Between Reason and Experience: Preface to the Chinese Translation

Introduction The explanation of the original title of this book is helpful for understanding its basic theme. “Reason” in the title refers to rational technical disciplines, while experience means the lifeworld of everyday preferences, beliefs, and tastes. These are two seemingly alien dimensions of every technical design. The question of the book is: how do reason and experience combine and communicate in the technological realm? The answer to this question is found in the methods of constructivist science and technology studies. According to constructivism, purely rational considerations do not determine “one best way” to make a device. Technical disciplines yield multiple alternatives and social criteria select among them the one that is actually realized. Many of the important choices are made by those with official authority over the design process, for example, the regulators, managers and owners of businesses. But the public also has input into the selection. In this case communication is established between the apparently alien realms. We are of course familiar with market inputs by which consumers express their preferences individually, but there are also collective demands for new functions and changes in design. The technical environment has been transformed by protests, boycotts, demonstrations, public hearings, and the popular uptake of the results of hacking. These public inputs have a democratic character because they represent the values of the population at large and not merely the interests of business or the experts. My book concerns the nature of these democratic inputs and how they relate to the technical disciplines. Hence the title, Between Reason and Experience, which situates technology in its ambiguous place in the social system. I address the question of technology so formulated with many concrete examples such as the history of steam boilers, Japanese modernization, the French Minitel system, and information technology. I evaluate and borrow from many different theories including constructivist technology studies, cost-benefit analysis, Kuhn, Habermas, Heidegger, and Marcuse. The question of the democratization of technology is thus approached from many angles, three of which I will discuss in this preface. These are the relation of technocracy to public agency; critical methods for the study of technology; and finally philosophical aspects of the relation of technology to the lifeworld.