Synthesized answer
The passages suggest that Veblen does not claim technological facts are definitive for civilization, but rather that the apprehension of facts serviceable for technological ends is influenced by a "pecuniary bias or bent" [3]. This bias is described as "invidious, personal, emulative, looking to differential values in respect of personal force or competitive success" [3]. Consequently, the "canons of reality" by which facts are understood and utilized are those that conform to "conventionally definitive preconceptions of invidious merit, authentic excellence, force of character, mastery, complaisance, congruity with the run of the established institutional values" [1].
The passages indicate that while "matter-of-fact" knowledge derived from experience is incorporated into technology [2], much of the knowledge used for technological purposes is also "of the nature of convention, inference and authentic opinion, arrived at on quite other grounds than workmanlike experience" [2]. Therefore, technological knowledge and the state of industrial arts are subject to a "bias of scope and method in the current scheme of life, intellectual and sentimental" [3], and the "habitual trend of…
Synthesized from the book passages below. Chat with the book on Feynman for follow-up.
From the book
and convincing to men living under the discipline of emulation, invidious distinctions and authentic pecuniary decorum. Under these circumstances it is not in the anthropomorphism of naïve workmanship that the putative reality of facts is to be sought, but in their conformity to the conventionally definitive preconceptions of invidious merit, authentic excellence, force of character, mastery, complaisance, congruity with the run of the established institutional values and the ordinances of the Most High. The canons of reality, under which sense impressions are reduced to objective…
the accumulated knowledge so received and current, and turns it to account in dealing with the material means of life. Whatever passes current in this way as knowledge of facts is turned to account as far as may be, and so it is worked into a customary scheme of ways and means, a system of technology, into which new elements of information or acquaintance with the nature and use of things are incorporated, assimilated as they come. The scheme of technology so worked out and carried along in the routine of getting a living will be serviceable for current use and have a substantial…
be spoken of as a distinctive whole, standing out as a determinate and coherent phase in the life-history of the race. To this bias of scope and method in the current scheme of life, intellectual and sentimental, any new element or item must be assimilated if it is not to be rejected as alien and unreal or to fall through by neglect. All this bears on the scope and method of knowledge, and therefore on the facts made use of in the industrial arts, just as it bears on any other feature of human life that is of the nature of habit. And the immediate question is as to the bias or drift…
its own, but is rather concerned with the ways and means whereby instinctively given purposes are to be accomplished. According, therefore, as one or another of the instinctive dispositions is predominant in the community’s scheme of life or in the individual’s every-day interest, the habitual trend of the sense of workmanship will be bent to one or another line of proficiency and technological mastery. By cumulative habituation a bias of this character may come to have very substantial consequences for the range and scope of technological knowledge, the state of the industrial arts,…
ss, looking to gradations in respect of comparative potency, validity, authenticity, propriety, reputability, decency. The canons of pecuniary repute preclude the well-to-do, who have leisure for such things, from inquiring narrowly into the facts of technology, since these things are beneath their dignity, conventionally distasteful; familiarity with such matters can not with propriety be avowed, nor can they without offence and humiliation be canvassed at all intimately among the better class. At the same time pecuniary competition, when carried to its ideal pitch, works the lower…