Ideas about technological knowledge (in contrast to technical knowledge and to scientific knowledge) in philosophy of technology provide a powerful lens through which to consider the relationship between engineering and embodiment. For some philosophers of technology, technology is defined as extensions to one’s body (Brey 2000). But not all bodies are the same, nor do they all move the same ways nor in the same cultural contexts. What does embodied cognition (and, relatedly, moral perception, see (Van Grunsven 2021) mean for “what we can know and how we can come to know it” (Vincenti 1990)? With this short article, we describe the landscape of technological knowledge within the field of philosophy of technology over the past thirty years. Then, we offer a few quick examples of embodiment mattering to what is known and made. We draw particularly from cases in space studies, arguing for the importance of specialized material knowledge, often related to embodiment, for its role in shaping space futures and pasts. We end the article talking about current ways in which science engages with marginalized communities and corrective steps for repairing research on “human subjects” in the context of engineering.
Ideas About Technological Knowledge
Walter Vincenti’s What Engineers Know and How They Know It provides a deep dive on knowledge transformations in the context of aeronautical engineering. Engineering may often be described as applied science, but only placing the engineering field in the context of science does not describe the work done by engineers. Rather, it is more accurate to suggest that the practice of engineering applies scientific knowledge and develops engineering knowledge. Knowledge here is a means to an end, for the central goal of an engineering project is a technical artifact and not knowledge itself. But knowledge production is inevitable; engineers are creators, actively constructing knowledge throughout the design process much like scientists do with a scientific method.
Technology then is removed from the scientific and technological knowledge construction that defines technical artifacts as merely applied science. We know that technology is more than applied science, as it’s imbued with its own “significant component of thought” (Layton 1974). Davis Baird posits instrument epistemology—or thing knowledge—where technical artifacts bear our knowledge of the world alongside recognizable forms of knowledge containers like journals, books, and presentations (Baird 2002). A technology may also be able to communicate the existence of a phenomenon better than written theory, which is evident in Baird’s first example of Faraday’s electromagnetic motor. Faraday understood that the disagreement over electromagnetic theory made it difficult to explain the motor design, so he created and sent mini versions of his motor to his colleagues as a communication device. Scientists at the time may not have been able to explain the phenomenon via theory, but “we don’t need a load of theory (or indeed any “real” theory) to learn something from the construction and demonstration of Faraday’s device.”
Instrument epistemology addresses the semantic bias within our understandings of science and technology by reminding us that we learn by interacting with parts of the world. At its core, engineering involves making things utilizing any tools at hand, including knowledge communicated via multiple vessels. If we know that engineers need to interact with the world in order to meet design goals, we can also conceive of engineering as a social activity that produces knowledge. This design process is iterative: an engineer makes a design decision based on available information, forming pieces of knowledge that may be circulated via thing and/or theory. New things/theories are subsumed into the design tools available to engineers, ready to be utilized in the creation of more things/theories. Technology, along with its creation, constitutes a form of knowledge.
But what are the implications of claiming technology as knowledge? We haven’t necessarily come to an agreement on what it means to recognize the epistemological dimensions of technology (Johnson 2005). Ann Johnson, historian and philosopher of technology, defines common qualities within the array of scholarship that claims technology as knowledge: objectivity embedded within technical artifacts; social and material constructions of technology; tacit technological knowledge; authority of technological knowledge; and ethical dimensions of technology. Technological knowledge is mitigated via social interaction, both internally within artifact design and externally from a community. Qualities like objectivity and skill may be located within an artifact, where what constitutes “objective” technical knowledge is embedded into its design and making. Technological knowledge also accommodates commercial qualities that are constructed through social and material interactions, since we also know that technology is political.
Returning to the engineering field for a moment, we can see that engineering processes also embody social, located, and commercial qualities. Johnson’s review focuses on three studies of heavily engineered technologies that demonstrate development of knowledge within the engineering community. Vincenti shows us that aeronautical engineers engage in a knowledge community as they work to achieve technical specifications and that engineering knowledge is embedded within engineered artifacts throughout the design and construction processes. Engineers rely on their own embodied experiences, and the embodied experiences of others, for their work. Our intention for the remainder of this short article is to demonstrate via case study the role of embodiment in what is known and made—what is engineered. If technologies are extensions of our bodies, and not all bodies are the same, what can we come to know across difference and alternate embodiment?
