Philosophical Research On Technical Obsoleting

In this era of pursuing technological innovation and new technology, doing the opposite, the technical obsoleting is taken as the definite object of the study, and its important position in social development is highlighted. Technical obsoleting is an independent existence and an ontological concept different from technological innovation. From the perspective of philosophy, referring to Kuhn’s relevant theory on scientific revolution and analyzing some cases of technical history, the essence of technical obsoleting is revealed. A further research on its connotation, types, causes, process, and the technical obsoleting mechanism is conducted.Technical obsoleting exists as an users’ non-subjectivity process separated from technology, and a technology’s non-objectivity process from using condition to idle condition. It is a concept put forward from the objective technology development process, and describes the technology system transformation from the state that technology original function operates normally into a pending state. With the characteristics such as passivity, hysteresis quality, incompleteness, repeatability, technical obsoleting can be classified into the following categories: the alternative and the non-alternative; the sequential type and mutant type; the natural and artificial type; the quantity-reduce and the structure-altered type. The main factors influencing technical obsoleting are as follows: the technical context change, social value selection, economic fluctuation, and obstacles of inheriting and spreading. And technical obsoleting roughly experiences such a process as ‘Anomaly, Crisis, Resistance and Obsoleting’.