Full Article
To make sense of Schatzberg’s name to arms, we want to pay close attention to how he defines the 2 ‘sharply diverging traditions’ of speaking about expertise. Across the two millennial span of his historical past, Schatzberg places commentators in a single or different of the camps. On the one aspect is the ‘instrumental approach’, which adopts the language of means and ends and which thereby ‘portrays know-how as a slender technical rationality, uncreative and devoid of values’. But that doesn't mean that ‘technology’ as an analytical class must be the identical. A well-chosen definition may not only assist as a historian’s analytical category but in addition serve for sociologists and philosophers. While I absolutely sympathize with the purpose to oppose technological determinism – and who wouldn’t? First, the cultural approach’s definition of know-how is so capacious as to be virtually ineffective. Yet even for a recent English word ‘technology’ has come to embrace often co