Benjamin Franklin was a writer, printer, inventor, and designer of apps. He believed that knowledge comes from experience, including both external sensations and internal reflection. Franklin's model of self-education applied this Enlightenment view of the origin of knowledge and truth.

1. Benjamin
Franklin

2. Key Words for Benjamin Franklin
•reading, writing, editing, printing
•printer, public (connected to publicus, people), editor, press
•apprentice, journeymen, trade, indenture, work education
•industry (in Latin, means diligence), frugality, diligence,
utility, useful, temperance, disinterestedness, modesty
•goodness, virtue, errata (an error in printing and writing)
•fortune, credit, character, interest, business

3. Reason is natural revelation.
- John Locke
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man.
- Alexander Pope
The Enlightenment

4. Benjamin Franklin:
Writer, Printer, Inventor,
and Designer of Apps

5. Ben Franklin’s epitaph, written when he was 28 years old:
The Body
of B Franklin Printer,
(Like the Cover of an old Book
Its Contents torn out
And stript of its Lettering & Gilding)
Lies here, Food for Worms.
But the Work shall not be lost;
For it will, (as he believ’d) appear once more,
In a new and more elegant Edition
Revised and corrected,
By the Author.

7. Page from
Franklin’s
manuscript letter
to his son

8. Job Printing

9. Franklin’s
“autobiography”
was first published
in Paris in 1791 in a
French translation

16. The Enlightenment
✤ Where does knowledge (and, by implication,
truth) come from?
✤ What is the origin of knowledge, truth, and
meaning?

17. John Locke, from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)
Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper [tabula
rasa], void of all characters without any ideas; how comes it to be
furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and
boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless
variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To
this I answer, in one word, From experience: in that all our knowledge
is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation,
employed either about external sensible objects, or about the internal
operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves is
that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of
thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all
the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring.

18. Enlightenment Epistemology
✤ The problem of epistemology: the theory of knowledge
(where does knowledge come from; what constitutes
knowledge, etc.?)
✤ Knowledge comes from “experience”
✤ Experience consists of two things:
✤ sensations (exterior) and reflection (interior)
✤ Franklin’s model of self-education applies Locke’s
epistemology

19. “Method is the soul of business” - Edgar Allan Poe

23. What is an App/Application?
A piece of a program or piece of
software designed and written to fulfill
a particular purpose of the user.

24. Self-Tracking (The Quantified Self)

25. The Evolution of Apps