Concept
Technocentrism
Overview
Technocentrism is a value system that is centered on technology and its ability to control and protect the environment. Technocentrics argue that technology can address ecological problems through its problem-solving ability, efficiency, and its managerial means. Specifically, these capabilities allow humans control over nature, allowing them to correct or negotiate environmental risks or problems. Although technocentrics may accept that environmental problems exist, they do not see them as problems to be solved by a reduction in industry. Rather, environmental problems are seen as problems to be solved using rational, scientific and technological means. They also believe in scientific research. Indeed, technocentrics see the way forward for both developed and developing countries, and the solutions to environmental problems, as lying in scientific and technological advancement (sometimes referred to as sustainopreneurship).
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
For philosophic theory has no Aladdin's lamp to summon into immediate existence the values which it intellectually constructs. In the mechanical arts, the sciences become methods of managing things so as to utilize their energies for recognized aims. By the educative arts philosophy may generate methods of utilizing the energies of human beings in accord with serious and thoughtful conceptions of life. Education is…
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
States what Technocentrism is.
The _former_ bases the purposes in nature, by the analogy of a faculty acting with design, on the _life of matter_ (either its own or the life of an inner principle in it, a world-soul) and is called _Hylozoism_. The _latter_ derives them from the original ground of the universe, as from an intelligent Being (originally living), who produces them with design, and is _Theism_.[112] § 73. _None of the above systems…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
States what Technocentrism is.
That Greek mediaeval science did not get very far on these lines is a commonplace. Scientific progress and practical control as systematic and deliberate matters date from the century of Galileo, when qualities which lend themselves to mathematical treatment were seized upon. "The most promising of these ideal systems at first were of course the richer ones, the sentimental ones.
John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic
Close in meaning to Technocentrism; the term itself is not named.
Related ideas
Place in the tradition
Part of Transhumanism.