The Competitiveness of Nations

in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy

August  2003

Tooled Knowledge

Table of Contents

WIP Page

5.0 Cultural Path Dependency

5.01      If tooled knowledge plays a critical role in a knowledge-based economy, why does it remain below the analytic radar of the history, philosophy and sociology of science and technology as well as of economics itself?  Others have, in so many words, responded to the question:

… we … dispute … that technological knowledge… be assigned a subordinate epistemological status. (Dasgupta & David 1994, 494)

… an explicit examination of … knowledge about technology has simply been suppressed by introducing certain assumptions… (Rosenberg 1994, 11)  

… matters involving “hardware,” including techniques of instrumentation, are … dismissed as … an inferior form of knowledge … This … academic snobbery should surely have been discarded long ago... (Rosenberg 1994, 156-157)  

5.02      The answer, I believe, is cultural path dependency and a resulting bias.  The modern Western world has inherited an epistemological hierarchy from it earliest beginnings.  In ascending order, it ranks Sensation, Sentiment, Reason and Revelation.  The first three were subordinate to a monopoly of Revelation exercised, often violently, by the Christian Church beginning in 313 C.E. with the Edict of Milan.  Soon afterwards Christianity was declared the official religion of the Roman Empire (Langer 1952: 119).  This monopoly lasted until the late 18th century.  As will be seen, this epistemological hierarchy continues today, with qualifications, even in the modern natural sciences.

5.03      With respect to tooled knowledge, this hierarchy found expression in the ancient, and continuing, dichotomy between the Liberal and the Mechanical Arts.  In the Liberal Arts, one works with one’s head (and tongue).  These are ennobling and suited for the upper classes.  In the Mechanical Arts, one works with one’s hands.  These are demeaning and suitable only for the lower classes.  This dichotomy was introduced when the ancient Greeks adopted slavery.  In this regard, writing was considered a Mechanical Art by the ancient Greeks and fit only for scribes and slaves.  The spontaneous spoken word was what was required of ‘free’ citizens of the polis for it was, in open debate, using the spoken word that truth would emerge. (Fuller 2000, 46)  Of course, the ancient Greeks did not believe the brain was the organ of decision but rather the heart with all its related passions (Hillman 1981)

 

(a) Hypotheses

5.04      In what follows I trace this cultural path dependency with respect to the natural sciences and tooled knowledge.  The first is arguably the dominant knowledge domain; the second, the dominant force active on the planet today.  I will do so by knitting together seven hypotheses proposed by historians, philosophers and sociologists of science and technology as well as one economist.  Each is a specialist in their respective fields but their contributions have been viewed in isolation.  I construct my argument out of their finely hewn stones recognizing that

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each is subject to dispute and debate within their respective disciplines.  Furthermore, I do so using my own reading of their work.  Linked together, they constitute, for me, a convincing explanation of the paradox that, at one and the same time, the experimental natural sciences have risen to their current cultural ascendancy paralleled by the continuing epistemological subordination of tooled knowledge except, at least implicitly, within the natural or experimental sciences themselves.  After telling the tale, I will interpret it.

5.05      One final qualification: the hypotheses generally refer to the emergence and evolution of the natural sciences in Great Britain and, more generally, in the English-speaking world, or ‘Anglosphere’ (Bennett 2000).  Hypotheses include:

i) Zilsel Hypothesis: Craft Origins of the Scientific Method (1945)

ii) Merton Hypothesis: Puritan Values & God’s Book of Nature (1938)

iii) David Hypothesis: Patronage & Mathematics (1998)

iv) Jacob Hypothesis: Anglicans & Experimental Philosophy (1980)

v) Houghton Hypothesis: Round Heads and Virtuosi (1941, 1942)

vi) Kuhnian Hypothesis: Paradigm of Normal Science (1962)

vii) Wiener Hypothesis: Gentlemen Don’t Work with Their Hands (1981)

 

i) Zilsel Hypothesis: Craft Origin of the Scientific Method (1945)

5.06      In my reading, the Zilsel Hypothesis (Zilsel 1945) consists of four parts.  First, with the collapse of feudalism, the rise of capitalism and the dawn of the Age of Discovery, an empirical form of experimentation gradually emerged among master craftsmen and instrument makers in Western Europe.  This involved a conscious breaking with tradition in favour of progress to which they dedicated written works to assist successors to exceed their own accomplishments.  Such works were, however, written in the vernacular not in Latin - the lingua franca of their age. This inhibited the spread of their thought to the educated upper classes and excluded them from the university (Bologna 11th century; Paris 1150; Oxford 1167; Cambridge 1209).

