The first emphatic word in Heidegger's Die Frage nach der Technik highlights not technology, its how, its about, or wherefore, but questioning. This for Heidegger is because 'Questioning builds a way.'(10) What is to be built by way of questioning is extraordinary, if in the midst of Heidegger's many remarkable claims, often too little analysed if routinely remarked upon. The way is a way of freedom, an opening toward a relationship to essence of technology. Heidegger's project of 'questioning concerning technology' seeks 'to prepare a free relationship' to technology, where the freedom of this relationship of human existence to technology is determined in terms of response to the 'essence' of technology. Heidegger's brief is not against technology. He speaks in the name of liberation but not mastery.

Because 'technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology,' that is, because the essence of technology is nothing technological, the free or open relationship of human existence to technology is not a matter of the technical facility or experience with technology so often invoked by commentators arguing against or on behalf of Heidegger's analysis of the technological essence of modernity. Nor it is a mater of detachment, Gelassenheit alone. This in turn means that any neutral perspective on technology is a convicted relationship to technology, just as being for or against technology is an entrapment within the technological setup.

By means of the anti-adjectival definition of essence ordinary enough in Heidegger, it is because 'the essence of technology is by no means anything technological' and not because of our philosophical thickness that we remain barred from experiencing 'our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it' (Q 4). In other words, we are excluded from anything like a relationship to the essence of technology exactly when we conceive technology as the technological.

To articulate his project of questioning within the framing constraint of technoscience, Heidegger invokes a backwards and forwards dynamic. Questioning the usual adjectival force of essence as whatness, quiddity reveals the instrumental and anthropological definitions of technology as manifestly related terms: to ' posit ends and procure and utilize the means to them is a human activity' (4) poised, as the instrumental always is in anthropocentric terms.

In this questioning of technology, the instrumental and anthropological definitions, and the observation that the one entails the other, are not denied. They are as Heidegger says 'correct.' For Heidegger the instrumental definition is anthropological. It defines both technology and, as homo faber, the human being. This in turn locks us into the defining problem of our age, which is now no longer if it ever was, How does it stand with being, but rather How does it stand with technology? And like the being question, this question can be parsed in many ways.

Heidegger weaves technology in its essence into the original meaning of the ancient Greek word for 'art' in all its breadth: techne referring to 'the activities and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts'(13). As art, as techne, technology is at least potentially, that is, from its origins, poietic. Recalling the likewise coordinate sense of techne and episteme, Heidegger claims that 'technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, wherealetheia, truth happens' (13).

But exactly this definition of technology seems counter-intuitive, to say the very least. As many of Heidegger's critics have noted: it seems to ignore the many different aspects and experiences of contemporary technology. If we are pleased to think of Heidegger's thought as a species of (to follow one commentator's colloquialisation) 'pine tree mysticism,' this is surely pine tree pretentiousness. How does the aletheiological event of technology enable us to understand our relationship to technology?

Heidegger expresses the essence of modern technology as what he names a challenging-forth or challenging-revealing. This challenging sets upon what is, nature, the genetic profile of the individual human being, the graphic imagination of the human relationship to the cybernetic domain, and so on and reveals it on the terms of that same technical challenge or set up. For a farmer with a a plow what there is are fields of earth to be cultivated; for a farmer at war, what a plow always retains is the aspect of matter beyond form: raw materials for a sword. This is not opposed to the determination of a plow for plowing, it is because (i.e., the how) of that determination. For the genome project, what there is what counts as the makeup of the human being, mind and body/body and soul, there will be assayable, measureable nucleotide sequences.

The contrast to challenging forth is the contrast Heidegger suggests between the care of husbandry and challenge of technological control or domination. The game is the same: agriculture. In the latter case we can speak of forbearance because, to use Heidegger's much maligned black forest imagery, the saw mill on the river is a tool to turn the flow of the river into the turning of a wheel for human advantage and appropriation. There is or better: there has to be forbearance or restraint to the extent that without great care for the flow and force of the river, its bends, its banks, depths, recent meteorological history, the saw mill cannot function. The sheer will to power of the woodcutter, his ambition, his dreams of rapacity, as some philosophers of technology have observed to be more rather than less characteristic of the users of pristine or early forms of technology are all irrelevant. The technological condition or hypothetical imperative of technology means that in premodern times the only way to realize such ambitions is to husband one's energies to the limits of the river and to reflect that same care in the design and operation of the saw mill. The hydroelectric dam, on the other hand, forces the question for once and for all. The scope of the river is altered, dammed into the requisite domain and so dammed, the challenging of the hydroelectric plant reveals the river in terms not of its history or its contours or what lies upstream, but eliminating all that, as hydroelectric source. Here one misses the point if all one sees is the quaint image of the oldfashioned water mill in a nostalgic contrast with the modern advances of hydroelectric power. Rather Heidegger offers a reflection on the difference between modern technology and premodern technology in the way this difference yet reflects the essence of technology

In the related case of agriculture, Heidegger traces the transformation into modern agribusiness as the transformation into the rule of modern method and technique, the radicality of his claim is that the farmer as well as the farm and the farmed are thereby transformed. So it goes with sheep-farming. Formerly, Heidegger notes, to cultivate and to set in order 'meant to take care of and to maintain' (14-15). An entirely different ideal rules in mechanized or 'factory' efficient farming. Rather than the ambiguities of stewardship however close to dominion in a patriarchical scheme, we have an undisguisedly brutal, patently and shockingly efficient industrial enterprise. The earth no longer gives or withholds anything. Thus there is no need to thank the earth or the gods for nature's bounty: that would be true nostalgia and superstition. Today modern means guarantee crop yields.

It is easy to overlook the economic engine that leads to the biological jackpot that culminates in the Human Genome project.(11) But it is to this effect that Heidegger argues that 'Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry' (15). The recent cloning of an adult sheep near Rosslyn in Scotland helps to recall the force of Heidegger's original insight into the issue of the mechanization of nature and the calculation of life itself beyond what remains the horribly cathected resonances of the full quotation:

Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and death camps, the same thing as the blockades and reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs. (GA 79, p. 27.)

It is important to emphasise in this context that the political force of the historical associations inevitably entangled in this statement -- the anger that can still be elicited by the implications of such a statement on the part of a defeated opponent -- means that few readers are inclined to see what Heidegger is arguing. Victors still in a war more than half a century cold, we are outraged interpreters of the range of things Heidegger ought to have said. In the previous example, the politicized moral confidence of a Caputo(12) or course, of Levinas himself, can persuade us that such a Heideggerian reduction to the 'same' must miss the point thoroughly and completely, that equations such as these betray the excesses of Heidegger's own rhetoric and a failure of philosophic insight.(13) As critics, we evaluate Heidegger as thinker of the ethical above all, and find him morally lacking.(14) This same evaluative, calculative passion is what it means to be ourselves caught in the draft of the Ge-stell or the constructions of modern technology. According to measuring, evaluative, moral fashion, Heideggers's Ackerbau image has everything to do with Heidegger (and Nazism) and nothing to do with technology and nothing to do with us. Neglecting what Heidegger means when he says 'the same,' 'das Selbe, we stubbornly maintain in the indignation of blindness that that there is nothing the same in the cadence of the examples sequenced in Heidegger's comparisons. Technology, according to its instrumental, humanist ideal, is neutral. Thus nuclear energy can destroy or else it can yield life. Recoiling from Heidegger's comparisons, deploring his associations as outrageous, condemning his lack of taste, his crassness, we stubbornly refuse to connect agriculture, however modernized and bio-technized (which it has been for quite some time, especially and rather dramatically in the USA: land of no-holds-barred capital opportunism), with the enduringly horrible phenomena of gas chambers and death camps. We will not see anything 'the same' in the 'manufacture of corpses' and the meat processing industry, which last includes and which was in fact the motor of the experimental procedure of cloning as an advantage or progressive improvement over even such a mechanical means of reproduction as artificial insemination.

