Legitimating the machine: The epistemological foundations of technological metaphor in the natural philosophy of René Descartes

ANDRÉS VACCARI

Philosophies of Technology: Francis Bacon and his Contemporaries

Brill Academic Publishers

Lugar: Leiden; Año: 2008; p. 287 - 336

This paper examines the role of machine metaphors in the natural philosophy and metaphysics of René Descartes (1596-1650). Descartes was a key figure in the close alliance of systematic reason and technological practice that characterizes the technoscientific turn of the seventeenth century. I argue that for Descartes the machine was a technological thesis and a heuristic device, and that these two aspects are closely interdependent in his philosophy. Descartes’ contribution was to ground the machine on an ontological and epistemological basis, exploring, among other things, the poetic and conceptual possibilities of a mechanical theory of life. The machine is, on one hand, a true expression of how the world really is, as well as the conceptual foundation for our understanding of this same world. I focus, then, on these two main aspects: how technical artifacts and processes enter Descartes’ philosophy of nature, and the role of analogy in his scientific method. I begin by situating Descartes in his historical, conceptual and technological milieu, pinpointing the material and cultural sources of natural-philosophical explanation. I move on to a broad outline of Descartes’ physics, which has a markedly metaphysical character. Then, to the heuristic machinery of epistemology: the apparatus of perception and how mechanics serves as the basis for clear and distinct knowledge. I argue that, for Descartes, science is about the creation of intermediary hypotheses, and situate this approach in the context of the Cartesian view of human knowledge in the larger scheme of things (i.e., the theological framework for Descartes’ philosophy of science and technology). In turn, Descartes’ perspective is informed by a ‘semiotics’ of non-resemblance (in which our impressions do not ‘resemble’ their referent or source). I then examine how the machine becomes the ‘master’ metaphor, constitutive and productive of knowledge. I hope this paper is a contribution to the historical understanding of the scientific revolution—in particular, as establishing one of the most influential paths through which technology and science entered in dialogue, and became productive of each other. More generally, it is a historical case study on the role of metaphors in scientific knowledge.