5.07      Second, at first the experimental revolution in the crafts was overshadowed by the artist/engineer/scientist genii of the Renaissance who attained a unique synthesis of hand, heart and head that has, arguably, never been achieved again in Western culture.  This unique period in Western history, a veritable bubble in time, began with the ‘Quattrocento’ referring to the second decade of 15th century in Italy, especially in Florence, when the optics of ‘perspective’ was discovered followed by the High Renaissance genius of Da Vinci (1452-1519) and, in Germany, Dürer (1471-1528).  That the integration of knowledge attained at this time did not continue was the result, among other things, of the chilling effects of religious conflict beginning with the Protestant Reformation (generally dated from the 1517 posting of Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Castle Church, Wittenberg,) and the subsequent Catholic Counter-Reformation (generally dated from 1545 and the Council of Trent).  For whatever reasons, the bubble burst.

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5.08      Third, about fifty years later, a small, select group of university trained scholars recognized the merits of the experimental method of superior craftsmen and married it to their own systematic and theoretical ways of thought_{. [a]}  It was Francis Bacon (1561-1626) who called on natural philosophers to go into the workshops of the mechanics and observe nature being forced to reveal her secrets.  He called for a ‘History of Trades’ to draw upon and codify the experimental empirical knowledge attained by the crafts.  Eventually he wanted a ‘House of Solomon’ to be erected modeled on the craft workshops of his experience and dedicated to experimental philosophy.  When “the social barrier between the two components of the scientific method broke down, and the methods of the superior craftsmen were adopted by academically trained scholars: real science was born.” (Layton 1974, 34)

5.09      The sense of progress distanced experimental craftsmen and emerging experimental philosophers from the alchemists and humanists of their age who sought fame and glory for themselves and their patrons relying, respectively, on secret arcane methods and the authority of antiquity, not progress of an Art (Zilsel 1943).  This moral imperative to contribute to the advancement of knowledge by accumulating replicable unmediated results through the experimental method is a unique ethical, as well as functional, characteristic of the natural sciences.

 

ii) Merton Hypothesis: Puritan Values & God’s Book of Nature (1938)

5.10      In my reading, the Merton Hypothesis consists of a major premise to which I add a corollary.  First, the Merton Hypothesis asserts that a coincidence of interests occurred in early seventeenth century England between the religious and moral values of the Puritans (more accurately some sects of the Puritan movement) and the emerging experimental sciences (Merton 1938).  In essence, the Puritans claimed God’s meaning was revealed not just in the Bible (by then available in the vernacular) but also in his other book – the Book of Nature.  Rather than simply accepting the arguments and authority of popes, bishops and philosophers, one should seek God’s meaning through the experimental method.  The unique environment of the Commonwealth established by Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) allowed natural science to take root in England rather than in Galileo’s Catholic Italy where the experimental method was subject to the Inquisition.

5.11      Second, as a corollary, while the Puritan ethos favoured the natural sciences, it was hostile towards the Arts especially the performing and visual arts.  Art’s ability to manipulate Sentiment as a technology of the heart threatened Christian values – Catholic and Protestant.  Rooted in the biblical injunction against graven images and the Platonic injunction restricting poetry to the praise of the gods and great men (Plato, Book X, 1952: 433-434), the performing and visual arts were considered at best profane, and, at worst, sacrilege (Chartrand 1992). 

5.12      It was not until the late 18th century that Art finally escaped the heavy hand of the Church.  It was at this time that the Fine or Beaux Arts coalesced around a new philosophy – aesthetics - created by Baumgarten

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 as his science of sensual knowledge to balance logic as the science of intellectual knowledge (Kristeller 1952, 35).  The word aesthetics itself derives from the Greek aisthesis - the activity of perception or sensation - which at root means “taking in” and “breathing in” - a “gasp”, the primary aesthetic response (Hillman 1981).

