Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Technology: Liberation or Enslavement?
- Do the Successes of Technology Evidence the Truth of Theories
- Instrument and Reality: The Case of Terrestrial Magnetism and the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis)
- Realism and Progress: Why Scientists should be Realists
- Quantum Technology: Where to Look for the Quantum Measurement Problem
- Welcome to Wales: Searle on the Computational Theory of Mind
- Acts, Omissions and Keeping Patients Alive in a Persistent Vegetative State
- Technology and Culture in a Developing Country
- Art and Technology: An Old Tension
- Tools, Machines and Marvels
- Values, Means and Ends
- Question Time
- Notes on Contributors
- Index of Names
Technology and Culture in a Developing Country
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Technology: Liberation or Enslavement?
- Do the Successes of Technology Evidence the Truth of Theories
- Instrument and Reality: The Case of Terrestrial Magnetism and the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis)
- Realism and Progress: Why Scientists should be Realists
- Quantum Technology: Where to Look for the Quantum Measurement Problem
- Welcome to Wales: Searle on the Computational Theory of Mind
- Acts, Omissions and Keeping Patients Alive in a Persistent Vegetative State
- Technology and Culture in a Developing Country
- Art and Technology: An Old Tension
- Tools, Machines and Marvels
- Values, Means and Ends
- Question Time
- Notes on Contributors
- Index of Names
Summary
Even though the subject of my paper is ‘Technology and Culture in a Developing Country’, it seems appropriate to preface it by examining science itself in the cultural traditions of a developing country, such as Ghana, in view of the fact that the lack of technological advancement, or the ossified state in which the techniques of production found themselves, in the traditional setting of Africa and, in many ways, even in modern Africa, is certainly attributable to the incomprehensible inattention to the search for scientific principles by the traditional technologists. I begin therefore with observations on how science and knowledge fared in the traditional culture of a developing country.
Science and Our Culture
In a previous publication I pointed out—indeed I stressed—the empirical orientation of African thought: maintaining that African proverbs, for instance, a number of which bear some philosophical content, addressed—or resulted from reflections on—specific situations, events or experiences in the lives of the people, and that even such a metaphysical concept as destiny (or fate) was reached inductively, experience being the basis of the reasoning that led to it. Observation and experience constituted a great part of the sources of knowledge in African traditions.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Philosophy and Technology , pp. 121 - 142Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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