Technē

Technē (τέχνη) means art, craft, or skill — the practical knowledge of how to make or accomplish something. It belongs to the carpenter, the doctor, the navigator, the sculptor, and the poet alike, and is kin to tektōn, 'carpenter' or 'builder' (the source, through Greek, of 'architect' and 'tectonic'). From technē come our 'technique' and 'technology'.

Knack or knowledge?

Socrates and Plato are forever testing whether some claimed expertise is a genuine technē or a mere knack. A true craft, they argue, can give a rational account of what it does and why, aims at a definite good, and can be taught — and on this test they often find rhetoric, or the politicians' supposed wisdom, wanting. The craftsman became Plato's favorite image for knowledge: even the Demiurge fashions the cosmos as a craftsman shapes his material, looking to the Forms as his model.

Making and the rest

Aristotle placed technē among the intellectual virtues, defining it as the reasoned capacity to make — distinct both from epistēmē, the science of necessary truths, and from phronēsis, the wisdom that governs action rather than production. To make well and to act well, he saw, are not the same art.