For Heidegger, the key, and this is, alas -- and I cannot emphasise that alas too keenly or too much -- unchanged, it is the same, in the example of (say) organ reserves grown in cloned organisms to be harvested as a reserve, a stockpile, for projected needed transplant possibilities. What sets upon and challenges forth the dynamic force of nature is what Heidegger calls a twofold Fordern, an expediting, a summoning, calling forth, a compelling. That is also, for Heidegger, 'the revealing that rules throughout modern technology' (16). What we want in good English is to force nature, like a bonsai tree or the English gardener's art that is the garden itself: botanical presentation, maze, topiary. This is what is desired and this is what we do: driven to secure 'the maximum yield at the minimum expense' (15). This is the modern meaning of efficiency: technology as causa efficiens.

But 'because man is challenged more originally than are the energies of nature, i.e., into the process of ordering, he is never transformed into mere standing-reserve. Since man drives technology forward, he takes part in ordering as a way of revealing' (18), Heidegger finds a saving or better, more accurately said: a twisting power. To assert that the human being is "challenged" into the process of ordering, "taking part in ordering" seems to be a mere subjectivism, like the voluntarist understanding of technology as the will to dominion which Heidegger claims to find in Nietzsche. But such a reading would overlook the aletheiological in Heidegger's account of revealing: 'unconcealment itself, within which ordering unfolds, is never a human handiwork, any more than is the realm through which man is already passing every time he as subject relates to an object' (18).

In this first exposition of a possible saving dimension, 'we need not look far' but only 'apprehend in an unbiased way That which has already claimed man and has done so, so decisively that he can only be man at any given time as the one so claimed' (18). In everything that we do authentically, one could say, without violence to Heidegger I or II, we find ourselves 'already brought into the unconcealed.' Heidegger is famous for the passivity this entails (as this is further articulated in 'The Turn,' or in Gelassenheit, or in the infamousSpiegel interview, 'Only a God Can Save Us'). But what Heidegger intends here is merely an articulation of the aletheiological character of truth. 'When man, in his way, from within unconcealment reveals that which presences, he merely responds to the call of unconcealment even when he contradicts it' (19).

Answering the claim of unconcealment, the key difference to be thought between the scientific method of questioning or reseach and the way of thoughtful questioning is the responding claim of unconcealment: the difference between the calculated or inauthentic, investigative question (ordered in advance to a pre-scribed or expected answer), and attentive, reflective or responsive questioning attuned to that which is to be questioned, just where the ordering intentionality of questioning as such can obstruct -- in every stiff-necked way -- the advance of thinking. Scientific questioning is exactly not the questioning that Heidegger names the piety of thought. And if that latter questioning does not turn of itself into simply saying that is only because the difference between thinkers and poets is made of the simplicity that by its nature (and to the mischance of thinking), yields only to the poet.

For Heidegger, the kind of answer sought by reflective questioning responds in 'the sense of correspond[ing] to the essence of what is being asked about' (23). Rather than the monological order of question and answer, this is the dialogical attention that for Heidegger is already given to us at the heart of intentionality. Heidegger's subtle claim that 'we need only apprehend in an unbiased way' is a coordinate reference.

Kant was able to express the decisive achievement of modern science as exactly scientific questioning (KdrV xiii). This is a questioning set up in advance, ordered to a particular answer (the question-answer style characteristic of scientific questioning is always anything but open). For Heidegger, the very technological order of science begins in theory.(15) Even particle physics, the most advanced and radical bastion of science is bound to this style of scientific and not reflective or thoughtful questioning. Even in the exactly paradoxical realm of quantum mechanical indeterminacy 'nature reports itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation and ... remains orderable as a system of information' (23).

For Heidegger and recent critical reflections in the philosophy of technology increasingly share this perspective, if they do not attribute the insight to Heidegger, it is plain that the traditional theoretical distinction between pure science and applied science or technology is erroneous. Representing modern technology as applied physical science (and the advocates of strong public support for basic science make this identification with all calculated rhetorical intent)(16) is an illusion which dissipates in the wake of questioning into the essence of modern technology and the essential origins of modern science (23).

The danger Heidegger speaks of is not singular but a multifarious danger -- that man might come to take the character of ordering for the essence of unconcealment -- 'thus endangered out of destining' (26). The danger is that reducing the real to nothing more than standing reserve, humanity can lose the world of things that are not merely the products or resources of technology. What is at risk is not the possibility of such a reduction but the truth of what is. The danger too is that this ordering as standing reserve can come to include human beings as a resource, to be managed -- the very vision experimental practice shows to be uncomfortably non-metaphorical. What is in danger thereby is not its contrary but rather its corollary: man 'exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth.' At the end of the day, there is nothing but subjective, idealised humanity: nature is revealed as anthropomorphized construct; deities are demythologized as anthropomorphic projections; the dark night of the soul corresponds to Dickensian bits of beef, Freudian frivolity covered over with shame. At risk is the doubly simple, truth as aletheia.

Babette Babich

Fordham University, Department of Philosophy, 113 West 60th Street, New York, NY 10023

The Philosophy of the Question

With his most famous question, the Being-question, the Seinsfrage -- a question essentially and not incidentally obliterated by the tradition of philosophic questioning, Heidegger proposes a phenomenology of questioning. This is not counter to the project of philosophy but it calls us to our own experience as questioners, even as those who ask, who can ask 'Why the why.'(1) For Heidegger, 'only because man is in this way, can he and must he, in each case, say, not only yes or no, but essentially yes and no.'(2)

A reflection on inquiry as such poses the interpretive question of the question. In this way, Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology inBeing and Time determines the point of departure for any inquiry as the prerequisite, orientation and anticipatory process or progression towards any possible fulfilled terminus. Heidegger's later question concerning technology is inaugurated in the same way with careful attention to the destiny of the question as a project and a possibility for thought.

But Heidegger's concern with technology is itself 'questionable' for ordinary philosophers of technology. After all, it seems patent that Heidegger is the anti-technological philosopher par excellence. Thus Heidegger's questioning concern with technology and science,sustained throughout Heidegger's life as the double to the Being-question, is routinely heard as a 'negative' account of technology, that is as a critically antagonistic and nostalgic assault against the modern technical world. This negative appraisal of Heidegger's thought is not a weakness on the part of Heidegger's readers and critics. Rather the questions concerning technology and Being-question have to be heard in such a negating, critical fashion. That is, as long as we fail to ask the question of the question.

In what follows I attempt to reflect upon the case, the question of the question after technology. Heidegger's phenomenology of questioning is important here because, I shall seek to show, the contemporary expression of technology condemns questioning to nothing more than a calculative convention (namely that of question and answer) rather than an open- ended or attentive project. Calculative questioning challenges and is content with nothing less than the satisfaction of the correct. It is the calculative character of the contemporary techno-scientific world which renders the questionable as such less and less question-worthy. Calculating technological questioning is revealed as a Ge-stell -- hyphenated to emphasize the enframing of modern technology as a set-up. This framing set up is the secret of technology (as the age of the world picture), the quantitative expression, that is the earmark of information-age technicism or what Heidegger called 'Americanism,' i.e., 'European' (see WP153; cf 135). Thus the achievements of modern technological advance depend upon calculable manipulation which in his day, Heidegger named 'cybernetics.' The danger here is that 'what can seemingly always be calculated completely, becomes, precisely through this, seemingly incalculable. The invisible shadow cast by this conviction is the result of the ascendency of man as subiectum' (WP 136). Technological potential is apparently infinite but the sacrifice of unimaginable infinity to the imaginary ideal of mathematical infinity is a token of what Heidegger calls aletheia.

