Notes Towards a Philosophy of the Science/Technology Interaction

For something usually taken for granted as a basis for practical politics and economics, the lack of critical scholarship on the interaction of science and technology is downright scandalous. All that seems clear is the inadequacy of the naive idea that somehow or other science can be ‘applied’ to make technology. In spite of a morass of case studies promoted as a legitimation of funding practices or to provide a social license for the support of basic scientists, no such concept as ‘application’ is of use to serious historians of science or of technology. Similarly, although there are voluminous statistics which disaggregate such entities as funding and manpower into categories of basic science, applied science, and development, there is no evidence that this division produces results of any theoretical value. On the contrary they appear to be nothing but a trivial artifact of the definitions used, rather than any illumination of the chain of action in which they are supposed to be linked.