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The problem with which I want to engage your attention this evening requires a little more specification than is given in my title. It would seem obvious enough that technology is a species of knowledge. Our so called "age of technology" seems to have more of this commodity we can call "technological knowledge" than any previous age or society. You would expect, then, that technology as a species of knowledge would be highly revered, widely studied, and generally well understood in our society. You would think, in fact, that a talk with my title would be no more required than one on 'science and the structure of knowledge". This happens not to be so. Technology is not generally revered, especially by intellectuals, not well understood and studied, and even has its claims to be a species of knowledge disputed. I take it as my task to try to dispel such views. What I shall suggest in the course of what follows is that from one angle technology is only a part of the logical structure of our knowledge; and that from another angle the whole of our knowledge can be regarded as a substructure, as included under technology. Viewed logically, technology is a substructure of knowledge; it is knowledge of what physicists call the "initial conditions". Viewed anthropologically, knowledge is part of man's multiform attempts to adapt to his environment which we call his technology.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-5424-3_19

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