 

iii) David Hypothesis: Patronage & Mathematics (1998)

5.13      In my reading, the David Hypothesis (David 1998) consists of two parts.  First, competition for status among the nobles of late medieval and early Renaissance Europe led to a system of patronage of scholars and artist-engineer-scientists.  Patronage of utilitarian subjects like fortifications and weaponry were wrapped in secrecy.  Support of non-utilitarian matters, however, like art, literature and mathematics required public disclosure if prestige was to flow to the patron.  Beginning in the Renaissance such patronage increasingly took the form of support for academies, first for poetry and literature and then the visual arts (Kristeller 1951).

5.14            Second, by the early 17th century, this “entailed the revelation of scientific knowledge and expertise among extended reference groups that included ‘peer-experts.’” (David 1998).  This system of peer evaluation was necessary in the emerging experimental sciences because of the ever increasing mathematical complexity, e.g., calculus, that noble patrons could not interpret and who wanted to avoid the public embarrassment of supporting fakes and frauds.

 

iv) Jacob Hypothesis: Anglicans & Experimental Philosophy (1980)

5.15      In my reading, a question unanswered by the Merton Hypothesis is how experimental philosophy flourished after the decline of Puritanism, the end of the Commonwealth (1649-1660) and with the restoration of the monarchy.  The Jacob Hypothesis asserts that the natural sciences flowered in the post-Puritan period because of Latitudinalists within and without the Anglican Church - including Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton.  They squared the circle of science and religion with the politics of the Restoration resulting in establishment of The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge incorporated in 1662 (Jacob & Jacob 1980).  This was the first ‘science academy’ in keeping with the David Hypothesis.

5.16      It was Robert Boyle, in the 1650s with his Some Considerations touching the Usefulness of experimental natural philosophy, who first provided a metaphysical rationale for natural science placing the laws of the physical universe in stasis above and beyond human and divine intervention (Jacob 1978).  This argument was fully expressed in his 1686 publication: A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature.  The act of Creation had, he argued, once and forever, established the Laws of Nature.  Having set the machine in motion God withdrew and Nature became the legitimate object of study by the new Experimental Philosophy (Johnson 1940, 417).  Ironically, Isaac Newton did not accept the new philosophy and continued to believe in miracles and divine intervention in the material world (Harrison 1995).

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v) Houghton Hypothesis: Round Heads and Virtuosi (1941, 1942)

5.17      In my reading, with the founding of the Royal Society it was logical that Bacon’s House of Solomon would finally arise and his History of Trades (Houghton 1941) be completed.  Neither was to be.  Instead, the marriage of hand and head, of Mechanical and Liberal Arts, quickly broke down.  While natural philosophy flourished, its Baconian craft connection was broken.

5.18      After its founding the Royal Society made several attempts to erect its own custom-built House of Experiment (Shapin 1988).  It was intended not only to provide facilities for the conduct of experiments but also for the ‘artificial revelation’ (Price 1984, 9) of natural science to the public.  All attempts, however, failed and the Royal Society remained a ‘talk shop’ for peer review and publication, in its Philosophical Transactions, of research conducted elsewhere.  Similarly, the history of the trades was never undertaken and quickly faded from view.

5.19      According to the Houghton Hypothesis, this turning away from the Baconian vision was the result of certain founding members of the Royal Society known as the virtuosi, most especially John Eveyln. 

And what is true of Evelyn is true in general of the virtuosi, for we know that by 1667 natural philosophy had “begun to keep the best Company, and refine its Fashion and Appearance, and to become the Employment of the Rich, and the Great, instead of being [as it still largely was in Bacon’s time] the Subject of their Scorn.” (Houghton Jan. 1941, 72).

5.20      The virtuosi were rich, educated curiosity seekers who sought neither knowledge-for-knowledge-sake nor for utilitarian purpose.  Rather they sought divertissement, diversion or entertainment with a passion for the marvelous (Houghton Apr. 1942, 193), i.e., they wanted more and better toys.  Scientific experiments were viewed as entertainments together with antiquities, art and collecting exotic seashells. 

