The Competitiveness of Nations

in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy

August  2003

Tooled Knowledge

Table of Contents

WIP Page

4.0 Source

4.01      When one asks from where tooled knowledge comes, one faces terminological and conceptual confusion.  In mainstream economics, the impact of new knowledge on the production function is called ‘technological change’.  New knowledge, no matter its source, may, alternatively, be disembodied or embodied in capital plant and equipment and/or endogenous or exogenous to the economic system, i.e., stimulated by profit and loss (endogenous) or not (exogenous).

4.02      In Marxian economics, Engel distinguished between the handicrafts, manufacturing and machine industry as the temporal sequence defining historical development of tooled knowledge (Rosenberg 1974, 717).  These stages, for my purposes, roughly correspond to:

• the craft era (prior to the 1776 publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations);

• the technology era of division and specialization of labour (post-1776 publication) culminating in the production of standardized parts made using machine tools and assembled by semi-skilled workers in the ‘American System’ of the early to mid-nineteenth century (Hounshell 1983); and,

• the engineering era of machine tooled parts assembled by semi-skilled workers on ‘the line’ (early to mid-twentieth century). 

4.03      After Marx and Engel, parts assembly was rationalized with the mechanized assembly line introduced by Henry Ford in 1913.  A worker assembled only some parts of a growing semi-complete work as it inexorably passed on to the next worker down ‘the line’.  Workers became tied and conditioned to its mechanical rhythm; they became, in effect, alienated from the means of production.  Beginning in the mid-1950s, however, and continuing to this day, workers are increasingly being displaced by other machines (robots) that assemble parts made by computerized machine tools with a human taskmaster monitoring the whole process from beginning to end using computers – a general purpose engine.

4.04      Tooled knowledge for Marx and Engel, including that emanating from the natural sciences, was considered endogenous emerging in response to the economic forces of profit and loss.  Purity of purpose such as ‘knowledge-for-knowledge-sake’, like religion, was so much opium for the masses cloaking the inexorable teleological forces of capitalist economic development.  In other words, there was only one source of tooled knowledge – the economic process itself.

4.05      Faulkner (1994), in her comparative review of the science/technology debate, notes that some make a distinction between technology and engineering. For example, Vincenti (1991), author of What engineers know and how they know it, distinguishes technology involving draftspersons and workers from ‘engineering’ concluding that “although elements of engineering methodology appear scientific, engineering methodology as a whole did not emerge within science.”

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(Faulkner 1994, 434).  In other words, there are three distinct sources of tooled knowledge - technology, engineering and the natural sciences.

4.06      Layton (1974, 35), following Zilsel (1945), stresses the arts (techne) and crafts origins of modern technology, engineering and the natural sciences.  He classes engineering, medicine, and agriculture as “technological sciences” involving the “science of the artificial” in contrast to the “basic sciences” (Layton 1988, 90-91).  There are for Layton six sources of tooled knowledge: the arts, crafts, technology, engineering, technological (or engineering) science and the natural sciences.  All are linked by a common origin in the experimental method of late medieval and Renaissance craftsmen and instrument makers.

4.07      Polanyi (1960-61) offers an even more complex seven-part perspective.   Alternatively, he distinguishes between industrial science (p. 404); analytic technology (p. 405); engineering (p.405); theoretical technology or theoretical engineering (p. 405); technically justified sciences (p. 405);  and, ‘practices’ exhibiting fundamental overlaps between science and technology e.g. medicine (p. 405)_{.  [a]}

4.08      Finally, Price distinguishes between technology and science based on, among other things, the fact that “[r]oughly speaking, science is a cumulating activity which is papyrocentric, while technology also cumulates, but in a papyrophobic fashion.” (Price 1965, 561)

4.09      From this plethora of sources of tooled knowledge, I deduce a four-step sequence: the crafts, natural science, technology and engineering.  They share two things in common.  First, they involve either measurement and/or manipulation of the physical world.  Second, their present epistemological status is rooted in a sequence of overlapping temporal gestalten (Emery & Trist 1972).  Traditions of the first have been absorbed by and continue in the second, third and fourth; traditions established in the second continue in the third and fourth; and so on up the temporal line of progression.

