Modern science and technology: two sides of a coin
Peter Kroes
It is a widespread view that in our times science and technology have become intertwined to such a degree that it is no longer possible and even makes no longer sense to distinguish between the two. The age-old distinction between science and technology is put into question and instead of referring to science and technology as two separate kinds of activities it has become quite popular, especially in the field of STS, to refer to something of an amalgam of the two, called ‘technoscience’. I will take issue with this view. However, in order not to be misunderstood let me specify from the very beginning the interpretation of this claim that I find troublesome. I am not so much interested in historical or institutional interpretations of this claim. Whether it is accurate as a historical view may depend on showing that ways of demarcating science and technology that were once viable from a historical perspective, have lost their meaning for our times. From an institutional perspective this view may be supported by showing that the kind of work that goes on in institutions that are traditionally labeled as ‘scientific’ (universities) and ‘technological’ (industrial labs), or is performed by different professionals (scientists versus engineers) does not (no longer does) run parallel to or does not cover the kind of work designated by these labels. A critique of these interpretations of this widespread view would require what Hans Radder calls a ‘nominalistic-empirical account’ of science and technology: “go and see, and define science (respectively technology) as the practical activity that is called science (respectively technology)” (Radder , ). I will leave it an open matter whether or not the above view, interpreted in one of these ways, may be substantiated. Let me just remark that in my opinion proponents of this view use arguments that sometimes come close to committing a line-drawing fallacy. Indeed, a nominalistic-empirical approach may show that it is difficult, if not impossible, to draw a clear line between activities that can unambiguously be classified in a traditional way as science and technology and it may even be true that this is the case for the bulk of activities to which in present times the traditional labels of science and technology are attached. But that does not rule out the possibility of activities that may be classified unambiguously as science and technology. Moreover, it is not hard to find examples of such activities. Even if it is admitted that these examples are
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‘extreme’ cases and that the bulk of activities of interest lies on a continuum between these extremes, it does not follow that the distinction between science and technology makes no longer sense and has to be given up.
I will interpret the above view about science and technology as one about forms of human action. Then it states that it is no longer possible, nor does it make sense to distinguish doing science (or the activities of a scientist) from doing technology (or the activities of an engineer). It is this claim that I want to put under scrutiny. In doing so, I will follow more or less what Radder calls a ‘conceptual-theoretical’ approach by focusing on the aims of the activities involved (ibidem). I agree with Radder that the two approaches, the nominalistic-empirical and the conceptual-theoretical, have to be used side by side; the nominalistic-empirical approach cannot do without some pre-understanding of what the labels ‘science’ and ‘technology’ refer to and the conceptual-theoretical approach needs backing up by empirical examples. I will more or less leave out this empirical backing up of my conceptual-theoretical analysis but I am convinced that my main points of critique may indeed be amply supported by empirical case studies.
In my analysis of whether it still makes sense to distinguish between science and technology as forms of human action I will take my lead mainly from Radder’s article “Science, technology and the science-technology relationship” (). This is one of the best articles, if not the best, surveying the literature on the demarcation of science and technology and their relationship. In it Radder examines and criticizes various attempts to define science and technology and states that “[a]ll attempts to provide essentialist definitions of science and technology prove to be questionable” (, ). He concludes that what is called for is (ibidem):
a more differentiated account in which science and technology exhibit both similarities and dissimilarities. Starting from an intuitive pre-understanding that needs to be qualified or modified by empirical studies, science, technology and their relationship may be characterized by these similarities and dissim-ilarities, or more precisely by certain patterns that they share and by further patterns that are more typical of the one than of the other.
I have no problem with this conclusion, precisely because such a differentiated account somehow still presupposes that we are dealing with two different kinds of activities that are similar in some and dissimilar in other respects. Science and technology are not replaced by some undifferentiated whole called ‘technoscience’.
What I find problematic in Radder’s analysis is the argument that he uses to show that science and technology are similar in a particular aspect, namely in the design and construction of material things and processes. He uses this argument to
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mine the traditional claim that science and technology are different because they have different aims: whereas the aim of science is an epistemic one, the acquisition of knowledge, technology has a practical aim, namely the design and construction of useful material things and processes. This view, he says, has to be qualified (, ):
After all, designing and constructing material things or processes, including the generation and utilization of design knowledge, is common business in the practice of observational and experimental science. […] Both the overall observational or experimental setup and their component devices, apparatus or instruments often require an extensive process of design and construction […]. Such observational and experimental practices constitute a major part of scientific disciplines. Hence […] design (knowledge) and construction do not demarcate technology and engineering from science.
