Talk:Technology assessment/Archives/2014

Discussion on this article

Note: Technology assessment (TA) is not a genuine philosophy project, although quite a number of philosophers are TA practitioners. I therefore propose to discuss the content of this article here, close to the article itself. --Mnent (talk) 12:08, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Proposed changes

• I propose to drop the following two sentences: "The United States Department of Defense (DOD) assesses technology maturity using a measure called Technology readiness level." and "The ETC Group has proposed an international treaty for technology assessment - entitled ICENT - International Convention for The Evaluation of New Technologies". The first is fully unrelated to the topic, the second is outdated, as this was an initiative in 2005 with no noticable impact. --Mnent (talk) 12:08, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Unless there is opposition here within a week or so, I shall delete the two sentences in brackets. --Mnent (talk) 13:27, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

• I propose to drop the entire "See also" section of this article as the links are by far to unspecific. Mentioning the Collingridge dilemma and Technology forecasting should be made in the main text describing what TA is and how it is related to forecasting etc. --Mnent (talk) 13:35, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

• We need to write a section on TA methodology. --Mnent (talk) 13:35, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

• We need a few references to standard TA books and articles. --Mnent (talk) 13:35, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

• We need an additional section on "Forms of TA". I am currently collecting short definitions for the following notions: Parliamentary TA (PTA), Expert TA (or classical TA or traditional TA), Participatory TA (pTA), Interactive TA, Constructive TA (CTA), Discursive TA, Argumentative TA, Vision assessment, Rational TA, Anticipative TA or anticipatory TA, Real-time TA, Innovation-oriented TA (ITA), Health TA (HTA), Public TA --Mnent (talk) 12:56, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

based on input of three leading European TA practioners I have inserted a respective section --Mnent (talk) 08:30, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

• The section 'General description' is far from capturing the current state of TA knowledge and practice and needs heavy editing. In particular, it needs to reflect the various definitions of TA, its various approaches, methods, target audiences etc. --Mnent (talk) 14:43, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

I agree with Michael Nentwich's suggestions above Profdrcope (talk) 09:33, 11 September 2010 (UTC)Prof David Cope, POST, UK

Critical parapgraph

I don't think that the new paragraph added recently ("TA is basically a form of cost-benefit analysis....") is adequate. I agree that the current general description has major deficits, see above, but just adding sentences like "...impossible to carry out in an objective manner..." or "...greatly influenced and biased by the values of the most powerful stakeholders..." without any reflection of the vaste literature on this, is inappropriate. I would not argue against adding criticisms to the article, but as it stands, this paragraph is simply not true. Therefore, I am strongly in favour of deleting this additional paragraph from the live article and discuss the issue first here on the Talk pages. --Mnent (talk) 09:15, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

I also disagree with the content of the paragraph. In addition it does not conform to the encyclopedia style required by wikipedia. The section with the general description of a topic has to be distinguished from a section where critique is put forward. But even this would require a neutral form of description of cons. Bottomline, I would recommend to delete the paragraf, and encourage the author of those lines to start a section on critique of TA with well documented arguments. --hidigeigei (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 10:11, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Yes, would be better to have a discussion on this critical paragraph, as it represents an outdated and rather narrow perspective on the notion of TA, which does neither reflect the current TA practise nor its validity claims. Recall, that modern TA is a reflective endeavour and indeed, as such it virtually cannot be completely objective or value-free as the author of this paragraph complains. Any other expectations would be truly naïve. Anyhow, contemporary TA aims by definition at inter-subjective validity of its results and therefore at principle acceptability of its procedures and outcomes, e.g., by transparency about the premises of its analyses. This is in sharp contrast to poorly explained suspicions that TA would be simply an instrument of lobbying. Corresponding conspiracy theoretical assumptions have no place in encyclopaedias and should be corrected here in the interest of the users of wikipedia. 87.139.79.238 (talk) 08:25, 7 May 2014 (UTC) LingSt