The international technology assessment movement represents a noteworthy attempt at understanding and mastery of technological progress by modem industrial society. This paper explains why Technology Assessment has enjoyed marginal success. TA has patterned its methodology after the technologies it must evaluate. More fundamentally it has sought philosophical support from the same positivistic assumptions on which science based technology is grounded. Because positivism perpetuates the error that scientific technology is intelligible in terms independent of the political and economic context, TA itself (...) is deprived of substantive criteria which could form the basis of a critique of technology. (shrink)

The current sociotechnical enterprise known as technology assessment (TA) is examined. Applying Skolimowski's analysis of epistemic possibility, the two foci of TA activities, impact analysis and policy analysis are shown to involve different logical and methodological forms. Impact analysis is shown to follow the logic of applied science while policy analysis involves the logic of technological design. Methodological implications of this distinction are isolated. Areas requiring conceptual clarification internal to TA practice are identified and limitations of the overall approach are (...) articulated. (shrink)

The paradox that individually rational actions collectively can lead to irrational outcomes is exemplified in human appropriation of a class of goods known as "common-pool resources" : natural or humanly created resource systems which are large enough to make it costly to exclude potential beneficiaries. Appropriations of common-pool resources for private use tend toward abusive practices that lead to the loss of the resource in question: the tragedy of thecommons. Prescriptions for escape from tragedy have involved two institutions, each applied (...) largely in isolation from the other: private markets and government coercion . Yet examples exist of local institutions that have utilized mixtures of public and private practices and have survived for hundreds of years.Two problems further exacerbate efforts to avoid the tragic nature of common-pool resource use. One, given the current level of knowledge, the role of the resource is not recognized for what it is. It is, thus, in a fundamental, epistemological sense invisible. Two, if the resource is recognized, it may not be considered scarce, thus placing it outside the scrutiny of economic theory. Both types of error are addressed by the emerging field of ecological economics.This paper discusses common pool resources, locates the ambiguities that make their identification difficult, and argues that avoidance of a CPR loss is inadequately addressed by sharply separated market and state institutions. When the resource is recognized for what it is, a common-pool good, which is subject to overexploitation, it may be possible to identify creative combinations of public and private institutions that can combine to save that resource. Disparate examples of self-organized enterprises, public/private utilities, and "green" taxes, to name a few, provide empirical content for developing theories of self-organized collective action. (shrink)

I argue that irreducible multiple conceptions of moral obligation may be found in efforts to define "sustainability." Individualistic ethics currently dominate and will probably continue to shape discussions of natural resource depletion. Non-individualistic, organic ethics, which focus on entire generations of humans, are useful for overcoming problems of intergenerational identification. Finally, however, an expansion of the purview of ethics to the entire biotic community, as suggested by Aldo Leopold, represents a third scale of concern and obligation. By means of an (...) articulated, scalar bequest package, incorporating each of these disparate foci, I outline a hierarchical ethic of sustainability. (shrink)

This audio recording contains a lecture led by Dr. William Christian, Dr. Shirley C. Guthrie, and Dr. Stanley R. Hopper on November 20, 1965 as a part of the America and the Future of Theology Lecture Series. Dr. William Christian discusses the possibility of interaction between metaphysics and theology, the concept of God in Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysics, the relation of Whitehead’s metaphysics to Platonism, and the relation of Whitehead’s metaphysics to Christian theology. Dr. Guthrie responds to Dr. Christian (...) by accepting the interaction of metaphysics and theology as a possible subject and how metaphysics is necessary to theology, but only as an instrument not a dictator. Dr. Stanley responds to Dr. Christian by posing two questions: Can the relationship between theology and philosophy or theology and metaphysics be adequately represented when the concept of God has a strong family resemblance according to Whitehead, and What is the relationship between metaphysics and theology? Lastly, Dr. Christian responds to both Dr. Guthrie and Dr. Stanley. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION Linguists who work within the tradition of transformational generative grammar tend to regard semantics as an intractable, perhaps ultimately ...