Technology as Interior: A Civilizational Epistemology of Technological Becoming
摘要
Contemporary philosophy of technology has developed sophisticated accounts of infrastructures, algorithms, and socio-technical systems, yet it rarely addresses the interior conditions through which a technological world becomes intelligible. This paper argues that technological civilization is grounded in an epistemic interior: a horizon in which significance is disclosed, possibilities are differentiated, and action becomes meaningful. Dominant frameworks, shaped by representational epistemology, presuppose a separation between cognition, value, and praxis, and thus struggle to explain technological trajectories that do not emerge from this lineage. Drawing on Wang Yangming’s philosophy of mind, the paper reconstructs an alternative epistemic architecture—the Wang Yangming Cognitive Infrastructure Model (WY–CIM). Rather than treating intention, cognition, and praxis as sequential stages, WY–CIM conceptualizes them as a recursive movement through which technological worlds are constituted. Intention functions as an ontological orientation, cognition as world-constituting differentiation, and praxis as the transformative site where understanding is enacted and revised. Together, these dynamics form a generative interior that existing theories cannot adequately articulate. The paper argues that technological civilization emerges from this recursive coupling of value, understanding, and material enactment, and proposes WY–CIM as a civilizational epistemology capable of accounting for technological plurality without cultural essentialism.