Technology as an invention: The project Homo Creator

Dmitriy Yu. Shat­alov-Davy­dov
Lobachevsky State Uni­ver­si­ty of Nizh­ni Nov­gorod

Tech­nol­o­gy as an inven­tion: The project Homo Cre­ator

Abstract. The arti­cle high­lights the con­cept of Homo Cre­ator for­mu­lat­ed bas­ing on a fun­da­men­tal analy­sis of the exist­ing the­o­ries in the phi­los­o­phy of tech­nol­o­gy. Pos­er crit­i­cizes the func­tion­al approach towards the essence of tech­nol­o­gy and sug­gests chang­ing it into the neothomist under­stand­ing of tech­nol­o­gy as a choice of the most opti­mal solu­tion among an ini­tial­ly giv­en scope of pos­si­ble solu­tions. By doing so, he demon­strates his adher­ence to Dessauer’s inter­pre­ta­tion of tech­nol­o­gy. The mod­el seri­ous­ly evolves by engag­ing Hart-mann’s ontol­ogy of the four stages of word un-der­stand­ing and by defin­ing the place of tech­ni­cal arti­fact in it. He devel­ops the rel­e­vant sys­tem of cat­e­gories and rede­fines a rela­tion of human-tech­ni­cal object. This scheme is linked to the down­ward cau­sa­tion sug­gest­ed by Karl Pop­per and results in a mod­el of user–constructor–inventor (in dif­fer­ent roles). In this mod­el, an inventor’s idea, which has emerged from some cor-rela­tion between cat­e­gories of pos­si­bil­i­ty and need and is com­ing into exis­tence in a draft draw­ing, puts frame­works on a mate­r­i­al con­struc­tion of the tech­ni­cal arti­fact by a con­struc­tor. Such an approach demon­strates a uni­ver­sal char­ac­ter of the tech­ni­cal arti­fact. Bas­ing on Poser’s ontol­ogy, this arti­cle con­sid­ers the pos­si­bil­i­ty of using the notion of “non-Hum­boldt­ian trad­ing zone” for de-scrib­ing and under­stand­ing a con­tem­po­rary com­mu­ni­ca­tion between soft­ware devel­op­ers and users.

Key­words: tech­nol­o­gy, tech­ni­cal arti­fact, inven­tion, final­i­ty, inten­tion­al­i­ty, cau­sa­tion, func­tion, goal, instru­ment, trad­ing zone

DOI: 10.5840/dspl20192343

Acknowl­edge­ments
The report­ed study was fund­ed by RFBR accord­ing to the research project No. 18–011-00335.

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