I was once invited to produce a survey of recent work on "Pragmatism and Technology."  I decided (Durbin, 1995), to focus on a small handful of philosophical contributions that approach the understanding and control of contemporary science-based technology pragmatically.  I further limited myself to contributions of North American philosophers.  I here repeat that survey, with the aim of expanding on what I said in chapter I; some philosophers have made positive contributions to the solution of technosocial problems.   However, as I said earlier (1995), I think that lessons can be learned from contrasting the decidedly real-world pragmatism of some North American philosophers with more abstract, theoretical, or foundational critiques of modern technology by European philosophers.

    Some European philosophers that I would propose for contrast are Gilbert Hottois (especially in his Le paradigme bioéthique:  Une éthique pour la technoscience, 1990), Hans Jonas (especially Das Prinzip Verantwortung, 1979), and José Sanmartín (especially Los nuevos redentores:  Reflexiones sobre la ingeniería genética, la sociobiología y el mundo feliz que prometen, 1987).

    I do not summarize the work of these authors here.  Each is well known generally (Jonas, of course, did most of his philosophizing in his later years in the USA), and each is especially well known in a particular European culture--French, German, or Spanish, respectively.  I do not here make any explicit comparisons and contrasts.  What I do offer is a summary of some key North American contributions--leaving the actual comparisons and contrasts to the reader.

    It can be said, preliminarily, that Hottois, Jonas, and Sanmartín all subject recent technologies--and most especially genetic engineering--to fundamental, even foundational, critiques.

    Jonas's critique, the first and best known of the three, explicitly links his to a post-Kantian new categorical imperative based on our fears of recent technology's unprecedented expansion of human powers.

    Hottois goes even further, appealing to an ethical impulse deeper than any particular traditional ethical approach--which ethical impulse (he argues) is fundamentally threatened by "technoscientific" (especially genetic?) threats to what it means to be human (or ethical, at the root level).

    Sanmartín's views explicitly reject any appeal to such "deep" philosophical reflections, but he still insists on fundamental transformations of social norms (making them more responsive, for example, in the case of genetic testing, to the basic rights of those tested).

    All of these philosophers are interested--it is even fair to say, are passionately interested--in practical changes in our way of life in a technoscientific world.  But, to the North American philosophers to be discussed, none of their approaches, however practical, is pragmatic.

    Here I need to pause to mention some meanings of "pragmatism" and "pragmatic."  So far as I know, Immanuel Kant was the first philosopher to use the adjective pragmatische; this was in one of his titles, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, 1798 (and it may have been no more than a stylistic variant on the praktischen of the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 1788).

    In the two centuries since, "pragmatic"--and, later, "pragmatism"--have had many different meanings in the philosophical literature.  These range from "pragmatics," as the third subdivision of formal semantics (syntax, semantics, and pragmatics), to the names of particular philosophical traditions--whether European (for example, Giovanni Papini in Italy and Edouard Le Roy in France) or North American.

    In addition to the variety of philosophical uses, the term "pragmatic" also has more than one usage in ordinary, everyday language.  Some people are said to be pragmatic in a good sense--they manage to get a great many things done efficiently; while other usages are more pejorative:  "He is (merely) pragmatic, but she has a longer-range view of things."  And so on.

    Here, I reserve the term "pragmatism" for the school of American Pragmatists (especially John Dewey and George Herbert Mead), including recent disciples.  "Pragmatic" is the adjective I use to describe the work of some philosophers who, without being Pragmatists in that sense, nonetheless follow Dewey's advice, pitching in and working directly with non-philosophers to solve particular social problems--here, problems of our high-technology contemporary society.

    1. Larry Hickman's John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology (1990):

    I begin my survey with this book for several reasons.  The first and most obvious is that its subject is John Dewey, the philosopher most people think of first when discussing American Pragmatism.  A second reason is that Larry Hickman successfully reintroduces Dewey's voice--mostly neglected until now--into recent debates, European and American, about contemporary technology.  Still another reason is that, of all Dewey disciples writing today, Hickman is most sympathetic to the kinds of European approaches to problems of technology I have mentioned for purposes of contrast.

