Summary of my responses to Marilyn Strathern on a test of all technology


Author: Terence Rajivan Edward (or 0161__Rajivan, if that helps)
Draft version: version 1 (18th September 2025)


The quotation. In her 2005 book, Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives Are Always a Surprise, Marilyn Strathern refers to Australian media coverage of the thirteenth IVF baby. Then she writes, "Indeed, the media constantly draw attention to the circumstances under which people choose reproductive interventions, for these appear test cases for the validity not just of this technology but sometimes (it seems) of all technology." (p.17)


The puzzle. Some tests are regarded as tests of some technology, such as a test of some umbrellas a business has made.  But regarding a test as a test of all technology seems bizarre. Here is an outline of a comedy sketch to "bring out" the strangeness. Some television reporters are at the unveiling of new technology, a new computer say. A reporter says to the camera, "Technology: is it good or bad? I am not talking about this one piece of technology. I am talking about all technology. Is any piece of technology bad?" The puzzle is how can we make sense of this thought of a test of all technology. The two responses after the next are my main responses, the latter casting doubt that we can.


Transparency please. Elsewhere Strathern introduces the expression the tyranny of transparency. I guess she introduced it as a response to university audits: she wants to say to auditors of the University of Cambridge that the university functions really well as a research and teaching institution even if they do not understand how and meeting their requirement of transparency would reduce its success in these areas, when the aim is improvement. But it is reasonable to ask for more transparency in response to the quotation.


Inductive reasoning? I suppose one might come to the impression that a test is a test of all technology by inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning is when one generalizes from a sample. For example, this slice of bread is healthy, this second slice is healthy, this third slice is healthy; one generalizes that the whole loaf of slices is healthy.  Similarly, one might start with the evidence that a certain test is a test of technology 1, also a test of technology 2, and a test of technology 3… and eventually generalize: it is a test of all technology.


On the very idea. A test of all technology? Is that even a coherent concept? For will not the test itself use technology, observational technology (a writing pad to note down results, etc.)?Assume it will. Thus if the test reveals that all technology is invalid, then the test itself is invalid, because it relies on technology too, and so it does not reveal that all technology is invalid. (A test that we can know a priori cannot coherently deliver one of two epistemically possible results - epistemically possible before we think carefully about the test - does not seem a test at all.) I am not saying as the final word that the concept of such a test is incoherent, because I depend above on an assumption that the test itself uses observational technology. But then again how to avoid this assumption? (I lifted the words here from my earlier writing.)


Validity? This is not a response to the puzzle. A test for the validity of all technology? What does “valid” mean here? I dropped the concept for stating the puzzle and for the inductive response, but used it in the response immediately above. As logicians use the word, an argument is valid if its conclusion must be true if the premises are true. But a technology is not an argument.  On one interpretation, validity refers to function for a designed end: a technology is valid if and only if it can function for the end it was designed for. I used this sense in the contribution immediately above. On another interpretation, validity refers to moral acceptability: a technology is valid if and only if it is not unethical. I do not know if there are other interpretations worth considering here.


Obscurity. This is not a response to the puzzle. Professor Sarah Green once told me that she finds Marilyn Strathern obscure because her sentences omit information which a suitably placed reader can infer, if they think a lot about a given sentence or rely on information which they bring to the text. (Or she said something like that: I cannot remember her exact words; it was before 2001.) But is not the quotation we are considering obscure because we have no clear idea of what a test of all technology is or what would give the impression of a test’s being this?


Utilitarianism about nonsense? I anticipate someone’s saying that Strathern’s test-of-all-technology remark is nonsense. Do you think she should not have written it, if so? One view is that it is acceptable, even within an academic, if the overall benefit to people from doing so outweighs the cost of not doing so. In this case, I realized the “On the very idea” argument above! 


References
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. Reading Marilyn Strathern: the validity of technology. Available on academia.edu
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. An inductive reasoning explanation for Dame Marilyn Strathern's bizarre technology impression. Available on academia.edu
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. "We see things they'll never see"?: technology studies against the tyranny of transparency. Available on PhilPapers.
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. On the very idea of a test of all technology. Available on PhilPapers.
Strathern, Marilyn. 2000. The Tyranny of Transparency. British Educational Research Journal 26 (3): 309-321.
Strathern, Marilyn. 2005. Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives Are Always a Surprise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.