Abstract

This work on the nature of knowledge-intensive technology proceeds from a distinction between two types of knowing: Theoretical Holism, and Practical Holism. Theoretical Holism refers to those means of knowing that follow from the metaphysical tradition associated with Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, and the like, which culminates in the modern natural and social sciences. Practical Holism refers to the form of knowing explored by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Practical Holism maintains that all forms of theoretical knowing are grounded ontologically in our everyday background practices , which, because they involve skills, cannot be accounted for theoretically. Thus, this work seeks to critique the "theoretical" study of technology as instrumental or anthropological in light of Heidegger's ontological, "practical" understanding of technology as the Ge-stell, the modern way of Being. Within the Ge-stell, everything in nature, including man, is challenged-forth to render up its energies in the service of demands for ordering all that is orderable. ;The hallmark of this technological way of Being was, in Heidegger's time, the hydroelectric power plant, which challenged-forth the river to yield its energy by damming it up behind the turbines. This work argues that a change in the technological nature of Being away from the "empirical" to the "mathematical" shifts the hallmark of the technological way of Being from the hydroeletric plant to knowledge-intensive technologies and cognitive science. This way of Being thus accounts for the two things that are studied here concomitantly: knowledge-intensive technologies as manifestations of the "mathematical" technological way of Being, and the use of cognitivism, structuralism, management science, and artificial intelligence research to study man and technology as quantifiable, and context-independent beings. In its place, this work seeks to give an account of the relation between man and technology by extending Heidegger's practical holism. This account recognizes technology in its ontological dimension, as a mode of truth that is brought-forth in our everyday background practices