He reiterates this point again in the conclusion of his article in the following way (, ):
Thus […] the intuitive idea that the design of material things and processes might constitute and essential contrast between science and technology needs to be adjusted to a pattern of similarity and dissimilarity: since design is a per-vasive characteristic of observational and experimental science, the contrast merely applies to theoretical sciences.
For several reasons I find this argument problematic. My first reason is that the occur-rence of design and construction activities in science does not, as such, undermine the distinction between science and technology. I fully agree with Radder that the design and construction of material things and processes plays a pervasive role in modern observational and experimental science; no one familiar with modern science would deny that. But this observation as such does not say much about the aim of science and therefore does not, by itself, undermine the claim that science and technology have different aims. It is not an intrinsic or ultimate aim of science, for instance, to build the observational and experimental equipment to be found at CERN. The build-ing of all this equipment is a means to realize an epistemic end, namely the testbuild-ing of theories about elementary particles. Just as a thought experiment, suppose that somewhere on Earth Higgs bosons were constantly being created spontaneously. In that case there would not have been the need to build CERN’s Large Hadron Col-lider in order to create Higgs bosons; of course, it would still have been necessary to build all the observational equipment. In general, building observational and exper-imental equipment is a necessary, integral part of research projects in most fields of
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modern science (except, as Radder remarks, for the theoretical branches). But that does not make it (an integral part of) the aim of science, whereas it is, on all accounts, an integral part of the aim of technology. In my opinion such situations may better be characterized as the co-occurrence of science and technology (Galle and Kroes to appear). Modern experimental science often cannot do with the use of state of the art technology and, vice versa for modern technology. Many engineering design projects, especially at the frontiers of technology, involve (massive) scientific research. That fact by itself, however, does not imply that any distinction between design and research no longer makes sense.
It may be objected that the building of observational and experimental equip-ment, especially when it is intended to open up and explore new kinds of phenomena with the help of that equipment, may become a scientific aim in itself. But analo-gous to proximate and ultimate causes, we may interpret these situations in terms of proximate and ultimate aims; realization of the proximate aims is then intended to provide the means to further the realization of the ultimate aim. From the point of view of the ultimate aim of science, the work is not done when the experimen-tal and observational equipment has been built. With regard to the epistemic aim of science the ‘real’ work starts from there, namely the use of this equipment in the study of these new phenomena—unless, of course, one considers this equipment itself to be a form of ‘thing knowledge’ as is done by Baird (). Let me imme-diately qualify this rather simplistic picture, in particular the notion of real work in order to avoid being misunderstood. To begin with, it may occur that in actual scien-tific practice the development of equipment and the creation of phenomena, to use Hacking’s phrase, go hand in hand (Hacking ); see also (Chang ). Then it becomes difficult to separate the means (development of equipment) from the end (knowledge of the phenomena). Such situations may be characterized as ‘technosci-entific’ practices, that is, practices that cannot be classified unambiguously as science or technology. However, once the phenomena and corresponding equipment have been stabilized new practices emerge that often can be clearly classified as scientific or technological on the basis of their aims. Then, ‘off the shelf ’ equipment becomes available for research into those stabilized phenomena and a clear distinction between the means and ends of research can be made. The use of a lot of technical equipment in scientific research does not by itself turn that research into a technoscientific prac-tice.
The point about ‘real work’, furthermore, is not to claim that the development of observational and experimental equipment does not require any real work. On the contrary, this development itself may be an outstanding engineering achievement and, given the previous point about the co-creation of equipment and phenomena, also an outstanding scientific achievement. We have to realize, however, that generally
modern science and technology: two sides of a coin
speaking, the scientific and engineering skills needed for developing and making sci-entific equipment may be very different from the skills needed to use this equipment fruitfully in scientific research. Through his construction of the telescope and his dis-covery of the satellites of Jupiter and the phases of Venus with this telescope Galileo showed extraordinary skills in both fields. But from the point of view of astronomy as an epistemic enterprise, his telescope is rightly regarded as a scientific instrument and his discovery of the phase of Venus as a scientific achievement. All the scientific and engineering ingenuity that went into the construction of the telescope did not as such further the goal of astronomy as a scientific discipline (it may have furthered optics as a scientific discipline). For that, the ‘real work’ with the telescope as an astronomical instrument still had to be done.