Beyond the technological dreams of infinite calculation, the question of the question refers to the doubly-turned or yoked nature of questioning.(3) In Being and Time Heidegger writes, 'Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction from what is sought.' But the way inquiry takes direction can vary. What is sought can be interrogated by the question or what is sought can be attended to in the question. Attentive questioning attends both to what is asked as what is asked about what is asked and listens to that which is sought by the question. This last is also the piety -- the poetry -- of thought, a movement of thinking that is almost Eastern in aspect if not origin. The responding attentiveness of creative questioning (or authentic, genuine reflection or thought) directed to the sense of things -- Heidegger invokes in his 1954 essay, 'Wissenschaft und Bessinnung,' such responsive questioning forgets itself as questioning and as it loses 'the character of questioning,' becomes in the end 'simply saying.'(4)

The danger of mistaking the aletheic character of truth, regarding it as no more than what is correctly revealed by the enframing constraint or rule of modern technology (Ge-stell) is the danger that questioning will become no more than investigative inquiry. As the open adventure of thought that is the essence of questioning, before but especially after technology what is thereby endangered is the aletheic essence of truth.

Heidegger's own questioning in the wake of technology is a question set into the set up or setting upon that is the essence of modern technology or das Ge-stell. 'This incalculable can be safeguarded into its truth -- only in creative questioning and shaping out of the power of genuine reflection' (WP 136). The working effect of such creative questioning questions into the framework or set up of technology. Such a query must be 'safeguarded' or sheltered as the kind of subordinate questioning most at risk in the wake of the instrumental thinking of technology. This is the oblivion of technology: 'in this situation total forgotteness of being reigns, total concealment of being.' Stilted by our culture of technique and invention, we are anything but masters, we are not the originators or disposers of technology, but in this framed relation to technology, humanity is subordinated to technology, becoming , in Heidegger's words, 'its toy.' As Jean Ladrière argues, the technological scheme or logos 'becomes an exterior power' imposing 'its own law on humanity.'(5) This is not a an ontologically clouded variation on a Luddite theme but a phenomenologically articulated, existentially and pragmatically confirmable commonplace. To use any technological item, even simple machines like a lever or a wedge, the user must conform, i.e., the user must attune him or herself to the tool as such in order to use the tool as such -- and not the other way around. This is the hypothetical imperative of technology. If you want to surf the Internet (if you want to ride a motorbike), you must do so within the limits of the Internet including your particular provider/browser (motorbike) you happen to be using. Other tricks may or may not work: convergence or coincidence with the specific protocol determining success in every case. This rule of adaptation to the demands of the tool and the exigency of the task to be done is skill; it is the result of study or receptive, affine use.

Holding a hammer properly enables one to use the hammer to accomplish what one has to do with the hammer. But this is other than bending the hammer to one's own will. The hammer will do best what one will if one conforms one's use to the intrinsic design of the hammer, heft, shape, etc. (conformity with respect to the appropriate grip, the angle and arc of the swinging stroke, even the kind of nail employed, surely the position of the same). In the case of hammering, there is always a great bit of freedom -- one can use the side of the hammer's head or the shaft for hammering, if it is a claw hammer and one is a performance artist, say, one can use the sharp edge of the claw. But even here the condition of the range of use is 'decided' or constrained by the tool and the task even in the last unlikely because (not albeit) unwieldy case. This is what Heidegger in Being and Time referred to as equipmental totality (SZ 68). With more sophisticated machines, anything mechanically driven for example, especially all things electronic, the range of play is increasingly reduced.

Thus engaged on the terms of our tools in order to use them as our tools, we accomodate ourselves to the law of the techno-cybernetic world, harnessing our patience and our desire to the numbing constraints of modern technology, on the telephone, on the road, where the most ubiquitous example of modern technological constraint or fascination is cybernetic captivation, matched to the software and hardware limitations of our computer world, on line, on the Internet, on the Web. In Heidegger's words, again, we are the 'plaything' of our own technology, and once again: not the other way around. It is common to protest against Heidegger's esotericism when we hear him speak of technology, especially the technology of logic, the organon of Western rationality, as if it were imposing its law on us,playing with us. The idea is as paradoxical as anything that calls for thought or may be named question-worthy. Obviously too, we also hear this expression as mysterious or esoteric or even mystical because of Heidegger's style, his language. Where language is the technology of academic discourse, the rhetorical tool of the philosopher and the sophist, language is also the technology of science and reflection, poetizing and thinking. It is in this same alienating/alienated way that we become, in Thoreau's more direct formula: 'the tools of our tools.'

As the plaything of technology, fashioned in turn by what we make, we are ourselves transformed into the instruments of our own technologies, information and otherwise. Indeed, one way to regard modern humanity is as the practical and literal means of technology today: that is as the agency of all technological reproduction, mechanical reproduction and electronic reproduction. Regarding the historical essence of technology, we ourselves -- to use Joan Stambaugh's pragmatic translation of Ge-stell -- have been been 'framed' by what in Heidegger's image, 'frames' us.

In Nordic mythology, Odin's two ravens had powers embodying the technological dreams of the Western soul, as barbarian as civilized. To inform the All-Father, they moved at the speed of thought. And Odin was a god, as Oedipus was a man, who paid a consummate price -- but in Odin's case, deliberately and with an eye enough -- for knowledge. But in a world of multifarious heritage and influence, we are not quite Odin's children. Born according to one Greek myth, from a mixture of dust and titan's blood we have more in common with Prometheus who also carried the same promise of instant wish, will, and fulfillment in his own name but was condemned to endure the desolation of the failure of technology, as this failure testifies to what Reiner Schürmann calls the tragic condition of Being, what Heidegger names its withdrawal, we dare immediate fulfillment, like Prometheus, in violation of all measure. Our reward, like Sisyphus's perfect justice, is desire without end. Here, it is also instructive that even a storyteller like Camus remembered only Sisyphus's eternal destiny and not his original offense. In truth, Sisyphus was punished for a crime before he could commit it. He was guilty of no more than embracing a phantasm, the vaporous dream of the object of his desire, the mother of the gods. His fate was to play and replay the same endeavor: infinitely rendered, impossibly accomplished. Sisyphus won desire to infinity: as soon consummated, as soon undone. That is: frustrated, ungratified, a pursuit as eternal as Keats's own illusions.

The mischief of non-consummation, the human plague, is the numbing constraint of technology and science, whereby the question of essence as Heidegger poses it, taking a metaphor from the poet Stefan George, is the question of what frames us. This frame is the traditional question of love and freedom. And it is the same traditional romanticism that captures the enduring allure of the efficient technical mind. The same ideal of love and freedom betrays the history of the tradition and practice of magic and alchemy which (Nietzsche argues) functions as the paradigm and secret motivation for the whole of modern science and technology. If questioning has become insipid in the wake of technology or else in the placidity of the thoughtlessness of Western reason, we need to ask Heidegger's question once again. We do this not by questioning technology but by questioning questioning in the wake of technology.

In the scientific schematism that condenses every causality to a singular nexus, stripping the metaphysical and first, final, and fetishistic material causes, we have re-made, reworked (if in a thoroughly Roman or imperalist image) the causa efficiens. And yet only the causa efficiens, as a practical technoscientific observer might claim, only one out of the original quartet, was ever 'really' able to cause anything in the first place. This conviction is the scientistic myth of simple causality. In truth, in the round, real world, there is no such identifiably singular efficient cause, separable from the manifold interplay of the causal dynamic. The actual causal nexus is the chaotic interrelatedness of real events and processes: selectively, deceptively simplifiable, overdetermined from the start, in a chain of conditions and related qualifications. And every detail works its ultimate consequence, as Nietzsche would say, by necessity.

