Conservatoire national des arts et métiers

About: Conservatoire national des arts et métiers is a education organization based out in Paris, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing. The organization has 3573 authors who have published 7127 publications receiving 141430 citations. The organization is also known as: CNAM & Conservatoire des arts et métiers.

Technology as a public culture in the eighteenth century: The artisans' legacy

Abstract: Joel Mokyr’s book reflects a very important historiographical trend devoted to understanding factors of growth in the history of the industrial revolutions. Mokyr focuses on one factor, technology, more precisely on the supply of useful knowledge. His main ambition is to propose a definition of technical knowledge. In considering technology as knowledge, not only as artefacts and processes, Mokyr is following an historical school built up by Edwin T. Layton, David F. Channel and Rachel Laudan in the United States, and by Jacques Guillerme, Jan Sébestik and Hélène Vérin in France, stemming from Alexandre Koyré, Georges Canguilhem and Herbert A. Simon’s legacy and enhanced by Constructivist historians of science. As Mokyr says in his first chapter, this quest for the definition of technical knowledge does not concern only historians of science, it is also central for economic historians. I understand that, beyond the reference to economics, the author means that the definition of useful knowledge needs a technical point a view, that technology is not a subdivision of scientific knowledge. Useful knowledge may include scientific results but it is not limited to an application of science to industry. What is technical knowledge if it does not fit with applied sciences or the application of science? What does it mean to use a knowledge, to put it into practice, into action? Former historians and epistemologists have explained that technology (understood as the Continental word technologie) is the science of purposive action, of intentionality and design, of operations and gestures devised in order to achieve a project, of “adaptation of means to some preconceived ends” according to Layton. Following Simon, technology was then defined as a science of conception, as a systemic and synthetic science, distinct from analytical science, and fully recognized since the Renaissance under the term of genius (sciences du génie), later evolving into ‘engineering science’. In contrast to this notion of applied sciences, technology belonged rather to political economy, to the sciences of organization and action.