Synthesized answer
Veblen's approach to documentation in this essay is not directly stated. However, the passages suggest that "accumulated knowledge" and "information derived from experience in industry" are incorporated into the "scheme of technology" [4]. This technological scheme is built upon knowledge that is "effectually of the nature of matter-of-fact" [4].
The passages also indicate that much of the knowledge used for technological purposes can be of a different nature, being "convention, inference and authentic opinion, arrived at on quite other grounds than workmanlike experience" [4]. This implies that Veblen is distinguishing between knowledge that is empirically derived and knowledge that is based on other forms of validation, such as "invidious distinction" and "pecuniary repute" [1, 2, 3]. The essay seems concerned with how these various forms of knowledge, particularly those influenced by "pecuniary culture," affect the apprehension of facts useful for technological ends [3].
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…
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…
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…
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…
the technological particulars that have led from the beginnings down through the primitive and later growth of culture. Such a work belongs to the ethnologists and archæologists; and it is summed up in the proposition that men have applied common sense, more or less hesitatingly and with more or less refractory limitations, to the facts with which they have had to deal; that they have accumulated a knowledge of technological expedients and processes from generation to generation, always going on what had already been achieved in ways and means, and gradually discarding or losing such…