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Technologies, particularly scientific instruments, concurrently invoke and substantiate scales. There is the opening here for a ‘new serious about technology’ . We can still research the richness of ‘technology’ as an actors’ class while sharpening and pondering with ‘technology’ as an analytical class. Yet this was not an alliance of equals, and the ‘trouble with techne’ – that it had the potential to upset the social order – remained. Aristotle, Hugh of St Victor, Johann Beckmann and Talcott Parsons, for example, were instrumentalists. The Kultur-oriented German engineers of the nineteenth century, Lewis Mumford, and the Sixties critics of expertise took the cultural view of technology. Schatzberg has provided a beautiful service by tracing the conceptual historical past of know-how so clearly. This intervening power is the nature, the essence if you will, of expertise. It is present in the elegant of planetary science but in addition the mundane of changing gear whereas driving a