Kant characterizes the technic of nature as "nature's power to produce things in terms of purposes."
Alfred North Whitehead characterizes the scientific mentality as instinctively holding that all things great and small are conceivable as exemplifications of general principles which reign throughout the natural order. He sees the alliance of science and technology as keeping learning in contact with irreducible and stubborn facts, and credits the Benedictine monasteries as providing much of this practical bent. (cf clock)
From the early Paleolithic, human societies have been characterized by an interwoven complex of tecnological practices and social structures. Technologies shaped social structures, while social structures governed the use of technologies.
For Don Ihde, (Instrumental Realism) a philosophy of technology "focuses on the material conditions and mediations relating to knowledge gathering in general or to science in particular." (p.46) Despite Ihde's criticism of the Platonic philosophical project, this interpretation of technology remains a cognitive one. Technologies as technosocial form are close relatives of symbolic form. (cf perspective )
Bruno Latour investigates "technoscience" by privileging the unsettled moments instead of the settled ones, in order to foreground the process of "the fabrication of scientific facts and technical " artifacts." Looked at this way, technoscience begins to appear as a very complicated socius (or machine) for creating and resolving controversies, with the focus upon technoscience in action. Latour starts his descriptions with technoscience writing, which is made for attack and defence. For Latour. "all laboratories are counter-laboratories, just as all technical articles are counter-articles." (Science in Action, p.79) The laboratory is a "scientific factory", its technological production facility. The laboratory-produced "object" becomes an independent "thing" "Laboratories are now powerful enough to define reality." (From Don Ihde, Instrumental Realism, pp 128-135) The laboratory is a disciplined space, where experimental, discursive, and social practices are collectively controlled by competent members.