Bring in the Bodies: Embodiment, Tacit Knowledge, and Engineering
Technological knowledge is sometimes embodied: knowledge about how to do things (perform certain technical tasks, or assess states of technologies by how they sound or smell) that don’t necessarily translate well into sentences and explanations. This is called tacit knowledge when we have “know how” to do something (classically, ride a bicycle, or cut the probe tip for an atomic force microscope for a science researcher [Bijker Baird]), or when our knowledge is experiential in nature. Disability studies, cultural studies, and gender studies meet philosophy of technology where positionality, social configurations, and experiences of difference shape how a technology is used (or not), understood or imagined, and who certain experiences are offered to (invitation/ability to use).
Some definitions of technology rely on the idea that technologies are extensions of the human organism (Brey). While we might take issue with the human part of this definition (Shew 2017), Philip Brey’s unified account draws from accounts of technology as extension from Marshall McLuhan, Ernst Kapp, and David Rothenberg. Brey uses this account to ask important questions in the philosophy of technology about (1) whether there is the compatibility of our creations with our desires, (2) how the intentions of different groups in society get represented (or not) and how to make sense of social injustice, (3) what happens to human bodily and cognitive capacities when more human tasks are taken by machines, and (4) how we are to understand ourselves as we replace more human function with machines (how does technology “re-create” us as we create technology?). Technological knowledge in the context of extension is knowledge about how things are extended and toward what ends—looking at swap outs for different functions (including social function), but also seeing technology in its operation—its relationship to our bodies and cognition, and in relationship to other people.
Ann Johnson passed away too soon, and the Ann Johnson Institute, created in her name at the University of South Carolina, highlights something we glean from her work in their motto: community is the method. Johnson’s work on the history of anti-lock braking systems (Johnson 2009) offers an account of technology development that relies heavily on the culture of different engineering teams and approaches to create technologies to prevent automobile tires from locking up—first in figuring out how to measure and model, and then in creating what we know as ABS technology today, which is on virtually every car sold today. This goal is quite compatible with our desires and serves to make driving safer. It highlights how the development of new knowledge is something done within communities. Communities produce technological knowledge.
Community may be the method in creating new technological knowledge for things like ABS, but we can also understand technology as embodied within the people who constitute different communities, who develop bodies with particular skills and embodied understanding. A classic example from Merleau-Ponty is the blind man using a cane:
The blind man’s cane has ceased to be an object for him, it is no longer perceived for itself (Le bâton de l’aveugle a cessé d’être un objet pour lui, il n’est plus perçu pour lui-même); rather, the cane’s furthest point is transformed into a sensitive zone, it increases the scope and the radius of the act of touching and has become analogous to a gaze (144/178). (quoted from Reynolds 2018)
This account has been oft-repeated, to explain and understand the phenomenology of blindness, and of extension. The cane is literally described as an extension of his body, a sensitive organ that replaces the function of gaze (extending or replacing vision). But even here, community plays far more of a role than most philosophers understand—as we import our cultural ideals and tropes around blindness and disability as we proffer this explanation.
Joel Michael Reynolds, a critical disability studies scholar, offers a revised account. First, the blind man’s cane does not exactly replace a gaze, and it changes how people gaze at him: the cane “can only function as Merleau-Ponty claims it does when others do not treat him as disabled. . . . The cane makes one conspicuous, easily leading to the interruption of any number of one’s bodily and social habits. . . . When he cannot safely cross a street because of a lack of curb cuts or audible walk signals, that incorporation is also disrupted.” The cane does not replace the gaze—even though some function overlap may exist in specific context, one is not a full replacement, and the experiences of the blind man will reflect the lack of consideration for people like him. Second, Reynolds explains that the experience of blindness is “a much more radical reconfiguration of existence than Merleau-Ponty imagines,” citing John Hull’s description of his own late-onset blindness: “I came to believe that blindness is a world-creating condition” (Hull, cited by Reynolds). Reynolds concludes, “becoming blind is a form of what L.A. Paul calls a ‘transformative experience,’ an experience the epistemic position of which one simply cannot be in prior to having it.”
Third, while Merleu-Ponty suggests that a sighted person could learn to move as a blind person if given enough practice, we know well that simulation exercises don’t actually work as intended (Redmond et al. 2017; Silverman 2017), and are decried by disability advocates because these exercises usually mislead participants into thinking they can understand, when often they do not and would be better served listening to disabled people (Ladau 2017). These experiences also tend to suggest there’s one embodiment of a particular disability, when there are many ways to be, for instance, blind, with varying levels and experiences of eyesight and different conditions and embodiments that would impact a person’s experience, not to mention infrastructure, cultural beliefs, and social biases that might play out differently for different blind people.