We do not simply accomodate ourselves to our technologies but we confine or limit our desires and so ourselves to them. What can be done becomes exemplary, worth doing, the only thing to do. From a phenomenological perspective, once again, we become our tools, project ourselves into and then, mirabile dictu, as Nietzsche liked to tease, we find ourselves in our things. Like the internet, like TV or MTV, but also like everything registered and so liable as stock, as reserve, technology becomes as resource the veritable mirror of our souls, insidiously benign like books or CDs, much more dangerously, in the illusory practice of writing in electronic media like email, or now reflecting our bodies in the idea of the genetic code, our "genes" that make us who we are. Beyond the negative threats of chemical plants and their waste, like nuclear powerplants and nuclear accelerators, like the plastic promise of contemporary cosmetic surgery, it is the ambition of the human genome project and the practical affair that is the cloning of an adult sheep that we ourselves are literally not metaphorically to be tooled by our tools.

This subjective fashioning is what it means to say that we are our tools. Clothes make the man (evidence of humanity: the first technology). If we are our mountain boots or our sandals, our choice of business suit or evening dress, we are also our hammers or indeed: we are our CD players, our computers, even our coffee-makers. And so it goes with tools, with cities and roads, with the communicational infrastructure of contemporary life in cellular and car phones (the latter providing social evidence of prime importance: the ultimate technology). In all these things, typically not exceptionally, the automobile exemplifies modern technological life. We do not need to speak of planes (though the example works far beyond Heidegger's 'waiting' plane on the runway) to see the backwards fashioning or working of the tool upon the user, the maker, the driver, the consumer. We recall the phenomenologically confirmable commonplace that a driver can and does become his automobile -- "extended" as the Husserlian cum Heideggerian analysis of the dynamic of motoring through narrow streets or on the open road, with power magnifying the force of the body, speed beyond any possible evolutionary anticipation, but a power controlled by the ordinary motorist and grand prix racer alike with delicacy, deliberate speed. But as Buadrillard has emphasised, we are both extended and restricted by the automobile. We go as fast the speed limit and police constraints permit. We go as fast as the economics of consumption allows but we also go as fast as the car itself, as the design of the road permits us to go. We are, we answer, the claim of the road. And in America this claim is sheer fantasy, a matter of the wide open spaces of the American West and the American Past: Chevy, T-Bird, Trans-Am. In Germany, to choose another land marked by its identification with the automobile, the claim and the fantasy are on more equal terms. For Germany, this fantasy has a different provenance and a different expression together with a different set of limitations. The Autobahn and the Mercedes were made for each other. The German motorist answers this complementary configuration of technical track permitting maximum speed and, for the most part, avoids the leftmost lane unless his own automobile makes it possible to ride down other knights of the open road: lights flashing, horns sounding, a jousting tailored for the streamlined, uni-directional vectors of the modern not the medieval era.

Not is it an accident that Germany shares its advertising preoccupations with the automodile with the North American public. Beyond speed, the erotics of the motor car "extend" us even more. This is not simply a matter of postmodern car crash fantasies. The feel of car works on the every day level and the more we are impressed by the design, the more able we are to drive the car like a second skin and this extension is more important than image. We can become via an exact bodily feel, the very edge of the automotive fender, in just the way Alphonso Lingis(6) describes this very visceral, sensual extension of the driver's car, or more prosaically, beyond Lingis's overt sexual metonymy, just in the way that Patrick Heelan's philosophy of (technologized or phenomenologically hermeneutic) perception(7)or Don Ihde's account of technological extension has it:(8) we are embodied indwelling beings, we are as Heidegger says, and here is the spacial crux of all technological revealing, in the world. And we speak of extended things and the talk of extended things as inaugurating modernity because we can extend ourselves, because we are inherently, quintessentially intentional beings, ahead of ourselves, beyond ourselves. Merleau-Ponty's account of the blindman's cane expresses the considerable versatility of intentional being in the world alongside and with the ultimately aesthetic or creative use of whatever may be to hand, be it a cane, an automobile, eyeglasses, telescopes, paintbrushes, or, for a teenager the electronic 'feel' and hype of surfing the Internet late at night, where in such web-dreams the computer screen absorbs the ever more Platonized images of adolescent fantasy and the Aristotelian desire to know.

In this context, we recall that for Heidegger well before this became common knowledge, cybernetics is named the 'ersatz for philosophy and poetry.'(9) In an age of virtual reality, it is important to remember that that all cybernetics, all computer or information technology is always, is essentially ersatz, i.e., unreal or virtual.

Albert A. Anderson, Babson College

---

Prometheus: Such are the inventions
I devised for mankind,
Yet have myself no cunning wherewith
To rid me of my present suffering.[1]

Human beings have been puzzling over the suffering which arises from technology at least since the middle of the fifth century B.C. Rather than blame technology, I believe that we should look to philosophy to determine why Prometheus suffers and what should be done to respond to the current ecological crisis.

The benefits brought by Prometheus' "gift of fire" are well known. Because of him humankind has the knowledge of how to build houses "turned to face the sun," the ability to understand "the risings of the stars and their settings," the power to calculate with number and to combine letters in order to "hold all things in memory." Through this cunning we can "roam the sea," "mix soothing remedies" for illness, and bring precious metals from beneath the earth. "Hear the sum of the whole matter in the compass of one brief word--every art [techne] possessed by man comes from Prometheus."[2]

Why, then, does Prometheus suffer? Aeschylus is wonderful in presenting Prometheus' agony, but he offers little help in understanding the real source of the problem. We are told that Prometheus defied Zeus, who had decided that the human race was a mistake. He was about to replace it with another.[3]But is it wrong to defy a willful, tyrannical ruler? It is hard to believe that the Greeks, who at that time were developing the world's first democracy, would settle for that explanation. We need to dig deeper.

Plato tells the story somewhat differently. In his dialogue, Protagoras, the character Protagoras expands upon the ancient myth.[4] After the gods created mortal creatures, they assigned to Prometheus (whose name means "forethought") and his brother Epimetheus ("afterthought") the task of giving each mortal creature the equipment it would need to live well. Epimetheus persuaded Prometheus to let him do the job, and he invited Prometheus to examine his work when it was done. So, it was Epimetheus who gave speed to some animals and strength to others; the power of flight went to a few, whereas others received underground habitation; some ate from the trees, others roots, and "to a certain number for food he gave other creatures to devour."[5] In this way each was given the power to preserve itself. Protagoras continues:

Epimetheus, being not so wise as he might be, heedlessly squandered his stock of properties on the brutes; he still had left unequipped the race of men, and was at a loss what to do with it. As he was casting about, Prometheus arrived to examine his distribution, and saw that whereas other creatures were fully and suitably provided, man was naked, unshod, unbedded, unarmed; and already the destined day was come whereon man like the rest should emerge from earth to light. Then Prometheus, in his perplexity as to what preservation he could devise for man, stole from Hephaestus and Athena wisdom in the arts together with fire--and he handed it there and then as a gift to man.[6]

Now we come to the part Aeschylus left out. "Although man acquired in this way the wisdom of daily life, civic wisdom [politike techne] he had not, since this was in the possession of Zeus."[7]

The point of all this is that Prometheus suffers because he stole part of what humans need to live, but the most important part--civic wisdom--was lacking. Without civic wisdom human beings are a menace to themselves, to other creatures, and to the earth itself. This has since become clear in the current ecological crisis. Prometheus, the forethinker, should have known better. Technological mastery, without civic wisdom, spells disaster. Zeus was ready to do away with the whole human race, but Prometheus, out of compassion, interfered and left us with a problem that is still unresolved. That is why he was chained to a rock and an eagle was sent to feast daily upon his liver. Zeus then sent Hermes to give human beings "civic art" [politike techne] "to bring respect and right among men, to the end that there should be regulation of cities and friendly ties to draw them together."[8] But here things become complicated.