5.21      These Cavaliers of the mind viewed the crafts as unworthy of gentlemen.  They looked down upon the utilitarianism of their Roundhead compatriots who had won the civil war but lost the final battle with restoration of the monarchy and reestablishment of the gentle classes.  Thus,

Evelyn … abandoned the history of trades, which Bacon [urged]…, because of “the many subjections, which I cannot support, of conversing with mechanical capricious persons” (Houghton Apr. 1942, 199). 

5.22      The Baconian ideal of the marriage of head and hand was, however, resurrected in France about a hundred years later just before the Revolution in a call for:

… creation of a new kind of public technical knowledge.

     This programme for a public technological knowledge was most fully developed in Diderot’s famous article, ‘Art’.  There, the cutler’s son made a plea for the mutual aid that the savant and craftsworker should offer one another.  Theoretical training was counterproductive unless combined with a

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practical knowledge of basic physical properties.  In the same breath, however, Diderot showed his appreciation of the organizing power of theoretical science by calling for a ‘Logician’ to invent a ‘grammar of the arts’.  He deplored the secrecy and venality of the various guilds, which he felt stifled technical innovation… (Alder 1998, 508)

 

vi) Kuhn Hypothesis: Paradigm of Normal Science (1962)

5.23      With this break between head and hand, natural or experimental philosophers increasingly distanced themselves from the crafts and utilitarian technology.  In 1833 they were renamed ‘scientists’ by William Whewell in response to a request from the poet Samuel Coleridge (Snyder 2000).  Thus after absorbing the craft tradition of contributing to knowledge-for-knowledge-sake and adopting the experimental method of superior craftsmen per the Zilsel Hypothesis, natural scientists gradually coalesced into a self-contained community of interest, or what Polanyi called ‘The Republic of Science’ (Polanyi 1962b). 

5.24      In my reading, the Kuhnian Hypothesis (Kuhn 1962) represents the quintessential statement of self-encapsulation of the natural sciences as a community of interest, hermetically sealed off from external influences of economics, politics and society, dedicated with almost religious zeal to the objective pursuit of knowledge about Nature.  Kuhn’s ‘normal science’ as a puzzle solving paradigm constructed out of instruments, esoteric language, practice and theory results in what he calls ‘incommensurability’, i.e., the inability to communicate outside one’s own community of specialization, even with other scientists.  Any lingering links with the Baconian vision of a House of Solomon open to the empirical world of experience were severed in the Kuhnian Hypothesis and replaced by the sealed pelican vessel of the alchemists whom Bacon had wished to displace.

5.25      Epistemologically, normal science can be characterized as Sensation (without Sentiment, i.e., without moral values) subject to Reason.  Scientific revolutions, however, can be characterized as Reason subordinated to Revelation.  Thus, with respect to the source of initial (and subsequent) paradigms, Kuhn relies on intuition or Revelation describing it in terms such as “scales falling from the eyes”, “lightning flash” and “illumination” (Kuhn 1962, 123)_{.  [b]}

 

vii) Wiener Hypothesis: The British Disease (1981)

5.26      Within the natural sciences, the craft tradition of instrument making or what Price called “the craft of experimental science” (Price 1984) continued, legitimized by its service to a higher calling.  Outside, however, the Mechanical Arts remained appropriate only for the lower classes.  Similarly in wider society, two cultures warred.  One was the descendent of Puritan Roundheads which “stood for science and technology, economic growth, the spread of cities, the career open to the talents, the pursuit of economic self-interest”; the other, the descendent of Royalist Cavaliers “stood for leisure, the countryside, gardening, arts

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and crafts, love of the past and disinterested public service. (The Economist April 25, 1981, 111).  And, thus it was that:

[t]he men responsible for technological innovations . . . during the beginning of the Industrial Revolution were nonconformists who had been excluded from the universities and learned their science indirectly while pursuing their trade.  In other words, the coupling between science and technology was very loose and did not rely on the established system of higher education. (Senate Special Committee 1970: 21)

5.27      In my reading, the Wiener Hypothesis asserts that England, after initiating the Industrial Revolution, fell behind its competitors – the United States and Germany – when gentility triumphed over utility.  The sons of the revolution were sent to Eaton and Harrod and then on to Oxford and Cambridge.  Within a generation “an uneasy accommodation was reached, permitting the pursuit of profit but only provided the industrialist paid lip service to older values which, in the end, were not his own.” (The Economist April 25, 1981, 111)  The result was the industrial decline of Britain, or what was called in the 1970s and 1980s, ‘the British disease’.  Its motto: Gentlemen don’t work with their hands. 