What seems like an easy case of technology as extension and embodied knowledge is complicated by social position and assumptions. Reynolds explains: “White-canes are not easily incorporated in a world made inaccessible for so many bodies in so many ways due to the structural and ideological stigmatization and exclusion of what is marked as ‘disability.’ . . . Insofar as the historical, cultural, and social cannot be split from the natural, biological, and individual, the historical traces of ableism and the ableist conflation cannot be erased from the form and materiality of the body.” Getting the story of embodiment in its relationship to community, prejudice/bias, and presumptions about how and why things are extended (the technology and its purpose) is not as uniform as understood by many accounts in philosophy.
Many times designers and engineers—those creating technologies for the use by different groups—have to rely on the expertise of others to understand the problem they are addressing or extension they need to create. They may need knowledge of embodiment of the others to create good things, to create worthwhile objects. This is often given as a reason we need diverse design teams. There are many examples of failures where a lack of knowledge constitutes a malicious ignorance on the part of a design team. We are all aware of the widely criticized rollout of an Apple Health app without a way to account for period tracking (which people are now deleting since that data can be weaponized by the state in a post-Roe world); the development of automatic soap dispensers and facial tracking that don’t “see black people”; the implications of airport “naked body scanners” that end up putting transgender people at risk and raise questions about the creation of child pornography. There’s a whole realm of work on bias in technology and AI development that lead to grave consequences for people (for example: Broussard 2023; Williams 2023).
The biases are to our imaginations: we aren’t actually very good at imagining what it is like to be different from how we are. Janna van Grusven talks about this idea as our moral visibility or invisibility, “the idea that we can succeed but also fail to be visible to one another as embodied expressive beings who are worthy of interaction” (from an interview with van Grunsven). Different technologies can make us more or less visible to one another, mediating our interactions and whether we see and understand each other at all. The importance of engaged interaction is central to combating moral invisibility. Indeed, it’s not just our environments and technologies that expand or diminish our ability to see/expect/include as we work and design, though that is part. Who engineers imagine as users may very well hinge on the visibility and importance of different types of users. We take this bias to be significant. There is no lack of evidence from humanistic work coming out of gender studies and Black studies.
Space Recruits, Space Shuttles, and Other Examples
Recently, Sheri Wells-Jensen and others in the disability community have rallied for greater inclusion of disabled people in planning for human space missions—greater visibility and moral visibility in how we plan for space. Wells-Jensen made “The Case for Blind Astronauts” in the pages of Scientific American several years ago and speaks of the importance of designing spaces that include more types of embodied people, especially when we are often planning spaces from scratch in the case of space habitats. Other space-oriented events have spoken to “decolonizing” our notions about space “frontiers,” which often recapitulate a truly horrible colonial perspective (see Becoming Interplanetary and Decolonizing Mars) that emphasizes extraction. Wells-Jensen, along with Mission AstroAccess, an all-disabled group that has had two voyages on “the vomit comet” 0-g flight, advocates for disabled people in space with the slogan “If we can make space accessible, we can make any space accessible.” There are many things to learn from their 0-g cross-disability flights that improve safety and access for everyone and that suggest possibilities for change to infrastructure more broadly. Taking all embodiments as good (or at least morally neutral) embodiments—with people that we can learn something from—is a cornerstone of work like this. We often subtly malign other ways of being in the world by preferences we develop from the experience of our own bodies.
The devaluation of certain types of bodies and some embodied skills also plays into how so many forms of work get perceived. So it is with women in different technological environments too: valued for specific types of work, which get deemed as less important and often the subject of technological development to replace such labor, or just forgotten about as incredibly crucial to the success of a technology.
Having the “right knack” for a particular skilled task also plays a role in embodied knowledge. We see this in the way some experimentalists seem to set things up in ways that yield good results or in the way a good prosthetist can watch a person walk and figure out what needs to be adjusted. Skills like these are a matter of art and knowledge. Sometimes different groups are sought for their particular capacities. While deaf and disabled people are often framed as deficient or lacking some capacity, as we saw in the last section, sometimes they are prized for exactly that difference. To take another NASA example (for which there is more information to be found), the Gallaudet Eleven, a group of deaf men from Gallaudet University, were recruited by NASA in the late 1950s. Congenitally deaf people don’t get motion sickness, and the Gallaudet Eleven were put through all the same exercises as astronaut candidates were and more—and studied because of their lack of motion sickness and preparation for prolonged weightlessness, used to develop knowledge about responses to different gravitational environments. They performed in objectively superior ways, though none of the eleven was ever considered an astronaut candidate. Their embodiments were taken as interesting for study for a decade, and they were used to produce knowledge for the space program.