Hermes asked Zeus whether he should distribute civic wisdom to all people or whether it should be distributed as the other arts were dealt--with one person possessing medical art and treating many ordinary people, one person being a carpenter for many, etc. The answer was that it should be distributed to all alike: "Let all have their share; for cities cannot be formed if only a few have a share of these as of other arts."[9] Here is the voice of the new democracy speaking clearly and eloquently.

Protagoras contends both that there is civic virtue [arete] and that it can be taught to all people. But another of Plato's characters, Socrates, has a few questions to pose concerning this bold vision of civic virtue and how it is to be distributed. Virtue seems not to be one thing, certainly not one upon which all people agree, but many things (knowledge, temperance, justice, courage, holiness, etc.), each distinct from the other, sometimes even in conflict. Rather than being distributed equally, certain people possess some of these virtues and lack others.[10] Some have courage and lack knowledge, some possess holiness but not justice, and still others have knowledge but not holiness. If civic virtue is to be taught to all, it would seem that a great teacher like Protagoras should know what virtue is, be able to define it, and be able to teach it. Subsequent discussion in Plato's dialogue makes it clear that Protagoras is unable to answer Socrates' objections, and therefore, is incapable of defining civic virtue and unable to teach it to all people.

But is there no hope? Is there no such thing as political wisdom? Is it impossible to articulate and teach civic virtue? These are philosophical questions, so I think it is philosophers who bear the responsibility for answering them. The ecological crisis has spawned a series of attempts to link ecology and values, to correct the wrong-headed approaches to ethical and political values which have failed so miserably in the modern world. But perhaps the source of the difficulty is not confined to the modern world. Perhaps it is Protagoras himself who pointed us in the wrong direction when he claimed that "man is the measure of all things" and wrongly tried to locate value judgments in human consciousness. To say that "man is the measure of all things" can mean (1) the individual person, (2) the consensus of any given society, or (3) the human race as a whole. All of those interpretations lead to some form of relativism.[11]

Perhaps what is needed is a new way of thinking about values, one which places human beings in proper perspective. To say with Immanuel Kant that people exist as ends, not as means only, does not entail that only people exist as ends in themselves. Even to acknowledge universal human values does not adequately account for other beings which might be ends in themselves. Tom Regan and Peter Singer argue for including other animals in the ethical community.[12] J. Baird Callicott calls for "nothing less than a sweeping philosophical overhaul--not just of ethics, but of the whole Western world view."[13] He counts himself among a group of philosophers called "ecocentrists" who advocate "a shift in the locus of intrinsic value from individuals . . . to terrestrial nature--the ecosystem--as a whole."[14]

If humanism is taken as a form of "human chauvinism," as some have claimed,[15] it offers a subjectivist or a relativist ethic (or both). We need to go beyond humanism. In 1948 Aldo Leopold wrote that

there is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus' slave girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.[16]

Following Leopold, Callicott seeks to establish "the land ethic" which contends that "a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."[17]

This approach, however, seems to commit the so-called "naturalistic fallacy" which G. E. Moore identified in Principia Ethica.[18] Moore argues that there is a common confusion between what is good, which is not a natural object, and any natural object. For example, when utilitarians equate what is pleasurable, which is a natural phenomenon, with what is good, that is a common instance of the naturalistic fallacy.[19] If one seeks to ground ethics in nature, in what is, then it would seem that one is guilty of that fallacy.

Moore contends that good simply cannot be defined. Good is good. It is a fallacy to equate pleasure, advantage, power, money, or self-interest with good.[20]

Callicott responds directly to this objection, deflecting Moore's formulation as "so specifically tied to Moore's ethics . . . as to be of little moment"[21] and concentrates instead upon Hume's version of the Is/Ought dichotomy.[22] Rather than opposing Hume, Callicott embraces his theory of moral sentiments (which he links also to the ethical theories of Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, and Edward O. Wilson[23]). There is no Is/Ought dichotomy, he argues, because all sentient creatures can participate in some version of moral or social sentiment which evolves in higher mammals into what we commonly consider to be rational ethics but which, originally, is grounded in feeling. What "is" and what "ought to be" have the same source--moral sentiment. This, he insists, results in a "holistic" ethic which avoids the Is/Ought dichotomy.

But there is a fatal flaw in Callicott's approach; in attempting to avoid the Is/Ought dichotomy, he creates an equally pernicious schism between feeling (sentiment) and reason,[24] removing any hope that rational beings (such as humans) who do make choices on the basis of reason, can find genuine unity and harmony with creatures which lack reason. Once reason overrides feeling, takes priority over feeling, as it often does, any attempt to ground values in feeling fails. No matter how much pleasure I derive from unjust acts, no matter how "good" they make me feel, they should be avoided.

Callicott is right about one thing; it is important to establish a holistic approach to values so that human beings, other animals, and the land itself are incorporated into a vision of reality which makes it possible to respond intelligently to the ecological crisis (as well as a host of other value questions). Where are we to look for such a vision? Callicott suggests that we return to Plato for guidance, contending that "ethical holism"[25] is supported by Plato's moral and social philosophy.[26] But his use of Plato's philosophy is misguided.[27] He applauds Plato's "complete indifference" to the pain and suffering of individual human beings, praising Socrates' response to Adeimantus' complaint at the beginning of Book IV of The Republic that his proposed society ignores human happiness. It is the well-being of the community as a whole, not that of any person or special class, at which his ideal community aims.[28]In light of what he takes to be the similarities between Plato's scheme and Leopold's, Callicott concludes that "the land ethic . . . is somewhat foreign to modern systems of ethical philosophy, but perfectly familiar in the broader context of classical Western ethical philosophy."[29]

Unfortunately, Callicott misreads Plato on this crucial issue. Rather than proposing an ideal society of the sort Callicott outlines, Plato uses his characters to elaborate and then demolish that vision.[30] Rather than offering a single theory of "the good life," in The Republic, Plato offers three separate, mutually contradictory concepts of the polis.[31] The second, a society of the "love of luxury and wealth,"[32] is the one Callicott confuses with Plato's positive case. It is just the opposite, a society which Plato rejects.[33] What emerges from this way of reading The Republic (and Plato's other dialogues as well) is a vision of ethics which is grounded in being and goodness, one far superior to that of modern philosophers who separate ethics from ontology and then seek to pull values out of a magic hat. To ground ethics in being does not commit the "naturalistic fallacy," because there is no such fallacy. This becomes clear when Moore explains what he means in "philosophic terminology." He says that "propositions about the good are all of them synthetic and never analytic."[34] The naturalistic fallacy could exist only if we were to accept the analytic/synthetic distinction. I have argued elsewhere that the arguments against the analytic/synthetic distinction are convincing and that it should be abandoned once and for all.[35] Plato embraced no dualism between "is" and "ought." On the contrary, the ontology which is developed in The Republic (and a variety of other dialogues) soundly rejects any such bifurcation. Knowing cannot be separated either from reason or from experience. Knowing, reasoning, and experiencing are grounded in being and goodness.