5.28      That symptoms of this disease exist in other parts of the English-speaking world was made evident in the last report of the Economic Council of Canada: A Lot to Learn (Economic Council 1992).  In comparing apprenticeship training in Canada and Germany, i.e., training in the Mechanical Arts, the Council found that apprentices represented 1% of the labour force in Canada compared to 6% in Germany.  The average age of an apprentice in Canada was 26 compared to 17 in Germany.  The average cost of apprenticeship in Canada was $170,000 compared to $51,000 in Germany (Economic Council 1992, 21).  The most telling finding, however, was that 10% of all secondary school students in Canada were enrolled in vocational education compared to 70% in Germany but 70% of Canadian high school graduates eventually ended up in vocational jobs “after more or less fruitlessly dabbling in postsecondary courses and/or part-time jobs”. (Economic Council 1992, 17-18)  _[c]

 

b) Interpretation

5.29      Another term for cultural path dependency is ‘tradition’ which derives from the Latin traditio meaning ‘handing over’.  It refers to a handing over of “an inherited, established, or customary pattern of thought, action, or behavior (as a religious practice or a social custom)” (MWO).  The Latin, traditio, however, is also the root of the word ‘treason’ meaning a “betrayal of trust”.  The paradox of the emergence and cultural ascendancy of the experimental natural sciences together with the continuing epistemological subordination of tooled knowledge exhibits both meanings.

5.30      On the one hand, the superior craftsmen of the late Middle Ages betrayed their conservative traditions by experimenting and passing on new knowledge to successors to advance their craft.  Similarly, the small band of scholars who in the early 17th century adopted the experimental method with its commitment to the advancement of knowledge betrayed

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their scholarly ‘hands free’ tradition with its reliance on authorities such as Aristotle.  The result was a social hybridomas, spawned through the marriage of head and hand, and eventually emerging as a distinct and self-contained organism with its own traditions.  

5.31      Unlike the bubble in time that witnessed the emergence of the Renaissance Man that eventually burst, the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century took root under the mid-century interregnum of Cromwell’s Commonwealth.  Like an emergent process (Emery & Trist 1972, 24-37), the new experimental philosophy parasitically fed on the religious and utilitarian values of the English Puritans gaining sufficient strength to survive restoration of the monarchy with its conservative class structure of noble and commoner.  In the transition, however, the living Baconian connection between the crafts and natural philosophy was severed. 

5.32      Natural or experimental philosophy, however, continued to grow and develop.  The increasing effectiveness of its ‘artificial revelations’ based on unmediated knowledge generated by scientific instrumentation progressively displaced the traditional revelation of religion, a word deriving from the Latin re-ligio meaning ‘linking back’.  Meanwhile the empirical experimental methods of the crafts, unsupported by the systematic, theoretical insight of scholars, continued and eventually gave birth to technology and the Industrial Revolution.  It was not until the late 19th century in Germany that the natural sciences and crafts (this time in the guise of ‘industry’) met and married again giving birth to the first scientific industry - the synthetic dye industry (Nelson 2002, 269)

5.33      Nonetheless, the dye was set.  The empirical experimental method of the crafts gave birth to what today is called industrial technology (a reincarnation of the Mechanical Arts).  Meanwhile, the natural sciences appropriated the institutional home of the ‘hands free’ Liberal Arts – the university.

5.34      This institutional appropriation, in turn, led, subsequently, to the emergence of another epistemological hybridomas – the social sciences combining commitment to the objective advancement of knowledge but lacking the benefit of scientific instrumentation. Without the unmediated knowledge of scientific instruments, the social sciences, in turn, spawned value-laden ideologies that, in their Marxian incarnation, gave voice to the ongoing clash between the Liberal and Mechanical Arts with its cry: Workers of the World Unite!  While Marx has been buried by the Market, the epistemological subordination of tooled knowledge, and its struggle for recognition, continues.

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