A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

1. Science and Technology

At present, many accept that modern science and technology are interwoven into a complex that is sometimes called “technoscience”: the progress of science is dependent on the sophistication of instrumentation, whereas the progress of “high-tech” instruments and apparatus is dependent on scientific research (see Galison 1987, 1997; Baird and Faust 1990; Radder 1996, 2003). From this perspective, an understanding of how scientific research interacts with technology, in particular in the development of instruments and apparatus, is a topic for both philosophy of technology and philosophy of science. The focus taken here is how scientific research contributes to the development of instruments and apparatus for technological use.

In philosophy of technology, recent interest has been in the nature of technological knowledge (e.g. Vincenti 1990; Kroes 1995; Pitt 2000), rather than in how scientific research contributes to technological development. In that literature, science is valued for its heuristic role, whereas scientific approaches to the development of technology are nonexistent. Conceptual and historical reasons may explain this focus. Traditionally, science and technology were distinct domains. The classical dichotomy between scientific knowledge (episteme) and technological knowledge (techne) was grounded in the ontological distinction between their objects: scientific knowledge is about “things” that exist of necessity, things that are universal, ...