Abstract
In December, 1987, Charles J. Pedersen shared a Nobel prize in chemistry for the discovery of the crown ether molecule. Pedersen spent his entire career as a chemist in the industrial laboratories of the DuPont Company. His fellow Nobel laureates — Donald Cram of the University of California at Los Angeles and Jean-Marie Lehn of the Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg, France — worked in much more traditional academic settings. They expanded on Pedersen’s work, with Cram developing “host-guest” chemistry that may hold significant promise for understanding cell behavior in living organisms and Lehn developing “cryptand” chemistry that has led to dissolving some of the most insoluble substances known to chemistry.1 What better example could there be that the social setting has no influence on scientific results? A pure science discovery can come out of an industrial laboratory, and practical results can be developed in an academic setting.
From a logical point of view, the strength of the support that a hypothesis receives from a given body of data should depend only on what the hypothesis asserts and what the data are: . . . a purely historical matter . . . should not count as affecting the confirmation of the hypothesis.
Carl G. Hempel, Philosophy of Natural Science, p. 38
Why [should] the conduct of engineering/science in an R&D setting [differ] from the conduct of engineering/science in other settings [?] For that matter, why should we think that philosophy of engineering differs from philosophy of science in an R&D setting?
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Notes
See the Wilmington, Delaware, Evening Journal, Friday, December 11, 1987, pp. A12–13; also, for some technical detail, Chemical and Engineering News, October 19, 1987, pp. 4–5.
See my “Toward a Philosophy of Engineering and Science in R&D Settings,” in P. Durbin, ed., Technology and Responsibility (Philosophy and Technology, vol. 3; Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987), pp. 309–327.
An anthology of original contributions by authors who have done such work as is currently available should be published in 1989 in the Research in Technology Studies series, Lehigh University Press.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2d ed.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970; original, 1962).
Ibid, p. 8.
Ibid, pp. 174–210.
See especially Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 1–23 and 231–278.
Structure, 2d ed., p. 176.
Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, pp. 272–273.
Paul K. Feyerabend, Against Method (London: NLB, 1975).
See Israel Schemer, Science and Subjectivity (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), and Ernest Nagel, “Philosophical Depreciations of Scientific Method,” in his Teleology Revisited and Other Essays in the Philosophy and History of Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), pp. 84–94.
Preface to Karin D. Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1981), p. viii.
Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979).
John Ziman, An Introduction to Science Studies: The Philosophical and Social Aspects of Science and Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 110; the second reference is to Ludwig Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979; German original, 1935).
Introduction to Science Studies, p. 112.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 110.
George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Act (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), p. 65.
Mead, “Scientific Method and Individual Thinker,” in G.H. Mead, Selected Writings, ed. A. Reck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), pp. 171–211; appeared originally in the collective volume (no editor listed), Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude (New York: Holt, 1917), pp. 176–227.
Ibid., p. 196.
Ibid., p. 203.
The best recent account is in R.W. Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey’s Conception of Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). Sleeper emphasizes logic, metaphysics, and theory of knowledge, but everything is subordinated to Dewey’s “meliorism.”
See John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (New York: Minton, Balch, 1929).
Mead, “Scientific Method and the Moral Sciences,” in Selected Writings (note 19, above), pp. 248–266; the reference is to p. 266. The essay first appeared in the International Journal of Ethics 33 (1923): 229–247.
Hans Joas, G.H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-Examination of His Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985; German original, 1980), p. 122.
Ibid., pp. 122–124.
Gilbert Hottois, “Technoscience: Nihilistic Power versus a New Ethical Consciousness,” in P. Durbin, ed., Technology and Responsibility (note 2, above), pp. 69–84; reference is to p. 80.
See, among many other items on this topic, Michael Crow, ed., Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering (Washington, D.C.: National Science Foundation, 1977).
Albert Borgmann, “Technology and Democracy,” in P. Durbin, ed., Research in Philosophy and Technology, vol. 7 (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1984), pp. 211–228; reference is to p. 223. Essentially the same material appears in Borgmann’s Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), chapter 16.
Ibid., pp. 223–224.
Ibid., p. 223.
Whether the poor are technological illiterates in technological societies or poor countries relative to technically advanced countries.
Carl Mitcham, “Philosophy of Technology,” in P. Durbin, ed., A Guide to the Culture of Science, Technology, and Medicine (New York: Free Press, 1980; paper, with additional bibliography, 1984), pp. 282–363; reference is to pp. 343–344.
The “technical” credo of analytical philosophy is succinctly stated by Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy.(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), p. 834, and by Hans Reichenbach The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), p. 123.
Compare, for example, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1982–1983 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983), with Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975); also, Laurence Veysey, “The Plural Organized Worlds of the Humanities,” in A. Oleson and J. Voss, eds., The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860–1920 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 51–106. Veysey carries his contrasts up to the 1960s.
As an old but forceful example, see Jacques Barzun, Science: The Glorious Entertainment (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).
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Durbin, P.T. (1989). Research and Development from the Viewpoint of Social Philosophy. In: Byrne, E.F., Pitt, J.C. (eds) Technological Transformation. Philosophy and Technology, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2597-7_3
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