KNOWLEDGE, ORDER, AND TECHNOLOGY: A STUDY IN THE PHILOSOPHY AND ECONOMICS OF 'APPROPRIATE' TECHNOLOGY

The increasing technological sophistication of the modern world is a phenomenon that presents the student of society with many sorts of problems: technological, economic, sociological. This dissertation takes as its analytic lens is the question of knowledge and its use, cast in terms of three "metaphors" for the way society (and its technology) might be organized. One of these is the well-known "machine model" often held to underly the technocratic "post-industrial" vision. The alternative to this, one often hears, is the organic "New Age" vision broadly construed. It is my thesis not only that these alternatives are far more similar than is generally thought but also that a third alternative--an evolutionary metaphor--is more appropriate for understanding technology and society.; Drawing on the writings of such thinkers as F. A. Hayek, Michael Polanyi, and Karl Popper, the dissertation carries the analysis of the three metaphors through several realms: the history of ideas; the methodology of the social sciences; economic theory; organization theory; and, finally, political philosophy.; Chapters four, five and six, which deal with matters economic and organizational, constitute something of a thesis-within-a-thesis. Here I argue the methodological and substantive similarity between the so-called "Austrian" economics of Hayek and certain aspects of the organization theory of Herbert Simon and others. The unifying framework, here again, is the evolutionary metaphor, which I further explicate in the economic context with comparisons and contrasts to the ideas of Thorstein Veblen, Joseph Schumpeter, and others.; The dissertation concludes with an explicit consideration of the concept of "appropriate" technology, offering both a philosophical critique and an alternate theory of "appropriateness" from the evolutionary perspective. I argue for a political philosophy that is neither technocratic or "Aquarian" but is, perhaps surprisingly, something rather close to the classical liberalism of Adam Smith. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the evolutionary metaphor suggests that Smithian institutions are perhaps more relevant to a complex "knowledge society" than they were to a less sophisticated eighteenth-century world; and this conclusion, I contend, is not only consistent with the rhetoric of appropriate technology but actually implied (if unrecognized) in certain parts of that literature.