete fulfillment.
LOK, p. 25: Yet this same trend toward homogeneity may lead to the loss of a precious heritage of cultural diversity that in the past sustained a wide variety of ways of knowing. And adopting uniform standards may have the effect of allowing well-established techniques and understandings to prevail over innovative alternatives.
LOK, p. 26: . . . forms of utilitarian thought increasingly form the basis for human actions and interactions
LOK, p. 27: Benefiting from technology requires matching the growth in 'knowledge technology' with a growth in the knowledge that guides this technology. . But the steadily accelerating momentum of change subordinates more reflective ways of knowing to the simple need to cope with what is happening, leaving little opportunity for new forms of knowledge to develop.
LOK, p. 28: Because 'progress', 'modernization', and change have become good in themselves, the possibility for new ways of knowing is assigned to the future. Technology promotes a fascination with 'what will come next', turning new knowledge into a product to be acquired rather than a faculty to be exercised and developed. . . . Questions about the purpose of our lives and the meaning of our actions cannot be answered by innovations in 'knowledge technology'; in fact, such technology tends to lead inquiry in a direction that leaves the fundamental questions unresolved and even unacknowledged. . . . Technological knowledge leaves its own way of knowing outside the scope of its inquiry. The consequence is that knowledge itself develops 'unknowingly', tracing with an ever-accelerating momentum outlines whose larger patterns remain unknown.
LOK, p. 29: Despite proclaiming itself 'value-neutral', technology inevitably provides a set of standards and values. . . . In suggesting that the technological way of knowing is uniquely competent to advance our knowledge, it confines the range of the knowable and the capacities of human intelligence.
LOK, p. 33: The technological model proclaims that knowledge is about ways to obtain results. How those results are to be applied is a matter for personal belief or conviction. The value or benefit of the results--their meaning in a larger context--is not presented as a question for knowledge. The technological model thus affirms the existence of two separate realms: the 'objective' world of results and the 'subjective' world of personal conviction and concern. Knowledge is understood to apply only in the objective realm; in the subjective realm of desires and feelings, knowledge has no role to play. Since issues of value and meaning fit into the subjective realm, they recede from view as possible subjects of knowledge or topics of public discourse.
LOK, p. 34: the 'fact' of identity itself, to which all knowledge is subordinated, is inaccessible to [technological] knowledge.
LOK, p. 35: The division between the subjective and objective is constantly reinforced and applied in new domains. . . . the self is guided not by awareness, but by the need to gain power over its circumstances so that it can obtain what it wants. . . . The split between the two realms places the self in a position where its time and space are confined and its knowledge fallible.
LOK, p. 36: With knowledge confined in this way, the self finds itself situated in a world given in advance. The role of cognition is to describe or 'make use of' this 'given' world. . . . Encoded in the rules and interpretations imposed by thought as a way of linking subjective and objective, 'knowing' loses its intimate connection to 'being'.
LOK, p. 37: When new knowledge does arise, it is understood as being bound to the 'objective' realm, which is not the realm of the self. Thus, such knowledge does not directly affect the self in its being.
LOK, p. 38: Valuable as the scientific methodology is within its own sphere, it accepts as a given the domain of not-knowing that technological knowledge posits at the outset. The structures of identity, value, and meaning remain beyond the scope of inquiry.
KTS, pp. 57-8: The knowledge that this first-level 'order' supports is knowledge of the already known--knowledge as technology, reflecting the limitations of first-level time and space. Devoted to the need to cope, technological knowledge produces a steady stream of new facts, new theories, and new solutions. But it also perpetuates the patterns of need and not-knowing. Programmed mechanically in advance, it can make no sense of the prospect for a new way of knowing.
LOK, p. 79: The technological model confines any potential
for deeper knowing to the realm of private insight, from which
it can be shared only as ideas and information: the content of
a prospective belief.
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