4.10      Of specific interest is the progressive extension of the Pythagorean insight about the cognate relationship between mathematics and matter.  Beginning with numerology and magic numbers, this has developed into modern chaos theory, fractals, quantum mechanics and, arguably, genomics.

 

a) The Crafts

4.11      The crafts are empirical and experiential, i.e., knowledge is acquired by observation and learning by doing.  Originally there was no distinction between the Beaux or Fine Arts as we know them today and ‘handicrafts’.  Both were classed as Mechanical Arts by the Ancients and epistemologically subordinated to the Liberal Arts. 

4.12      Mathematics was limited to ‘rules of thumb’ inherited by apprentices from guild masters or learned on the job.  Perfection lay in the past, not in a progressive future. 

4.13      During the ‘Quattrocento’ (the second decade of 15th century Italy, especially in Florence), the geometry of ‘perspective’

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was discovered.  This marked the separation of the visual arts from the crafts.  Fine arts academies appeared with the mathematics of perspective, in effect, serving as the basis for moving the visual arts into the Liberal Arts where they joined music whose Pythagorean connection had traditionally made it a Liberal rather than a Mechanical Art. The remaining crafts, however, continued as Mechanical Arts and to function with mathematical rules of thumb.

4.14      About thirty years later the printing press was invented in Germany by a craftsman, Gutenberg, in 1456 C.E.  This was the first engine of mass production, the mass production of codified knowledge.  While not directly linked to mathematics, as a general purpose engine, it permitted the wide distribution of existing knowledge about mathematics.  In a way the printing press inaugurated the knowledge–based economy 30 plus years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue.  With respect to ‘codified’ knowledge, it is somewhat ironic that the first work to be reproduced was the Bible, or what Northrop Frye called: The Great Code (Frye 1981)

4.15      At the about same time perspective and the printing press were invented, many were working on the mathematics of canon fire, e.g., Da Vinci.  The innovation of gunpowder in the West literally shook the foundations of European culture.  As feudal fortifications were breached, its social organizing broke down.  Feudalism gave way to budding capitalism and the guilds gave way to something new: experimentation by individual craftsmen in search of better methods than those inherited from the past. (Zilsel 1945)  This was the beginning of the end of a Renaissance founded on the superiority of the Ancients. 

 

b) Science

4.16      In the middle of the 17th century the Scientific Revolution occurred with the breakdown of social barriers between the two components of the scientific method.  The experimental method and instrument-making tradition of the crafts were adopted by university and mathematically trained scholars to form a new ‘experimental’ philosophy. (Layton 1974, 35).  Consummating this marriage was Leibnitz and Newton’s coincidental invention of ‘the calculus’ into which flowed the numeric results of increasingly sensitive scientific sensors. The crafts themselves, however, continued to use rule of thumb mathematics transmitted through apprenticeship and experience.

 

c) Technology

4.17      What today we call technology emerged in the late 18th century.  Its appearance can be dated to Adam Smith’s treatment of the division and specialization of labour (Smith 1776).  Unlike the crafts in which a one person was responsible for the entire production process, technology is characterized by the breakdown of the production process into discrete stages each requiring less skill than that of a craftsman, i.e., it employed semi-skilled labour.  As previously noted, this development was associated with the introduction of standardized parts production in

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French military arsenals.  The experimental tradition of both the crafts and natural science was adopted.

4.18      Coincidental with these organizational innovations was the invention of a new power source – steam - that allowed the working of materials like iron and steel beyond the human scale. These three developments – division of labour, adoption of the experimental method and a new power source - led to the end of the craft guilds and the emergence of what today we call ‘technology’.