    Scholarship on Dewey in North American philosophical circles in recent decades has mushroomed (see, for example, Morris and Shapiro, 1993; and Westbrook, 1991).  Hickman acknowledges this, leaning (for instance) very often on the fine intellectual biography of Dewey by Ralph Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey's Conception of Philosophy (1986)--where Sleeper concludes that the one consistent theme that unites all of Dewey's contributions is meliorism:  the claim, namely, that philosophy both ought to and does contribute to the improvement of the human condition.  What Hickman contributes to this flood of recent Dewey studies is the claim that, for Dewey, philosophy (rightly understood) and technology (understood as problem solving within the context of real-life conflicting social values) are identical.

    Two quotes summarize Hickman's arguments.  The first:

Inquiry was reconstructed by Dewey as a productive skill whose artifact is knowing.  He argued that knowing is characterizable only relative to the situations in which  specific instances of inquiry take place, and that it is an artifact produced in order to effect or maintain control of a region of experience. . . . Knowing is thus provisional . . . [and] the goal of inquiry is not epistemic certainty, as it has been taken to be by most of the philosophical tradition since Plato (p. xii).

Of the three giants of twentieth-century philosophy--Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey--only Dewey took it as his responsibility to enter into the rough-and-tumble of public affairs, and only Dewey was able to construct a responsible account of technology (p. xv).

    Hickman's book can stand up to philosophical criticisms on its own, but I want here, parenthetically, to provide two argument sketches that show why the Dewey/Hickman model is a particularly good one for philosophers of technology -- and philosophers generally.

    First, a social-scientific argument based on contributions of Dewey's collaborator, G. H. Mead:  There simply is no intellectually satisfying alternative to the Pragmatists' sociology-of-knowledge challenge to all versions of epistemology (and their behavioral-psychology parallels).

    As Mead argued with respect to scientific knowing (see 1964) -- and he and Dewey extended, elsewhere, to all forms of human knowing, even behavioral scientists who may think they are confirming individualistic stimulus-response models of knowing in their laboratories are and must be involved in a group process (confirmation).

    Similarly, all knowledge claims are group-specific and goal-directed -- not mere reactions to external stimuli (whether ideas, sensations, or anything else of that sort, whether proposed by philosophers or behavioral scientists) -- and the goals are always related to living meaningfully within the relevant group.

    The fullest elaboration of this argument is provided in Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality (1966).  That remarkable book is an excellent summary of philosophical theories converging on the Pragmatist point of view (see the book's notes), but the book's subtitle, A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (together with explicit claims made by the authors), indicates that their primary intent is to provide an empirically testable, sociological account of how real knowing actually takes place in real life.

    Second, a phenomenological argument:  Since the social science argument is controversial, a second, quasi-philosophical argument may be in order.  It is best exemplified in another work of Peter Berger, The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (1973).  There Berger and co-authors defend a view that "the sociology of knowledge always deals with consciousness in the context of a specific social situation" (p. 16).

    Here is a summary of their phenomenological method:

 Although consciousness is a phenomenon of subjective experience, it can be objectively described because its socially significant elements are constantly being shared with others.  Thus the sociology of knowledge, approaching a particular situation, will ask:  What are the distinctive elements of consciousness in this situation?  How do they differ from the consciousness to be found in other situations?  Which elements of consciousness [i.e., of particular consciousnesses] are essential or intrinsic, in the sense that they cannot be "thought away"?  (p. 14)

    In much more elaborate form, the attacks of Hubert Dreyfus (1992) and John Searle (1992) against artificial intelligence make the same sorts of assumptions.

    Dewey maintains explicitly in Reconstruction in Philosophy (1948) that:  "Philosophy grows out of, and in intention is connected with, human affairs."  And Dewey goes on:

 [This] means more than that philosophy ought in the future to be connected with the crises and the tensions in the conduct of human affairs.  For it is held [here] that in effect, if not in profession, the great systems of Western philosophy all have been thus motivated and occupied.

    My argument presupposes a degree of confidence that something in fact can be achieved--and is being achieved--through these activist efforts.

