Abstract
In this chapter I attempt a number of things. Together they constitute some steps toward the development of a new research program. It is a proposal for a new way of conceptualizing the relation between science and technology. It is also an attempt to find a way to escape some old philosophical dichotomies; dichotomies which have kept philosophers of science and philosophers of technology apart.
Appeared in New Directions in the Philosophy of Technology. Edited by Joseph C. Pitt. Philosophy and Technology Series, Vol. 11. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995. Reprinted by permission of Springer Academic Publishers.
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Notes
- 1.
A classic example of this can be found in a recent (1987) issue of Mosaic, an official NSF publication:
Every so often. in the long course of scientific progress. a new set of ideas appears, illuminating and redefining what has gone before like flare bursting over a darkened landscape. It happened when Galileo realized that physical laws needed to be written with numbers and invented the scientific method, when Darwin found an entirely different way to consider the evolution of living things, when Freud placed consciousness and emotion in a new context, when Einstein found a radical way to look at space and time, and when Wegener launched an earth science based on continental drift.
- 2.
Or that both experimenters were Americans and that the experiment was carried out in Cleveland, Ohio at what was then the Case Institute of Technology. After all, with names like “Michelson” and “Morley” they just had to be British and the experiment must have taken place at the Cavendish: didn’t they all?
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- 4.
I have discussed some or these issues elsewhere. most recently III Illy (1991).
- 5.
Only if your definition of “knowledge” entails existence would you be back in the old ditch in a hurry. Definitions of knowledge that entail the existence of the things that are known usually invoke a truth condition such as in “knowledge = justified true belief.” Luckily, there exist accounts of knowledge that avoid the problems truth conditions present. For example, on my account, which I will not belabor here, I distinguish between what is proposed by individuals as candidates for knowledge and the endorsement of those claims by the appropriate social community, An individual may think he or she has found the truth about a particular matter, but thinking or wishing so doesn’t make it so. Only when the claim has been endorsed by a particular community does it count as knowledge. The criteria the community invokes may have nothing to do with truth – it may, for example, remain satisfied with coherence or with practical efficiency. But, and this is what counts here, if the community determines knowledge, then inevitably truth will go by the board (Pitt 1983). This is the germ that the social constructivist and most relativists exploit.
- 6.
But it may bear on the resolution of discipline specific problems by importing techniques and individuals from other disciplines.
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Pitt, J.C. (2011). Discovery, Telescopes, and Progress. In: Doing Philosophy of Technology. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0820-4_8
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