The second reason why I find Radder’s argument problematic is that he does not take due account of a crucial difference between the design and construction of the material (physical) systems studied by scientists in their laboratories and the design and construction of technical artefacts by engineers. In the foregoing I have argued that in so far the design an making of material things in science concerns the making of measurement and experimental equipment, this may be interpreted as the co-occurrence of science and technology, and that, against Radder’s view, this co-occurrence does not undermine the claim that science and technology may be characterized as having essentially different aims with regard to the design and making of material things. But scientists not only design and make measurement and experimental equipment, they also design and make the (material) samples and probes on which they perform their experiments. On top of that, they also create, as Hacking famously claimed, their own phenomena; at CERN they literally create elementary particles like the Higgs boson. (They may even be said to design and create theories, that is, apart from designing and making material things they also design and make abstract things (artefacts), but I will leave this aspect of science out of consideration here.) All these activities may be considered to be integral parts of the aim of science. If that is so, any essential difference between science and technology when it comes to the designing and creating of material things appears to disappear in thin air.
However, as I have argued in my contribution to the book edited by Radder, The philosophy of scientific experimentation, two different senses of making or creating material things have to be carefully distinguished (Kroes ), namely creation in a weak and in a strong sense. This distinction captures the intuitive idea that there is a crucial difference between, for instance, the making of Higgs bosons at CERN and the making of bicycles at some bicycle firm. In a nutshell, whenever scientists create phenomena or things like elementary particles, they create things in a weak sense: they design and create the (boundary) conditions under which certain
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phenomena or objects occur so they can study them. Scientists, so to speak, design and make the stage, not the play; that is Nature’s job. The phenomena or objects appearing on the stage are not designed by scientists in the sense that their properties and behavior are the result of intentional design decisions by the scientists or are intentionally designed into them. Because of this, these phenomena or objects are considered to be natural; only the occurrence of the phenomena or objects is the result of intentional human action, not their properties or behavior. By contrast, the creation of technical artefacts involves creation in a strong sense. What make a technical artifact different from a physical object are its functional properties; by definition a technical artifact has a (practical) function. Because of their functional features technical artefacts are susceptible to normative judgments (such as, “this thermometer does not work well (malfunctions).”). This is not the case with regard to physical objects, whether occurring naturally or intentionally made by human beings. Thus, in order to create a technical artifact it is not sufficient to create simply a physical object, such as Higgs boson or a specific sample for an experimental study. The creation of a technical artifact involves more, namely the assignment of functional features to a physical object. Because these functional features are constitutive for being a technical artifact, technical artifacts are considered to be artificial objects (for more details, see (Kroes )). The design and creation, whether by scientists or engineers, of measurement and experimental equipment illustrates the crucial importance of functional properties; all this equipment has functional properties, may on occasion malfunction and belongs to the artificial world. This shows that the creation of physical phenomena and objects is not to be confused or treated indiscriminately with the making of experimental equipment.1 There is a crucial
difference between the two cases which pivots around the question whether the object made has functional properties or not.
Let me conclude with the following remarks. The intertwining and co-occurrence of science and technology may look like a recent phenomenon, but after all that may be a rather distorted picture. It is hard to imagine how the development of technology, of the designing, making and use of technical artefacts, could do without gathering knowledge about the behavior of matter, materials and of those technical artefacts. It appears that a design-and-making stance towards the world necessarily involves
Note, by the way, that in creating scientific phenomena scientists typically rely on engineers to design and make the necessary measurement and experimental equipment; in this respect, the data mentioned in the following quote from the CERN webpage (http://www .engineerlive.com/yourcareer/?title=CERN&company=) are telling: “Surprisingly, only . of staff at CERN are research physicists; are engineers and applied physicists, and are technicians and technical engineers.”
modern science and technology: two sides of a coin
also a research (‘scientific’) stance, even at the early stages of human technology. As regards science, ever since Bacon argued for the legitimacy of experiments for gathering knowledge about nature, but arguably also before, experiments have been an important linchpin that connects science to technology. So, it is not so clear whether there is anything new under the sun when it comes to the intertwining and co-occurrence of science and technology. Instead of interpreting the recent pervasive institutional intertwining and co-occurrence of modern science and technology as showing that the distinction between science and technology as two forms of human activity has lost its meaning, I prefer to interpret this as a sign of the fact that science and technology are, and may have almost always been, two sides of a coin. One cannot separate one side from the other, but that does not mean that it does not make sense or that it is not possible to distinguish one side from the other.
References
Baird, Davis. . Thing Knowledge: A Philosophy of Scientific Instruments. Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press.
Chang, Hasok. . Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Galle, Per, and Peter Kroes (to appear). “Science and Design: Identical Twins?”. Design Studies. Hacking, Ian. . Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of
Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kroes, Peter. . “Physics, Experiments and the Concept of Nature.” In The philosophy of scientific experimentation, edited by H. Radder, –. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Kroes, Peter. . Technical Artefacts: Creations of Mind and Matter. Dordrecht: Springer. Radder, Hans. . “Science, Technology and the Science-Technology Relationship.” In
Handbook of Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences, edited by A. Meijers, –. Amsterdam: Elsevier BV.