    This approach has led me to describe mine (see chapter I, above) as a "social work model" of good philosophizing--a characterization I think Dewey and Mead might have approved.  The argument I offer in its favor is not philosophical in any academic sense.  It assumes the urgency of the social problems that have drawn most of my colleagues into philosophy of technology--from environmental catastrophes, to major biotechnology threats, to widespread computer-based invasions of privacy.  Problems of this sort have always bothered philosophers of technology, from Karl Marx and neo-Marxists to Martin Heidegger and neo-Heideggerians, plus a whole range of younger philosophers in the Society for Philosophy and Technology and elsewhere--including applied ethicists.  Based on the urgency of the problems and the ineffectual character of the ethical responses of most of these philosophers, my argument (such as it is) is simple:  only progressive social activism seems to offer any hope of solving any of these urgent problems, even limitedly and temporarily.

    Not all contemporary North American philosophers claiming to be followers of Dewey would subscribe to this argument, but at least some would be sympathetic (see West, 1989).

    I turn next to three philosophers who do not claim to be Deweyans but who have done what Dewey proposes; that is, they have become activists, deeply involved with other activists in dealing with major contemporary technosocial problems (in North America, for the most part).

    2a. Kristin Shrader-Frechette's Burying Uncertainty:  Risk and the Case against Geological Disposal of Nuclear Waste (1993):

    Almost since the beginning of her philosophical career, Kristin Shrader-Frechette has been involved with a variety of technology assessment and environmental impact assessment commissions, first at the state level and then at higher and higher levels up to the Federal level in Washington, D.C.  Indeed, I think it is a fair guess to say that no North American philosopher has been involved in more such committees.  In some ways this is strange, because, since the appearance of Nuclear Power and Public Policy (1980; discussed below), Shrader-Frechette has often been accused of being not only anti-nuclear but anti-technology in general--a charge she has repeatedly felt that she has to combat.  But several characteristics--the fairness of her arguments, the expertise that she brings to discussions, and the fact that she always tries to make a positive contribution--keep getting her invited back again and again.

    The latest book, Burying Uncertainty (in many ways the most detailed of her books), is a good example of all of these qualities.  Four-fifths of the book constitute her critique of the major plan to bury nuclear wastes deep in a mountain in Nevada.  The critique includes many by-now-familiar features of her arguments:  the risk assessments used to justify the plan are faulty because they hide certain value judgments; the subjective risk assessments used are in fact mistaken in many cases; faulty inferences are drawn from these faulty assessments; there are fatal but unavoidable uncertainties in predictions of the geological suitability of the site; and the entire venture violates an American sense of fair play and equity, especially with regard to the people of the state of Nevada.  These are her conclusions.  The arguments in support of them are meticulous, even-headed, and unemotional in every case.

    This does not mean, of course, that they have been or will be viewed as such by Federal officials, including scientists, especially bureaucrats in the Department of Energy with vested interests in pushing the official project to completion; she has even been heckled when presenting her arguments in their presence.

    A second notable point is that Shrader-Frechette knows what she is talking about; indeed, her knowledge of both geology and the risk assessment process is remarkable in a philosopher in these days of academic specialization--though her critics, naturally, maintain that some of her geological claims are irrelevant and that her accounts of particular risk assessments are biased against official government experts.

    One bias Shrader-Frechette does not attempt to hide is in favor of equity; she has even given one of her more general studies a subtitle that underscores this bias:  Risk and Rationality:  Philosophical Foundations for Populist Reforms (1991).  This might make her sympathetic toward some aspects of Dewey's progressivism, but the social philosopher she invokes most often is John Rawls and his contractarian, neo-Kantian theory of justice as fairness.

    What typifies Shrader-Frechette's approach more than anything, however, and what clearly makes her a welcome addition to any discussion (including the discussion, here, of how to deal fairly with the urgent problem of finding a place to put highly toxic nuclear wastes), is her insistence on being more than just a critic.  She feels it necessary to make a positive contribution to the discussion; as she says, one purpose of the book is "to provide another alternative to the two current options of either permanently disposing of the waste or rendering it harmless" (p. 2).

