Intellectualism

Intellectualism is the name given to the position of those who give the intellect priority over the affective and the volitional. By extension, to any exaggeration of the role of the intellect. Intellectualism is based on the assumption that reality is rational or intelligible and, therefore, susceptible to rational knowledge, whether exhaustive or not.

From ethics

Roman sculpture of Socrates, century I dc.

Intellectualism can be perfectly applied in the ethical field, in those who defend that it is enough to know what is good to do it, and that evil occurs because of ignorance, a position known as Socratic intellectualism. Socratic moral intellectualism identifies virtue with knowledge. The moral experience is based on the knowledge of the good, only if one knows what is good and fair is one who does what is good and fair. The knowledge referred to in Socratic ethics is not theoretical knowledge, but practical knowledge about the best and most appropriate for each circumstance.

From the philosophy of knowledge

Intellectualism is an epistemological current that maintains that the basis of knowledge is formed jointly by experience and thought. Intellectualism maintains that there are logically necessary and universally valid judgments not only about ideal objects but also about real objects, derived from experience. In the philosophy behind intellectualism there are four types of them:

• Psychological intellectualism: It affirms that what is first is understanding, about the will of man.
• Metaphysical Intellectualism: Contrasts the thought of what is real with a blind belief.
• Theological Intellectualism: It is based on justifying or defending situations with the supremacy of divine understanding over all other possible forms of justification of facts.
• Ethical Intellectualism: Defends Understanding from Morality, making morals form the wisdom or ignorance that is acquired.

Finally we have as great representatives of this philosophical current, in the aspect of knowledge, Socrates, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, as well as many other classical, modern and contemporary philosophers.

From Marxist terminology

In Marxist terminology, especially during Stalinism in the Soviet Union, the deviationism associated with intellectuals branded as petty bourgeois was called intellectualism.

Technological intellectualism

The intellectualist image of technology is basically the idea that technology derives directly from applied science. This way of thinking is based on the model of human progress that is conceived in the middle of the 20th century AD. c.; more science means more technology, and more technology means more economic progress, which leads to social progress. However, this not only brings positive consequences, but also negative consequences such as risks derived from Technoscience, amplification of the economic gap and an increase in unemployment and inflation problems, among others. But science has a set of rational and objective theories, that is, they are considered neutral since they lack subjective values or appreciations. This is because they are founded on the scientific method, where the development of all scientific knowledge is created from a cumulative process in which the newest theories help to improve the science that was already present more and more, giving give rise to a more precise and well-founded science. For all of the above, it can be concluded that theories are prior to any technology, therefore, thus allowing us to affirm that there can be no technology without prior theories and vice versa. That is basically the foundation of the intellectualist image.

Questioning technological intellectualism

John M. Staudenmaier, S.J. conducted historical studies to remove technological intellectualism.

But just as the intellectualist image exists, there are also other visions and other ways of thinking about the science-technology relationship, so there are arguments with which this vision is usually attacked. One of the ways of questioning the intellectualist vision of technology consists in the search for historical moments of technology that, in turn, make it possible to widely question the fundamental postulate of this vision: "technology derives directly from applied science."

John Staudenmaier (1985) carried out an analysis of the history of technology from 1959 to 1980, which was published in the United States magazine Technology and Culture, showing, for example, that in research for the development of new weapons in United States in 1966, it was concluded that only 1% of the research was due to basic science, 91% was technological and approximately 9% could be seen as the result of applied science. That is to say, the affirmation that technology is always applied science should be questioned. Staudenmaier finally arrives at the following cases in history that attempt to demonstrate that the basic postulate of intellectualism is not fulfilled:

• Technology often changes scientific concepts.
• Technology uses other data or concepts different from those given by science.
• Among scientific theories and technological theories there is a notorious parallelism, but the assumptions behind each theory are different.
• The dependence on technical skills technology: The role of high-impact technical skills for technology continues to be considered.

The previous points deny the existence of the exclusive effect of applied science on technology, but not the relationship that these two maintain.

From the academic world

Mario Bunge outstanding philosopher who supports intellectualism from certain perspectives.

Mario Bunge is an important representative of the fact that technology could eventually derive from applied science, despite belonging to the small group that the academic field has on the philosophy of science and technology, since in these topics the academic field of engineering and science is much coarser. Among well-known authors, who explicitly defend the intellectualist image, one can find Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov.

Impact of technological intellectualism

Considering the intellectualist image of technology has influenced throughout history assumptions that reduce technology to a set of technological laws, which would be easily deductible from scientific laws. Bunge considers that technology is strongly supported by science through the creation of technological rules and technological theories, where Bunge, regarding the two aforementioned aspects, assures that «...a rule is an instruction to carry out a finite number of acts in a given order and with a given aim... Law-statements are descriptive and interpretive, rules are normative... while law-like statements can be more or less true, rules can only be more or less effective» (Bunge, 1972: 694). Where legaliform is the explanation of an event by reference to another, it necessarily implies appealing to laws or general statements that correlate events of the type that is intended to be explained. In addition, Bunge considers that technological rules are based on research and action, and cannot be trivial since they are based on laws and/or formulas that fully determine the action and research of some technological rule. However, unlike the rules of morality that restrict ethical behavior and the rules of semantics that restrict how to write correctly, technological rules are based on laws and/or formulas capable of ensuring effectiveness when complying with them, so when analyze the sentence «water boils at 100 °C», it is observed that it is a sentence based on nomological statements, this means that it is a true statement and that it can be checked, and say «to boil water, you need to heat it to 100 °C» is a technological rule. Therefore, it is possible to go from scientific laws to technological rules, passing nomological statements to nomopragmatic statements, where nomopragmatic implies that there is a human action involved. For all the aforementioned Bunge concludes: «And for that same reason technology, unlike pre-scientific arts and crafts, does not start from rules to end with theories, but vice versa. In resolution: that is the reason why technology is applied science, while science is not purified technology» (Bunge, 1972: 699). With which he defends the postulate proposed by the intellectualist image of technology.

Rebutting Mario Bunge

In the technological theories that Bunge mentions, there is an aspect that collides with a problem. The problem with which it collides is that theories are considered a kind of black box where various inputs enter and various outputs come out, without really caring what is the basis for it. Therefore, taking the theories as a black box implies that it only matters that when applying the theory it works, that is, looking at the aspects of efficiency, in addition to concluding that by assuming the “black box system” , the theories end up being of low complexity. From the current point of view (2016) the position that Bunge takes is perfectly debatable, since throughout history scientific discoveries have been used in an increasingly complex way so that in all the technological and historical advances that come after the automation process show more and more cloudy the notion that the scientific aspects are more complex than the technological aspects. In addition, there is another aspect that Bunge claims and that can easily be questioned, is that the black box he mentions works efficiently as long as the person using the technology does not worry so much about precision. The foregoing completely clashes with what is known currently since the technology currently requires a lot of precision and it is not carried out properly if there are failures. Bunge says that you should not worry about precision since precision has already been developed by the scientific bases that underlie the technology, but the problem is the difference in complexity that occurs currently (2016).^{[citation required]}

Fonts

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