User:BlueHoosier1/sandbox

Final Article (I contributed all parts of the Overview, Effects of technological rationality, and Response to technological rationality sections)
Technological rationality or technical rationality is a philosophical idea postulated by the  Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse in his 1941 article, "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology," published first in the journal Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences, Vol. IX. It gained mainstream repute and a more holistic treatment in his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man.

It posits that rational decisions to incorporate technological advances into society can, once the technology is ubiquitous, change what is considered rational within that society.

Overview
Marcuse writes that technological progress has the potential to free humanity from its requirement to labor for survival. Freedom from labor is true freedom for humanity, and this freedom from labor can be achieved from technological rationality. But instead of embracing this freedom, humanity has been subsumed by a new system of reason rooted in technological innovation. This new rationality, technological rationality, encompasses all elements of life and replaces political rationality.

Under this new system, technology and industry control the structure of the economy, intellectual pursuits, and leisure activities. False needs, which are defined by Marcuse as needs created by technological rationality, become inseparable from true needs, which are needs that are life sustaining. Reason in its pre-technological form collapses as opposition to the norms of technological society is denied under the new system of rationality. Complacency within the status quo replace Reason as people grow content with the better life offered by technology. This contentment and the subsequent loss of opposition makes humanity one-dimensional, which in turn makes humanity less free than before the onset of technological rationality. In this way technological rationality becomes totalitarian.

Effects of technological rationality
Because of the totalitarian nature of technological rationality, Marcuse demonstrates in One-Dimensional Man the various ways that technological rationality has changed various facets of life.

Labor
Technology, rather than freeing the proletariat class, has instead entrenched their enslavement to the classist system. The worker no longer has to labor with the same intensity due to mechanization, and this decreases the laborers feelings of enslavement. The ratio of white collar to blue collar workers increases as fewer workers are needed to produce goods. Progress has created a technological veil between the worker and his or her work, and the distinction between blue collar and white collar workers breaks down as technology reduces the labor gap between the blue collar and white collar worker. The worker associates himself or herself more strongly with the factory rather than his or her class, and the factory owners become bureaucrats. The Master-Slave relationship between worker and factory owner no longer exists, and the factory owner loses his or her power. Under technological rationality, the technicians and scientists become the new authority.

Government
The Welfare State rises in both need and prominence. Increased productivity, the rational goal under technological rationality, requires planning on the scale that only the Welfare State can provide. This new Welfare State is less free. It requires the restriction of leisure time, the availability of goods and services, and the cognitive ability to understand and desire self-realization. Yet as long as one's quality of life is improved under the new state as compared to the previous one, the people will not revolt.

This new society is driven to increase production by fear of the Enemy, which causes the state to exist constantly as a defense society. The Enemy can take the form of an idealized pure communism or pure capitalism. This Enemy does not truly exist, but its constant feared presence drives the society to greater productivity.

Art
Under technological rationality, high art has desublimated. Culture and social reality have flattened from two dimensions into one. Artistic alienation, which inspired the artistic works of the past, has disappeared due to this flattening. The high culture before technological rationality no longer makes sense to the modern onlooker. Art under technological rationality instead becomes common and mass-produced. This mass produced art is integrated into everyday life, thus fully removing the distinction between high culture and social reality.

Response to technological rationality
Over 300,000 copies of the first-edition of One-Dimensional Man were sold. The book was a New York Times bestseller and launched Marcuse's career as a leftist public intellectual. His conception of technological rationality and its negative societal consequences were a direct critique to the industrial capitalist society of the time. This critique was incorporated into the ideology of the New Left that rose in the 1960s. Many politicians on the right, such as Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley, and philosophers, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, attacked Marcuse's idea of technological rationality. Marcuse received death threats for his ideas, and Brandeis University and the University of California system attempted to fire him from his teaching positions due to One-Dimensional Man.

Ultimately, the conception of technological rationality and Marcuse's book One-Dimensional Man fell out of favor with the left in the 1990s. A small uptick in interest did resurface when One-Dimensional Man reached its fiftieth anniversary of publication in 2014.

Reference[edit]


Article Evaluation: Falsifiability

-The article on falsifiability is fleshed out, mostly neutral, and comprehensive. The use of the black and white swans example throughout the article made the concepts easier to understand.

-The overview section is a bit long and winding.

-The section "Falsificationism" has a different tone than the rest of the article and seems to only be relevant as a rebuttal to the section "Naive falsification".

-"Uses in the court of law" should be its own section rather than a subsection of "Criterion of demarcation."

-"Criterion of demarcation" also uses the pronoun "us" in the introduction of the section. The introduction should be rephrased to remove the pronoun.

-There is an issue with article neutrality. The section on "Naive falsifiability" uses the word "unsuccessful" to describe how the theory works, which is a value judgment. The section also describes the logic behind the theory as "valid" but "limited," which is again a value judgment.

-The sections on "Naive falsifiability" and "Falsificationism" lack citations. The citations for the other sections look good and mostly rely on first hand sources from Popper and other philosophers.

-The falsifiability page was a former featured article candidate. It belongs to WikiProjects Philosophy (C-class, high importance) and Skepticism (C-class, top importance). A note at the top of the talk page says the article may be too technically difficult for non-experts to understand, which I agree with.

-Most of the discussions on the talk page are about better defining falsifiability and the true meaning of other words/ideas put forth by Popper and other philosophers. The Wikipedia article brought up several topics we discussed in class (the swan example, inductive vs. deductive, the ideas of naive falsification [although I do not believe we ever called it that in class], etc.). Our class discussion focused much more on the implications of falsifiability than the Wikipedia page does, but this makes sense because a Wikipedia page is meant to explain the topic, not how it can or should be applied.

Article Selection:

Technological Rationality (This is my primary choice)

- Currently a high priority stub on the WikiProject History of Science.

- The current article stub has no sources and is just an introduction to the topic. History, an overview, and other sections could be added.

- An initial search of the internet on the topic reveals several possible sources. There is also primary literature where the term is introduced. I have also read a bit of Marcuse (the originator of the term) in another class and have enjoyed his writings.

-Possible sources: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/004839317200200103, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3231362?seq=2#metadata_info_tab_contents

Proteus Phenomenon

- Currently a mid priority stub on the WikiProject History of Science.

- The current stub has four sources. The four sources are reliable. There is not a lot written about this phenomenon, but definitely enough to fill a full Wikipedia article.

-Possible source: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0040028 (There are reference links to other reports on the effect within this article).

Received View/ Syntatic View of Theories

-Currently a low priority stub in the WikiProject Philosophy

-The current article stub resembles an introduction section. Several sections (history, more in-depth overview) could be written.

-The article has four sources. These sources appear reliable.

-Possible sources: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structure-scientific-theories/, https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-642-29928-5.pdf