What Is The Meaning Of Technology?

[Strain_of_Thought]

I may be asking for trouble by putting this up in GQ, but insofar as a factual answer is possible that’s what I want.

I am daily vexed by people’s use of the word technology. My best guess at the common meaning is “practical applications of the sciences of chemistry and physics, with emphasis on electronics”. My personal definition is essentially anything remotely patentable: a “useful process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter”. However, I am increasingly aware of how overloaded this use is; one red flag is that when using my definition I cannot draw a distinction between technology and technique.

What’s more, from its suffix technology ought to compare with other names of sciences like biology or geology, but instead it seems to me the word with that meaning is engineering, and technology ends up referring to the products of the science it ostensibly is. You can make sentences like: “Aerospace Engineering utilizes sophisticated manufacturing techniques to produce a turbofan airliner, which is an impressive piece of technology.”

So, my questions are:

1. How has the word technology historically been defined?

2. What is (are) the proper modern definition(s) of technology, and in what context(s)?

3. How does one distinguish engineering and technique from technology?

4. If technology is commonly thought of as “practical applications of the sciences of chemistry and physics, with emphasis on electronics”, then what other blanket term can be used to describe everything which is patentable in common conversation? (without necessarily being talking about patents)

[Blake]

@Strain of Thought

I1) How has the word technology historically been defined?

A discourse or treatise on an art or arts; the scientific study of the practical or industrial arts 1615
Practical arts collectively. 1859
A particular practical or industrial art. 1957

Courtesy OED.

2. What is (are) the proper modern definition(s) of technology, and in what context(s)?

Any of the above are proper modern definitions, though the first is somewhat archaic. Not sure what you mean by context, you can use them in in any context.

3. How does one distinguish engineering and technique from technology?

In simple terms engineering is work, it is making things, it is a physical action, something one does. Technique is the specific way that one does it. Technology is the artform of doing it.

If technology is commonly thought of as “practical applications of the sciences of chemistry and physics, with emphasis on electronics”, then what other blanket term can be used to describe everything which is patentable in common conversation? (without necessarily being talking about patents)

Inventions? Devices? Contrivances? Machines There are dozens of possible words, it really depends on a what you are referring to when you say “patentable”. Would you really call genes “technology”? Yet genes are patentable.

[NinjaChick]

@Strain of Thought

1. How has the word technology historically been defined?

Here’s some information that’s fairly irrelevant to what you’re really asking, but is interesting anyway (IMO). The original Greek word that technology is directly from was teknologia. Tekne is a noun with a couple possible meanings: art, skill, craft, or method. The -logia suffix is a form of logein, a verb meaning “to speak”. Put that together and we get “the art or method of speaking”. Teknologia originally referred to grammar.