Nuevas meditaciones sobre la técnica ed. by Fernando Broncano

Abstract

808 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE peal to a much broader audience. Give Fukuyama credit for the debate especially. His essays may greatly exaggerate and oversimply the status of liberal democracy in history, but they have generated valuable intellectual discussion and made this book a more lively and interesting engagement than I expected to find. Arthur F. McGovern, S. J. Dr. Mcgovern is professor of philosophy at the University of Detroit Mercy. His publications include Marxism: An American Christian Perspective (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1980) and Liberation Theology and its Critics (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1989). Nuevas meditaciones sobre la técnica. Edited by Fernando Broncano. Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 1995. Pp. 235; illustrations, bibliography. (Price not available.) This collection of nine “new meditations on technology” results from a collaboration on the “structure, dynamics, and evaluation of technological systems’ ’ by faculty from the universities ofSalamanca, La Laguna, Seville, the Basque Country, Navarre, and Washington University in St. Louis. Disciplines represented include philosophy, engineering, sociology, and economics. Conspicuous by its absence is history, especially the history of technology. The three initial papers (by Manuel Liz,Javier Aracil, and Marga­ rita Vázquez) focus on metaphysical issues of modeling and simula­ tion. What kind of realities are models, and what are their relations to concrete entities and processes? Technological models, Liz ar­ gues, are structured more by concerns for utility than logic, and Ara­ cil proposes a philosophy ofmodeling based on Putnam’s pragmatic realism. The second set of three papers (by Fernando Broncano, Josefa Toribio Mateas, and Jesús Ezquerro) emphasizes epistemological problems of technological knowledge and the increasing depen­ dency of science on technological instrumentation. Toribio Mateas, for instance, defends an instrumentalist’s interpretation of techno­ logical rules, while Ezquerro takes up the differences between indi­ vidual and collective human action as these can be illuminated by research on artificial intelligence (AI). The final three papers (by Mikel Olazarán, Miguel A. Quintanilla, and Alfonso Bravo Juega) consider sociological, political, and eco­ nomic aspects of technological change. Olazarán, in a case study of AI research, defends the social constructivism ofCollins, Latour, and others. Bravo Juega argues for the mutual implication of modern economics and technology. As a whole these papers represent a thoughtful, analytic approach to the philosophy of technology undertaken with conscious refer­ ence to José Ortega y Gasset’s Meditación de la técnica (1939). But if TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 809 Ortega is taken as representative ofwhat has been called humanities philosophy of technology, then these “new” meditations are not so much new in the sense ofbuilding on and continuing Ortega’s proj­ ect as they are new in seeking to break with it in order to establish a new beginning. Certainly it is the case that the style of these essays departs significantly from that of Ortega. The more immediate stimulus for these new meditations is, how­ ever, the work of Quintanilla, a philosopher of science whose Tecno­ logía: Un enfoquefilosófico (1990) was a major effort to build a bridge between humanities and engineering reflections on technology. It is also worth noting that Quintanilla and his colleagues are well ac­ quainted with Anglo-American analytic philosophical work, certainly much more so than English-language philosophers are of Spanishlanguage contributions to their fields. Were North American philos­ ophers of science and technology to wish to make an effort to over­ come this limitation, Broncano’s edited volume would be an espe­ cially good place to begin. Carl Mitcham Andoni Alonso Dr. Mitcham holds ajoint appointment in the Department of Philosophy and in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Pennsylvania State University. He is the editor of Philosophy ofTechnology in Spanish Speaking Countries (Boston: Kluwer, 1993). dr. alonso is a postdoctoral research fellow from the University of the Basque Country. Technology and the Politics of Knowledge. Edited by Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Pp. x+288; notes, index. $15.95 (paper). A central theme running through this volume in the Indiana se­ ries in the Philosophy ofTechnology is the recognition that technol­ ogy, like science, is not an autonomous world segregated from the larger society. As the editors...