    Admittedly providing only a sketch (one-fifth of the book versus the four-fifths critiquing current policy as epistemologically faulty and ethically unfair), what Shrader-Frechette argues for, in place of permanent disposal, is placing "high-level radwastes in negotiated (with the host community [or communities]), monitored, retrievable, storage facilities" for at least a hundred years.

    It is too early to tell whether Shrader-Frechette's book will have any impact, whether on blindered Department of Energy scientists and officials, or on public officials more generally--or even on the educated public (except perhaps in Nevada).  But one thing is clear now:  if a philosopher were to choose to follow Dewey's advice, to get involved actively in trying to solve some urgent technosocial problem like the disposal of nuclear wastes, he or she would have to search far and wide for a better model than Kristin Shrader-Frechette as she makes her case in this book.

    2b. Shrader-Frechette's Nuclear Power and Public Policy:  The Social and Ethical Problems of Fission Technology (1980):

    This earlier venture into the epistemological/ methodological fallacies of nuclear policy, along with its ethical inequities, is clearly more strident than Burying Uncertainty.  There is already all the care--to get the facts right, to deal with risk assessors on their own terms (even when pointing out their errors), and to argue carefully and meticulously--that one finds later.  Also, as later, the ultimate aim is to make an equity-based ethical claim; but here it is reduced to little more than a dozen pages.  And, though Shrader-Frechette, when she wrote this book, already had an exemplary record of working with assessment teams, this early venture does not show the same degree of care as the later one when it comes to understanding and appreciating the motives and feelings of her opponents.

    2c. Shrader-Frechette's Science Policy, Ethics, and Economic Methodology (1985):

    About midway between Nuclear Power and Burying Uncertainty, Shrader-Frechette broadened the scope of her critique, taking on the fallacies and hidden assumptions of a whole host of technology and environmental-impact assessments.  Science Policy is an extended critique of risk/cost/benefit analysis, the most widely used methodology in these various assessments.  In this book, Shrader-Frechette points out general and specific problems and she makes an extended case for what she calls regional equity--avoiding, where possible, imposing risks or costs on people in particular geographical regions.

    In this middle one of the three books mentioned here, Shrader-Frechette clearly moves toward providing positive alternatives to the methodologies she has criticized.  She offers two:  an ethically-weighted version of risk/cost/benefit analysis, and a technology tribunal--a public procedure for weighting equitably the competing values that different scientists bring to their risk/benefit analyses.  Shrader-Frechette is here, then, clearly moving toward the positively collaborative attitude so much in evidence in Burying Uncertainty--though perhaps the generality of the argument, focusing on a variety of assessments, probably dooms the book to have less of an impact than the later book.  (Nuclear Power may have had more of an impact, though it also gave more ammunition to opponents accusing her of being anti-technology.)

    3. Carl Cranor's Regulating Toxic Substances:  A Philosophy of Science and the Law (1993):

    This is another exceedingly careful, fair, and openminded critique of prevailing practice in another area of risk-assessment:  the legal control of human exposure to toxic substances.  As Cranor says explicitly, his book is "not a wholesale evaluation or critique" of either the scientific process of assessing risks of toxic substances or the legal procedures for lessening or controlling the risks.  What the book does offer is an argument for strengthening administrative--as opposed to tort/liability--procedures for dealing with control of toxic substances; more particularly:

I argue that present assessment strategies, as well as some recommended by commentators, both of which are temptingly inspired by the paradigm of research science--the use of careful, detailed, science-intensive, substance-by-substance risk assessments--paralyze regulation (p. 10).

    Like Shrader-Frechette, Cranor has been deeply involved with actual practitioners.  His acknowledgments mention a University of California Toxic Substances Research and Training Program, a University of California/Riverside Carcinogen Risk Assessment Project, the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, and the California Environmental Protection Agency--not to mention the office of U.S. Congressman George E. Brown, Jr., then chairman of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.  Cranor worked for a year as a Congressional Fellow in Congressman Brown's office, and Brown supplies a warm endorsement in a preface to the book.

