The relationship between science

and technology
Harvey Brooks
John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard Universily, 79 J.F.K. Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA

Science, technology and innovation each represent a suc- 1. Introduction

cessively larger category of activities which are highly interde-
pendent but distinct. Science contributes to technology in at
least six ways: (1) new knowledge which serves as a direct Much public debate about science and tech-
source of ideas for new technological possibilities; (2) source
nology policy has been implicitly dominated by a
of tools and techniques for more efficient engineering design
‘pipeline’ model of the innovation process in
and a knowledge base for evaluation of feasibility of designs;
(3) research instrumentation, laboratory techniques and ana- which new technological ideas emerge as a result
lytical methods used in research that eventually find their way of new discoveries in science and move through a
into design or industrial practices, often through intermediate progression from applied research, design, manu-
disciplines; (4) practice of research as a source for develop- facturing and, finally, commercialization and
ment and assimilation of new human skills and capabilities
marketing. This model seemed to correspond with
eventually useful for technology; (5) creation of a knowledge
base that becomes increasingly important in the assessment of some of the most visible success stories of World
technology in terms of its wider social and environmental War II, such as the atomic bomb, radar, and the
impacts; (6) knowledge base that enables more efficient proximity fuze, and appeared to be further exem-
strategies of applied research, development, and refinement plified by developments such as the transistor,
of new technologies.
the laser, the computer, and, most recently, the
The converse impact of technology on science is of at least
equal importance: (1) through providing a fertile source of nascent biotechnology industry arising out of the
novel scientific questions and thereby also helping to justify discovery of recombinant DNA techniques. The
the allocation of resources needed to address these questions model was also, perhaps inadvertently, legiti-
in an efficient and timely manner, extending the agenda of mated by the influential Bush report, Science, the
science; (2) as a source of otherwise unavailable instrumenta-
Endless Frontier, which over time came to be
tion and techniques needed to address novel and more diffi-
cult scientific questions more efficiently. interpreted as saying that if the nation supported
Specific examples of each of these two-way interactions scientists to carry out research according to their
are discussed. Because of many indirect as well as direct own sense of what was important and interesting,
connections between science and technology, the research
technologies useful to health, national security,
portfolio of potential social benefit is much broader and more
and the economy would follow almost automati-
diverse than would be suggested by looking only at the direct
connections between science and technology. cally once the potential opportunities opened up
by new scientific discoveries became widely known
to the military, the health professions, and the
private entrepreneurs operating in the national
economy. (See United States Office of Scientific
Correspondence to: H. Brooks, John F. Kennedy School of Research and Development (1945) for a recent
Government, Harvard University, 79 J.F.K. Street, Cam- account of the political context and general intel-
bridge, MA 02138, USA. Tel., (617) 495-1445; fax, (617)
lectual climate in which this report originated;
495-5776.
see also Frederickson, 1993.) The body of re-
Research Policy 23 (1994) 477-486 search knowledge was thought of as a kind of
North-Holland intellectual bank account on which society as a

0048-7333/94/$07.00 0 1994 - Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved

SSDI 0048-7333(94)01001-S
478 H. Brooks / The relationship between science and technoluRy
whole would be abte to draw almost automati-
caliy as required to fulfil its aspirations and needs.
Though most knowledgeable people under-
stood that such a model corresponded only to the
rare and exceptional cases cited above, it became
embodied in political rhetoric and took consider-
able hold on the public imagination and seemed
to be confirmed by a sufficient number of dra-
matic anecdotes so that it was regarded as typical
of the entire process of technological innovation,
though it was severely criticized by many scholars.
(See Kline and Rosenberg (1986) for an example
of criticism and an excellent discussion of a more
realistic and typical model.) One consequence
was considerable confusion in the public mind
between science and engineering, an excessive
preoccupation with technical originality and pri-
ority of conception as not only necessary but
sufficient conditions for successful technological
innovation, and in fact an equating of organized
research and development (R&D) with the inno-
vation process itself. The ratio of national R&D
expenditures to gross domestic product (GDP)
often became a surrogate measure of national
technological performance and, uItimately, of
long-term national economic potential. The con-
tent of R&D was treated as a ‘black box’ that
yielded benefits almost independently of what
was inside it (Brooks, 1993, pp. 30-31).
The public may be forgiven its confusions, as
indeed the relationships between science and
technology are very complex, though interactive,
and are often different in different fields and at
different phases of a technological ‘life cycle’.
Nelson (1992) has given a definition of technology
both as “ . . , specific designs and practices” and as
“generic knowledge.. . that provides understand-
ing of how [and why] things work.. . ” and what
are the most promising approaches to further
advances, including “. . . the nature of currently
binding constraints.” It is important here to note
that technoiogy is not just things, but also embod-
ies a degree of generic understanding, which
makes it seem more like science, and yet it is
understanding that relates to a specific artifact,
which distinguishes it from normal scientific un-
derstanding, although there may be a close corre-
spondence.
Similarly, Nelson (1992, p. 349) defines innova-
tion as “ . . . the processes by which firms master
and get into practice product designs that are
new to them, whether or not they are new to the
universe, or even to the nation.” The current US
mental model of innovation often places excessive
emphasis on originality in the sense of newness to
the universe as opposed to newness in context. In
general, the activities and investments associated
with ‘technoIogica1 leadership’ in the sense of
absolute originali~ differ much less than is gen-
erally assumed from those associated with simply
staying near the forefront of best national or
world practice. Yet R&D is also necessary for
learning about technology even when it is not
‘new to the universe’ but only in the particular
context in which it is being used for the first time
(Brooks, 1991, pp. 20-25).
However, innovation involves much more than
R&D. Charpie (1967) has provided a representa-
tive allocation of effort that goes into the intro-
duction of a new product, as follows:
(a) conception, primarily knowledge genera-
tion (research, advanced development, basic in-
vention) 5-10%;
(b) product design and engineering, lo-20%;
cc> getting ready for manufacturing (lay-out,
tooling, process design), 40-60%;
(d) manufacturing start-up, debugging produc-
tion, 5-15%;
(e) marketing start-up, probing the market,
lo-20%.
It does not follow from this that R&D or
knowledge generation is only 5-10% of total in-
novative activity because many projects are started
that never get beyond stage (a) and an even
smaller proportion of projects are carried all the
way through stage (e). In addition, there is a
certain amount of background research that is
carried out on a level-of-effort basis without any
specific product in mind. There is no very good
estimate of what percentage of the innovative
activity of a particular firm would be classified in
category (a) if unsuccessful projects or back-
ground research are taken into account. The fact
remains that all five stages involve a certain pro-
portion of technical work which is not classified
as R&D, and the collection of statistical data on
this portion of ‘downstream’ innovative activity is
in a very rudimentary state compared with that
for organized R&D. Indeed, only about 35% of
scientists and engineers in the US are employed
in R&D.
In small firms, especially technological ‘niche’
 H. Brooks / The relationship between science and technology 479