4.19      Technology, however, also continued to work with ‘rule of thumb’ mathematics.  The higher mathematics of the natural sciences were not immediately adopted.  Thus the Industrial Revolution was initiated, in England, by persons who had no university training in either mathematics or the natural science (Senate 1971)_{.  [b]}

 

d) Engineering

4.20      Engineering, as a formal discipline of thought, did not emerge in the English-speaking world until the mid-19th century.  It can be considered the product of a ménage à trois of technology, mathematics and the natural sciences.  It continued the empirical and experimental traditions of the crafts but replaced rule of thumb mathematics first by statistics (Layton 1976, 692) _[c] and, much later, by calculus “… American engineers were still debating in the 1920s whether students needed to learn calculus…” (Kranakis 1989, 18).  It also began to absorb the findings of the natural sciences.   

4.21      This order of epistemic integration differs from continental Europe where in France, for example, what might be called  ‘scientific’ engineering emerged a hundred years earlier with its requirement for training in calculus at formal ‘academic’ institutes such as the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées (1747) and the Ecole Polytechnique (1794).  As a discipline of thought, however, it was restricted to public engineering of armaments, canals, fortifications, roads, etc., and did not extend to private industrial production (Finch 1952).  In France too, rules of thumb, ‘craft laws’ and design principles rather than mathematics continued to dominate industrial production.

4.22      Engineering in the Anglosphere (Bennett 2000) remains to this day much more of a ‘self-regulating profession’ than an academic discipline as in Europe.  Furthermore, emphasis has historically been on industrial research, particularly in the United States, in contrast to ‘theoretical’ studies in France where an industrial research tradition did not develop until well into the twentieth century (Kranakis 1989, 7)

4.23      Among the conclusions drawn by Price about the relationship between the natural sciences and engineering (allowing, in this instance, for an equivalence between the terms ‘technology’ and ‘engineering’):

8. It is probable that research-front technology is strongly related only to that part of scientific knowledge that has been packed down as part of ambient learning and education, not to research-front science.

9. Similarly, research-front science is related only to the ambient technological knowledge of the previous generation of students, not to

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the research front of the technological state of the art and its innovations.

10. This reciprocal relation between science and technology, involving the research front of one and the accrued archive of the other, is nevertheless sufficient to keep the two in phase in their separate growths within each otherwise independent cumulation. (Price 1965, 568)

 

e) University

4.24      Finally, the role of the university in the generation of tooled knowledge requires explanation. The medieval university was dominated by philosophy, especially metaphysics or religion.  Beginning outside the university proper, the natural sciences from the late 17th century acted like an ‘emergent process’ (Emery & Trist 1972, 24-37).  First through concealment and then by parasitism, the natural sciences gradually entered the university, absorbed more and more of its resources (financial and human) until finally it became the dominant knowledge domain within.   Accordingly, the university has become the primary source of that form of tooled knowledge I call sensors, i.e., instruments intended to monitor natural phenomena. 

4.25      The primary sources of other forms of tooled knowledge, however, remain outside the university.  The degree to which the university is now recognized as the home of the natural sciences, compared to all other knowledge domains, was captured by Polanyi when he wrote:

Nature is given to man ready-made; we may try to elucidate it, but we cannot improve it.  But language, literature, history, politics, law, and religion, as well as economic and social life, are constantly on the move, and they are advanced by poets, playwrights, novelists, politicians, preachers, journalists, and all kinds of other, non-scholarly, writers.  These are the primary initiators of cultural changes, rather than the Faculties of Arts which contribute to the advancement of culture mainly at second-hand, by studying language, literature, history, law, religion, and so on, as produced outside the universities.  Hence, academic science has an advantage over the humanities similar to that it holds over technology…

We may conclude that the profound distinction between science and technology is but an instance of the difference between the study of nature on the one hand and the study of human activities and the products of human activities, on the other.  The universities cannot be the main source of progress either in humanistic or in material culture, as they are in the natural sciences.” (Polanyi 1960-61, 406)

 

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