Socrates does not provide a positive and unified concept of civic virtue in the Protagoras. His task there is to show that Protagoras lacked such a vision and, as a result, that his interpretation of the Prometheus myth was incoherent. Socrates points out at the end of the dialogue that he and Protagoras have traded places. Protagoras began by claiming that virtue can be taught, but his subsequent answers to Socrates' questions led him to the view that it cannot be taught--"for if virtue were anything else than knowledge, as Protagoras tried to make out, obviously it would not be teachable."[36] Socrates, after having said at first that virtue cannot be taught, changes his mind and seeks "to prove that all things are knowledge--justice, temperance, and courage--which is the best way to make virtue appear teachable."[37] Socrates concludes that dialogue by returning to the myth. He says:

I like the Prometheus of your fable better than the Epimetheus; for he is of use to me, and I take Promethean thought continually for my own life when I am occupied with all these questions.[38]

The conversation with Protagoras ends at that point, but not before Socrates suggests a way out of our plight. Promethean thought serves as Socrates' guide, and I think it can do the same for us.

But what, pray tell, is "Promethean thought" as Socrates now uses the term? We can begin by saying what it is not:

1. It is not "Epimethean thought." It is forethought rather than afterthought. For example our thinking about the ecological crisis has tended to be "afterthought," especially when it comes to putting our thought into action.

2. It is not technology separated from civic wisdom [politike techne]. Contemporary human beings have acquired the bad habit of thinking either that there is no such thing as knowledge or that it is separated into compartments which are sealed off from each other. The techne of carpentry allows us to build houses, but then we thoughtlessly neglect to "turn them toward the sun," making it necessary to heat them with oil. We have the know-how to construct passive solar heat, but we lack the civic wisdom to incorporate it into our communities.

3. It is not manifested in rhetoric, the pseudo-art practiced by an "orator" [rhetor] such as Protagoras. On the topic of teaching civic virtue, the character Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus points out that the real issue is whether the person speaking knows the difference between good and evil and is able to promote the good rather than the evil. Too often the political speaker does not know the difference but nevertheless attempts to "persuade the state which is equally ignorant . . . by praising evil under the name of good . . . and having studied the opinions of the multitude persuades them to do evil instead of good."

4. It is not analytic, synthetic, a priori, a posteriori, synthetic a priori, or any other permutation of these terms. Those distinctions emerged long after Plato's time, and they lead to a serious distortion of Plato's philosophy when we utilize them in interpreting his dialogues. This practice is responsible for many of the misleading interpretations of Plato's dialogues which pervade the modern world. For example, to say that the "forms" [ta eide] which are discussed in many of the dialogues are "a priori" is an anachronism leading many readers of Plato to think he was an epistemological dualist, a follower of René Descartes. Plato was not a follower of Descartes.

5. Contrary to Callicott, it is not feeling or sentiment separated from reason.[39] Callicott formulates his argument against the rationality of ethics as follows:

Reason appears to be a delicate, variable, and recently emerged faculty. It cannot, under any circumstances, be supposed to have evolved in the absence of complex linguistic capabilities which depend, in turn, for their evolution upon a highly developed social matrix. But we cannot have become social beings unless we assumed limitations on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. Hence we must have become ethical before we became rational.[40]

It is true that the explicit use of reason by human beings is a relatively late development in the evolutionary process, but that does not mean ethics must rest upon some more primitive impulse. Callicott's argument is based upon the assumption that ethical action consists largely of imposing "limitations on freedom of action in the struggle for existence." I question that assumption, along with the negative definition of freedom and the narrow concept of reason it entails. For human beings to be social, to live harmoniously with others, requires civic wisdom (one of the manifestations of reason). But this does not imply that other animals are irrational just because they lack "complex linguistic abilities." Promethean thinking, as Plato developed it throughout his dialogues, entails a much broader conception of reason than this, one which pervades being itself.

6. It is not the private property of professional philosophers. It belongs to all "lovers of wisdom."

This brings us to Plato's positive view of rationality. Full development of that notion requires a much longer treatment than is possible in this paper, but I shall characterize it briefly. In direct opposition to the rhetoric of Sophists such as Protagoras, Thrasymachus, Lysias, and Gorgias, Socrates cites "two principles, the essence of which it would be gratifying to learn, if art [techne] could teach it."[41] What are these principles? The Greek terms are diairesisand sunagoge, which mean, respectively, "dividing" and "bringing together." Here we must be careful not to view Plato's meaning through lenses which have been polished by analytic philosophers in the twentieth century. Here is how Socrates uses these terms:

Now I myself, Phaedrus, am a lover of these processes of division and bringing together, as aids to speech and thought; and if I think any other man is able to see things that can naturally be collected into one and divided into many, him I follow after and "walk in his footsteps as if he were a god." And whether the name I give to those who can do this is right or wrong, God knows, but I have called them hitherto dialecticians.[42]

The term "Promethean thinking," as Socrates used it in the Protagoras, is another name for "dialectic" as it is used in Phaedrus, The Republic,[43] and a variety of other dialogues. It is the process which Socrates in the Protagoras demonstrated clearly that Protagoras could not employ. That explains why Protagoras could not properly respond to Socrates' questions about the nature of virtue, especially about civic virtue and how it relates to other virtues (such as courage, temperance, justice, holiness, etc.).

What is most important about the dialectical method is that it is used to think about the nature of things, about being itself (in contrast to the Sophists who speak only about appearances). In "dividing by classes," we should search for "where the natural joints are, and not try to break any part, after the manner of a bad carver."[44] Such metaphors about the natural forms of things abound in Socrates' explication of the dialectical process in Phaedrus. The art of medicine is one of those given to human beings by Prometheus. This is a genuine art, not the sort of pseudo-art favored by the Sophists. We must follow what is natural, in medicine, in poetry, and in civic virtue.[45] The way this is achieved is through "discussion and high speculation about nature."[46]Pericles is cited as the "most perfect orator in existence" because he supplemented his great natural abilities through conversation with Anaxagoras who "taught him the nature of mind and the lack of mind."[47] Socrates constructs an analogy between the art of healing and the art of genuine rhetoric. "In both cases you must analyze a nature, in one that of the body and in the other that of the soul,"[48] the goal being through the one art to promote health and strength in the body by prescribing medicine and diet and through proper discussion to promote virtue in the soul. This is the "art of speaking" which canproperly be called an art [techne]. This is the art which Socrates practices. Its highest form of development so far is to be found in the dialogues of Plato. It is there that we find Socrates trying to expand the arts brought by Prometheus (medicine, astronomy, carpentry, etc.) to include politike techne, the art required for human beings who naturally live in cities. That is the art nurtured by dialectic. It is through dialectic, through genuine philosophy, that civic virtue can be made available to mankind.

Zeus therefore, fearing the total destruction of our race, sent Hermes to impart to men the qualities of respect for others and a sense of justice, so as to bring order into our cities and create a bond of friendship and union.

Hermes asked Zeus in what manner he was to bestow these gifts on men. "Shall I distribute them as the arts were distributed--that is, on the principle that one trained doctor suffices for many laymen, and so with the other experts? Shall I distribute justice and respect for their fellows in this way, or to all alike?"

"To all," said Zeus. "Let all have their share. There could never be cities if only a few shared in these virtues, as in the arts. Moreover, you must lay it down as my law that if anyone is incapable of acquiring his share of these two virtues he shall be put to death as a plague to the city."

The controversial climate surrounding SSK has existed since the beginning because of both external rejection and/or resistance and internal divergences and ambiguities. In the course of this paper, I intended to make a reconstruction of some of what appear as key points of what SSK protagonists share (until divergences are explicitly invoked to make different points), as well as what separates them from their chief opponents, the philosophers. In this reconstruction, the key issue for SSK could be summed up under the slogan, a role for sociology in an interdisciplinary naturalized study of science. With this demand, sociologists would attempt to join scholars of other disciplines that have already been integrated, such as cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, and the history of science. Why should sociological investigations not be able to complement other understandings of scientific knowledge? Indeed, it reveals that science and knowing are by nature collective activities. As such, science should not be differentiated from other collective human activities; it would be just another cultural activity. So the distinctiveness of science would reside not in a difference regarding its nature, but regarding its specific aim, the production of reliable knowledge. The search for the nature of this distinctive activity would rely on the empirical analysis of what it really is: what it produces, how it is produced, the resources needed for this, the places where this production occurs, and the contexts (proximate and remote) that affect both the activity and its results. It is from a precise empirical investigation of this kind that one ought, a posteriori, to decide what the nature and distinctive traits of science really are. It is, as a matter of fact, this kind of investigation that makes it necessary to overcome old distinctions and dichotomies.