    Here, then, is another excellent philosopher-model for anyone who would follow Dewey's get-involved advice--though Cranor's mode of philosophizing is even farther from Dewey's than is Shrader-Frechette's.

    4. Richard Sclove's "FASTnet" and "Scishops" Networks:

    One more example of philosophical activism is the work of political philosopher and Internet guru Richard Sclove, especially in his bulletin boards, "FASTnet" and "Scishops."  In his philosophical writings, Sclove (1997) has argued for populist technological design, attempting to counter the near-universal claim in our culture that technical design is a matter exclusively for experts.  He has collected dozens of examples of citizens not only contributing to large-scale technical design projects but initiating them and leading the experts throughout the design and construction process.  Sclove admits that these efforts have often been thwarted, and projects that began democratically have ended up being as anti-democratic as other large-scale technological developments.  But his anti-expertism case is strong.

    However, the part of Sclove's work I am emphasizing here is his electronic-mail networks, FASTnet and Scishops.  Many contributions in their early days added to Sclove-like examples of scientific and enginnering activism in "science shops" -- scientific/technical experts helping activist groups unable otherwise to afford the scientific expertise needed to counter corporate and governmental power -- and similar community science (and technology) projects.

    But as the newly-Republican U.S. Congress began in 1995 to threaten serious cutbacks in science funding, funding for the Office of Technology Assessment and the Environmental Protection Agency, and so on, FASTnetters and Scishoppers quickly joined the widespread lobbying on the Internet (and eleswhere) against these cutbacks.  Other e-mail networks, such as Sci-Tech-Studies (otherwise dominated by fairly esoteric academic discussions of the nature and role of the field of Science and Technology Studies), also provided opportunities for activist philosophers (and other academics) to get involved.  Not all of this electronic chatter added up to significant political counter-power -- or even serious real-world activism -- but there seems little doubt that some people in Congress did experience at least a small groundswell of citizen pressure that might end up having some lasting influence.

    Of couse, the Republicans under the leadership of Newt Gingrich and his allies, had already mastered electronic politicking; so perhaps the best one can say is that FASTnet, Scishops, Sci-Tech-Studies, and similar efforts only amounted to a partially successful counterforce.  Nonetheless, this provides another example of a way in which academic philosophers could get involved fruitfully in activist efforts to solve technosocial problems.

    It seems to me that this is another excellent example of philosophical activism, one toward which Dewey might have had much sympathy.

    5.  Another set of activist philosophers can be found among the ranks of environmental ethicists:

    That new field has drawn a number of philosophers, though by no means all of them are activists.  There has even been a small controversy in the journal, Environmental Ethics (see Hargrove, 1984, and Lemons 1985), about whether or not philosophical environmental ethicists ought to be activists.  In my opinion (Durbin, 1992b), a dichotomy separating philosophers worrying about academic "professional standards" from those who venture outside academia to work with activists on the solution of urgent environmental problems, would be a disaster.

    In any case, a reasonably large number of environmental philosophers have chosen the activist path.  (See, for example, Naess, 1989; Paehlke, 1989; Marietta and Embree, 1995; and Light and Katz, 1995.)  Nor does this mean that they must give up on academic respectability -- provided that that does not lead them to forget the urgency of particular local environmental crises.  Not to mention the overwhelming urgency of such global environmental issues as upper-atmosphere ozone depletion, the threat of global warming, worsening industrial pollution in countries committed to rapid industrial growth in previously unspoiled parts of the world, nuclear proliferation with attendant problems of wide dispersion of nuclear wastes, and so on and on.

    Conclusion:  I have here surveyed only five philosophers or groups of philosophical activists, but it seems to me that they represent a uniquely North American approach that is an interesting subset of American philosophers of technology.  Almost from the beginning of the United States, North Americans have been accused of being peculiarly practical, even anti-theoretical.  This can hardly be a fair criticism anymore, if one observes standard contributions to the philosophical literature on science and technology today.  But at least some North American philosophers would not have taken the claim as a criticism in the first place.  They--we--would take it as a compliment.  The world faces urgent social problems today, many of them linked to science and technology.  Why not at least try to get in there with other activists and help solve these problems?
 
 

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