I’m reading an article by Michael S. Mahoney in The First Computers. It is titled “The Structures of Computation” and Mahoney (who is one of the best historians of computing I have read – see my previous entry, History of Computing) makes a closing point,
The history of science has until recently tended to ignore the role of technology in scientific thought, … The situation has begun to change with recent work on the role and nature of the instruments that have mediated between scientists and the objects of their study, … But, outside of the narrow circle of people who think of themselves as historians of computing, historians of science (and indeed of technology) have ignored the instrument that by now so pervades science and technology as to be indispensable to their practice. Increasingly, computers not only mediate between practitioners and their subjects but also replace the subjects with computed models. … Some time soon, historians are going to have to take the computer seriously as an object of study, and it will be important, when they do, that they understand the ambiguous status of the computer itself. (p. 31)
I would go further and say that not only historians, but philosophers, and for that matter other humanities disciplines, are going to have to take seriously the ambiguous nature of the computer as instrument and extension in all knowledge disciplines.
The argument might go like this:
Know thyself (Socrates)
To know yourself is to know your mind
The computer is modeled on and models the mind
therefore Know the computer as your mind
Whether you buy the argument that the computer models the mind and that the mind has a special spot in our self-understanding, there is a weaker argument along the lines of Ian Hacking’s historical ontology. That is that computers and computing are thick concepts linked to our current self understanding and therefore they need to be studied if only to understand how understand ourselves through them. Mahoney’s work is beginning.
Bibliographic reference: Michael S. Mahoney, “The Structures of Computation,” The First Computers: History and Architectures. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, pages 17-32. 2000.