Given the program with which philosophers first began to work in this century, the strong philosophical reaction against SSK could appear to be both expected and reasonable. For the basic theses of that program were foundationalist normativism, justificationism, demarcationism, internalism, rationalism, and realism at an observational or theoretical level (or both). Compared to this program, SSK's program appears as an irreconcilable alternative by rejecting dichotomies, dissolving distinctions, and reversing the order of priority. It seems almost designed to violate each one of these philosophical theses. Born as a naturalistic program, it must necessarily focus on its own subject matter, the social basis of knowledge making. With this starting point, it is committed to being first, anti-internalistic, and, then, antidichotomistic, antidemarcationistic, relativistic, and constructivist.

The strength of philosophers' reactions would still be reasonable today if philosophy of science had remained the same as it was some decades ago. In such a case, the integration of sociological and philosophical studies would appear quite unrealizable, given that it would require radical changes in some of the studies. But many changes have taken place, recently and independently, within philosophy itself. There exists, for example, a general philosophical consensus around naturalization and the interdisciplinarity of science studies, and the hard edges of dichotomies have been softened, and demarcation lines have faded. So one could expect a new receptivity towards SSK. But this has not happened.

The issue demanding an integration of SSK within the naturalized study of science (within a naturalization that philosophy itself has promoted) is not a question of mere disciplinary boundaries, nor of defending interdisciplinarity. SSK makes interesting proposals both about how studies of science must be approached and about what its working agenda must include. Yet, regarding the possible impact of all this on the global image of science an impact that sociologists have hurried to proclaim while philosophers have rejected it we have a question that can only reasonably be answered a posteriori, never a priori. It is a matter of better elaborations of theoretical arguments and better development of empirical investigations. And these elaborations and developments demand an intellectual climate that one could hardly say has existed before today. With this paper, I hope to have collaborated in the creation of such a climate.

The rejection of the dichotomy of contexts and the reversal of priority between justification and the genesis of knowledge to which SSK gave rise has made of experimentation a chief issue in science studies. A move towards the experimental side of science has taken place recently within philosophy, too, with such influential works as those of Harr� and Hacking, and also those of Franklin, Galison, and Nickles all of them except Franklin sympathizers with SSK. This shift of attention has taken place in a climate of harsh criticism condemning the ironic fact that the traditional conceptualist view of science had neglected the very hallmark of science, experiments. Sociologists were also aware of the problems that philosophical theses about the "theory ladenness" of observation and the "underdetermination of theories by data" had caused for the earlier simplistic view about the nature and role of the empirical base of science.

Yet there is a difference with the sociological analysis of this topic; and it leads directly to the controversy, realism versus constructivism. For with so-called laboratory studies we have to deal with the problem, not that our view of facts depends on our previous expectations and beliefs, but that the very existence of facts depends on the processes that produce them in the laboratory. And this does not mean that nature or the world has no independent existence, nor that it has no role to play in knowledge. Yet it is not this reality which scientific knowledge relies on but the one that emerges in the laboratory. Laboratory work is indeed a labor that consists of not allowing reality to remain as it was when it arrived there. Whether mice, bacteria, or chemicals, scientists' work does not consist of passively observing them, but rather of manipulating them, and transforming them. And it does all of this with intricate instruments, apparatus, and resources which are also not taken from nature, but are themselves products of prior human activities.

The problem here, as in many of the controversial points that pit sociologists against philosophers, is the use of quotations out of context. Laboratory studies in particular and SSK in general are supposed to claim a metaphysical thesis that would deny the existence of nature, the world, independent reality; and/or to claim an epistemological thesis that would deny that such reality plays a causal role in knowledge. Around these supposed claims the controversy realism versus constructivism is built. Boyd (1992), for example, says: "Realists and constructivists differ in that the former hold, while the latter deny, that the phenomena studied by scientists exist and have the properties they do independently of our adoption of theories, conceptual frameworks or paradigms."47 But what in fact constructivists deny is that those phenomena exist and have the property they do, not independently of what scientists think, but of what scientists do with them in the laboratory.

The laboratory, thus, is not a place where scientist meets nature, and its power does not reside in allowing the conditions under which phenomena naturally occur to flow freely. Rather, "The power of a laboratory is measured by the extreme conditions it is able to create: huge accelerators of millions of electron volts; temperatures approaching absolute zero; arrays of radio-telescopes spanning kilometers; furnaces heating up to thousands of degrees; pressures exerted at thousands of atmospheres; animal quarters with thousands of rats or guinea pigs; gigantic number crunchers able to do thousands of operations per millisecond."48 Speaking of laboratory studies, Giere (1988)acknowledges: "It is undeniable that these works of Latour and Woolgar and of Knorr-Cetina capture the texture of day-to-day research in a way that few other works, be they sociological, historical or philosophical, have ever done." "Still," he adds, "for anyone trained in the natural sciences or in an analytic philosophy of science, constructivism sounds wildly implausible."

Yet Latour has an explanation for this sense of implausibility; it has at its cause a paradox of scientific activity. It has to do with the fact that, once scientific results leave the lab in the form of key pieces in scientific papers, they make no reference to the actions, agents, or resources that give birth to them in the first place. All the long, expensive, and complex processes from which the results emerge become invisible. It is a fact that the inclusion or not of references to places, people, or processes marks the status of a scientific sentence. By adding such references, the status of a sentence is undermined. By removing them, it becomes more reliable. No references at all, and it is taken as uncontroversial. It is well known that there are no scientific sentences uncontroversial in themselves, something that was highlighted by the old philosophical thesis of fallibility. It is also well known that the status of sentences can change, depending on several conditions. What sociological analysis now would show is that this variability takes the form of adding or removing references to agents, places, or processes. And this is the point; it is the lack of all reference to human activity in obtaining scientific results that makes them appear as if they were, indeed, really independent of all human action. It is in this way that the independent existence of scientific phenomena, a key thesis of the realist argument, turns out to be itself a phenomenon that results from removing all reference to the actions without which the very phenomena would not exist in the first place. So Latour (1987) claims: "[Scientific] statements are not borrowed, transformed or disputed by empty-handed lay people, but by scientists with whole laboratories behind them."

Niiniluoto (1991) distinguishes philosophical naturalization (with authors like Lakatos, Laudan, or Giere), where science appears as the paradigm of human rationality, from sociological naturalization, where "scientific beliefs have no special relationship with reason, truth and reality." But, beginning with the word, "truth," I think it is reasonable to say that this has turned out to be a very elusive claim. As for "reason," I think it is reasonable to say that now as had already happened in the '60s it depends on how "reason" and "rationality" are defined. And now, as then, what seems to be challenged is some of the interpretations of such terms. Finally, with regard to "reality," I think that Niiniluotois just plain wrong. Far from saying that scientists have no special relationship with reality, constructivists claim that scientists have a very special relationship with reality, but it is a relationship about whose nature we have no idea because its investigation was forbidden by the philosophical dichotomy of contexts.