In more recent years, some in the disability community have started talking about the embodied knowledge of alternative movement that would make some uniquely qualified for 0-g space environments. The call for papers for the Deaf Poets’ Society #CripsInSpace special issue featured Sam de Leve, a wheelchair user, talking about using kitchen counters and walls to push off of to move around a kitchen—the natural ease they had in getting around this way after so many years of experience. Sheri Wells-Jensen has taken to advocacy for disabled people in the space program with Mission AstroAccess. Space should belong to us all, and we have the opportunity to design habitats from scratch as we consider space: why shouldn’t we consider a wider range of embodiments? She has already given us the case for blind astronauts, but she has taken it further, going up twice on the “Vomit Comet” 0-g plane ride with two cross-disability teams to imagine more concretely the value of different types of embodiment and knowledge when it comes to different gravities and spaces. One of the central tenets of design, user experience, and Human-Computer Interaction is that design use and knowledge is best developed with a diverse set of users and a diverse set of designers.
Very few studies actually engage a diverse set of users. Especially where design of biomedical devices and therapeutic apps are concerned, we see test groups that rarely reflect the actual population. Because most disabled people are multiply-disabled, most testing that relies on one diagnosis to the exclusion of other diagnoses automatically discounts the vast majority of users. A friend was recently sharing with us the absurdity that no glucose monitors for diabetes have audio read-outs that they could find: it’s particularly a problem when you realize a common complication from diabetes is blindness (and that lots of people who may need monitors might be experiencing vision loss due to age too). User and test groups obviously got the user base wrong when they roll out products that don’t match their actual users’ embodiments (which here constitute an access need). This is an economic oversight, but also a failure of design. Often disabled users too are posited only as human subjects or as test pilots, rather than as co-producers and knowledge providers in their own right.
Implications
There are implications for studies with human subjects when we talk about the importance of embodiment and expertise to technological projects. Right now, institutional review boards are not often terribly savvy about research around different types of difference: indeed the scientific enterprise often asks for as few “confounding variables” as possible, but this means something different when what is being developed is meant for cross-community use or a very wide set of users. There are also many cases where researchers that share in the community they hope to study are wrongly grilled and seen as “biased”—a keen example is an autistic scholar friend whose work on autistic technology construction was denied approval because they couldn’t possibly do that work (ableism), or in the terrible phrase “research as me-search.” But what we make determines (sometimes literally) “who we see” and who gets to use the things that we make and who gets to move through the world with less frustration and accusation. Nora Berenstain, Dotson, Julieta Paredes, Elena Ruiz, and Noenoe K. Silva writing “Epistemic Oppression, Resistance, and Resurgence” (2022), explain about epistemologies more generally:
Epistemologies have power. They have the power not only to transform worlds, but to create them. And the worlds that they create can be better or worse. For many people, the worlds they create are predictably and reliably deadly. Epistemologies can turn sacred land into ‘resources’ to be bought, sold, exploited, and exhausted. They can turn people into ‘labor’ in much the same way. They can not only disappear acts of violence but render them unnamable and unrecognizable within their conceptual architectures. They can portray intentionally produced structural harms as ‘tragic’ and unforeseeable acts of fate (Ruíz, forthcoming). They can re-vision deliberate genocides as the inevitable and irreversible costs of the march toward ‘progress’ in the linear hierarchy of civilizations. (Berenstain et al. 2022)
So too with notions of technological knowledge, though this is rarely part of the conversation about them. If we accept that embodiment is connected to what we know and how we know it, and in social connection with others as we build community-based expertise, then the conversation around technological knowledge needs to be sensitive to differences in communities, environments, and social standing.
Ashley Shew
Oliver Shuey
Oliver Shuey is a PhD student in the Science, Technology, and Society department at Virginia Tech. Despite being trained as an engineer, he currently studies philosophy of technology, STS, and feminist/queer theory. He’s interested in writing more about engineering knowledge, technical design practices, and engineering as an embodied experience
