A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

Chapter 47

Environmental Science and Technology

MARY TILES

Because technologies develop apace and continue to find new applications, and because environmental science is currently an academic growth area, any attempt to catalog examples of mutual influence is doomed to incompleteness from the outset. An alternative approach is to consider three principal questions one can ask about the connection between technology and any scientific area and then to ask how the answers will be distinctive in the case of at least some of the environmental sciences. The three questions are:

1. Does technological development drive the research agenda? If so, how and to what extent?

2. In the long term, can successful research be expected to lead to innovative technological development? If so, how?

3. To what extent and in what ways is empirical investigation dependent on technology and technological development?

Answers to the questions, especially once one gets to any level of detail, will differ for different areas of scientific investigation; but there is reason to think that, even when working at a relatively high level of generality, there are some distinctive ways in which the answers for environmental sciences will differ from those given for more traditional, laboratory sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology.

First, however, there should be some clarification of what is included under “environmental science,” even though there is no unique, clearly agreed definition of this ...