Thus far we have spoken only of sociological constructivism. Yet constructivism is also an old philosophical thesis, at least in the sense of emphasizing the active role of the subject in the construction of knowledge. In this sense, it goes back at least to Kant. Of course, there must be important differences between SSK and Kant's view of knowledge. Yet Kant did claim that the "conditions of all possible experience are, at the same time, the conditions of possibility of the object of experience."51 Perhaps the constructivism of laboratory studies could be read, pertinently and interestingly, as a sociological/naturalistic version of Kant's claim.

This is a label for a battlefield on which philosophers and sociologists fight each other using their most sophisticated conceptual devices.37 Philosophers appear entrenched in one of the fields, their arms made of elements of a traditional artillery which, it is supposed, will one day be the definitive weapon for defending the distinctive feature of science: a theory of rationality. Sociologists at the beginning seemed to be on the defensive in the face of something that did seem more like an accusation than a mere description.38 Later, relativism became something to embrace rather than to avoid. Yet "relativism" is a term whose meaning has no level of precision higher than that of a "straw man" against or in favor of which a large part of the controversy is directed. Collins's work can be considered the turning point because he uses the term "relativism" in the title with which he presents his own SSK subprogram.39 But there is something interesting with respect to his use of the term. For Collins presents relativism in the first place not as a thesis about the nature of science, but as a strategy for the study of science.40 The interesting point is that the aim of this strategy in Collins's work is the same as that of other authors, with their other strategies. It is this that I am interested in highlighting first.

As we have seen, for Collins, science, as (or better, more than) any other collective activity, relies on an established order, whose principles as is always the case with unchallenged, stable orders are taken for granted and so become invisible. For this reason, one needs to make an extra effort to design a special strategy to uncover them. Collins calls his strategy to uncover the taken-for-granted principles which scientific culture relies on, precisely, relativism. His relativistic strategy, he says, "rests on the prescription: treat descriptive language as though it were about imaginary objects." But why precisely this prescription? Because if we want to know scientific culture, we should not take for granted what it does; this is what relativism intends, it "demands that the analysis of the way knowledge is established is not shackled at the outset by common sense judgments about what is and is not true." And the way scientists establish the truth is precisely by referring to descriptive sentences, i.e., sentences that are supposed to describe what the world is really like. If what we want is to study scientific culture itself, then we need the relativistic prescription, because "if cultures differ in their perceptions of the world, then their perceptions cannot be fully explained by reference to what the world is really like."41 So taking a relativistic stance (his prescription) would lead us to begin by doubting what is generally taken for granted, namely, the nature and decisive role with which descriptive sentences are empowered.

Thus relativism, such as Collins presents it, is first a strategy for knowing knowledge making rather than a thesis about knowledge itself. This recommendation of distancing oneself from what everyone especially scientists thinks about science, as a fruitful strategy for uncovering taken-for-granted assumptions, is a topic in the SSK literature.

Bloor's principle of impartiality also demands that a naturalistic explanation of knowledge be independent of how scientists evaluate it; it has to explain both what they take to be true and what they take to be false, as well as what he takes to be rational and what he takes to be irrational.

This is also the starting point of Latour and Woolgar's (1979) book. Here they recommend "maintaining analytic distance upon explanations of activity prevalent within the culture being observed." "In the case of scientific culture in particular there is a strong tendency for the objects of that culture [facts] to provide their own explanation. Rather than produce an account which explained scientists' activities in terms of the facts which they discovered, our interest was to determine how a fact came to acquire its character in the first place."43 And when Shapin and Schaffer (1985) present their impressive work on the experimentalist tradition in modern science, they claim: "Ordinarily, our scientific culture's beliefs and practices are referred to the unambiguous facts of nature or to universal and impersonal criteria of just how people do things (or do them when behaving rationally')." "To be a member of a culture," they add, "is to act considering some things as if they were self-evident, and this marks decisively the version of that culture that can give native members." Inversely, "The member who poses awkward questions about what everybody knows' in the shared culture runs a real risk of being dealt with as a troublemaker or an idiot. Indeed, there are few more reliable ways of being expelled from a culture than continuing to seriously query its taken-for-granted intellectual framework. Playing the stranger is therefore a difficult business; yet this is precisely what we need to do with respect to [scientific] culture. . . We wish to adopt a . . . . suspension of our taken-for-granted perception of experimental practice and its products. By playing the stranger we hope to move away from self-evidence." The advantage of the perspective of the stranger, the authors say finally, is that the stranger "knows that there are alternatives to [native] beliefs and practices."

In this way, relativism, as Collins explicitly presents it as the concrete way to approach science, follows the pattern generally recommended by SSK studies; namely, choose a path that will permit the uncovering of taken-for-granted assumptions. Why do they make this strategy a necessary starting point in the study of science? Perhaps the best answer to this question would be another question: why not? After all, our philosophical culture takes for granted that science is something very different (demarcation), that it operates according to exclusive rules of its own (internalism), rules, in turn, which are empowered by an epistemological virtue (rationality). Although the technical terms come from recent philosophical developments, the assumptions behind them come from the conventional wisdom about science that we all share lay person, scientist, and philosopher alike. For this reason, these assumptions represent too committed a starting point in an approach to science, especially if one intends to be a naturalist, one for whom what really happens must take priority over what is supposed to be the case.

When Gooding, Pinch, and Schaffer (1989) comment on the work of Franklin a paradigmatic member of the philosophical rationality field they say that for Franklin what counts is that there do exist rational strategies to evaluate scientific results. For SSK, instead, what counts is that those strategies are "culturally accepted practice"; but this does not mean that science is either an irrational enterprise or one in which anything goes. What the two sides disagree about is not what they say about science, but about how to approach the study of science. Contrasting Franklin's way and the SSK way, the former takes as explanans what the latter takes as explanandum.45 There is thus a difference between philosophers (rationalistic) and sociologists (relativistic) and it is that the former use epistemological norms to explain knowledge reliability this is all they think they have to explain while the latter extend the field of what must be explained to include the epistemological norms.

It is important to point out that Franklin is working within a recently modified framework regarding methodological matters. For philosophy of science began with a foundationalist/normativist view, making demarcation a radical dividing line and cognitive phenomena part of the Platonic-Popperian "third world." Then came naturalization which treats cognitive phenomena as part of the natural world and bases its normative claims on the empirical investigation of real scientific practice past and present. It is as a result of this kind of work that Franklin claims that there do exist epistemological criteria, and they do explain knowledge reliability. Yet he does not ask for an explanation of the criteria themselves.

Now enters sociological naturalization, which asks for such an explanation, and it gives one: its status is that of "culturally accepted practices." With this move, cognitive phenomena appear as part of the realm of social convention. And if this were true, demarcation would collapse. Here is where relativism stops being a mere strategy for knowing about knowledge, and becomes a substantive thesis about knowledge itself. It stops being a metamethodological strategy and becomes an epistemological thesis. And here, of course, is where the controversy about philosophical rationalism versus sociological relativism gets its focus. Yet the opposite of rational is neither relativistic nor social terms the debate has turned around but irrational.46 Only if sociologists had called their own work or science itself irrational would philosophers be justified in using rationality as a weapon to fight against them.

Inversely, the opposite of relativism is not rationality but absolutism; and the absolute be it norms, principles, or truth may properly have a place in the Popperian third world, but it is hard to see how a naturalist could find it in the messy and ever-changing reality of which both the world we want to know and knowledge itself are a part. This difficulty could be the reason why relativism is not a problem that SSK imposed on philosophy from the outside. For, from Quine's ontological relativity to Putnam's conceptual relativity, and on through Kuhn's incommensurability, philosophy in the second half of this century, to a great extent, has been an attempt to banish the phantom of relativism. And perhaps these philosophers are the only ones who have remembered that one of the major tasks of philosophy has always been that of uncovering taken-for-granted assumptions.