firms whose business is based on a cluster of ery of uranium fission leading to the concept of a
specialized technologies which are often designed nuclear chain reaction and the atomic bomb and
in close collaboration with potential users, there nuclear power is, perhaps, the cleanest example
is a good deal of technical activity by highly of this. Other examples include the laser and its
trained people which is never captured in the numerous embodiments and applications, the dis-
usual R&D statistics. coveries of X-rays and of artificial radioactivity
Thus, science, technology, and innovation each and their subsequent applications in medicine
represent a successively larger universe of activi- and industry, the discovery of nuclear magnetic
ties which are highly interdependent, yet never- resonance (NMR) and its subsequent manifold
theless distinct from each other. Even success in applications in chemical analysis, biomedical re-
technology by itself, let alone science, provides an search, and ultimately medical diagnosis, and
insufficient basis for success in the whole process maser amplifiers and their applications in ra-
of technological innovation. In fact, the relation dioastronomy and communications. These do ex-
between science and technology is better thought emplify most of the features of the pipeline model
of in terms of two parallel streams of cumulative of innovation described above. Yet, they are the
knowledge, which have many interdependencies rarest, but therefore also the most dramatic cases,
and cross relations, but whose internal connec- which may account for the persistence of the
tions are much stronger than their cross connec- pipeline model of public discussions. It also suits
tions. The metaphor I like to use is two strands of the purpose of basic scientists arguing for govern-
DNA which can exist independently, but cannot ment support of their research in a pragmatically
be truly functional until they are paired. oriented culture.
A more common example of a direct genetic
relationship between science and technology oc-
2. The contributions of science to technology curs when the exploration of a new field of sci-
ence is deliberately undertaken with a general
The relations between science and technology anticipation that it has a high likelihood of lead-
are complex and vary considerably with the par- ing to useful applications, though there is no
ticular field of technology being discussed. For specific end-product in mind. The work at Bell
mechanical technology, for example, the contri- Telephone Laboratories and elsewhere which led
bution of science to technology is relatively weak, eventually to the invention of the transistor is one
and it is often possible to make rather important of the clearest examples of this. The group that
inventions without a deep knowledge of the un- was set up at Bell Labs to explore the physics of
derlying science. By contrast, electrical, chemical, Group IV semiconductors such as germanium
and nuclear technology are deeply dependent on was clearly motivated by the hope of finding a
science, and most inventions are made only by method of making a solid state amplifier to sub-
people with considerable training in science. In stitute for the use of vacuum tubes in repeaters
the following discussion, we outline the variety of for the transmission of telephone signals over
ways in which science can contribute to techno- long distances.
logical development. The complexity of the inter- As indicated above, much so-called basic re-
connections of science and technology is further search undertaken by industry or supported by
discussed in Nelson and Rosenberg (1993). the military services has been undertaken with
this kind of non-specific potential applicability in
2.1. Science as a direct source of new technological mind, and indeed much basic biomedical research
ideas is of this character. The selection of fields for
emphasis is a ‘strategic’ decision, while the actual
In this case, opportunities for meeting new day-to-day ‘tactics’ of the research are delegated
social needs or previously identified social needs to the ‘bench scientists’. Broad industrial and
in new ways are conceived as a direct sequel to a government support for condensed matter physics
scientific discovery made in the course of an and atomic and molecular physics since World
exploration of natural phenomena undertaken War II has been motivated by the well-substanti-
with no potential application in mind. The discov- ated expectation that it would lead to important
480 H. Brooks / The relationship between science and technology

new applications in electronics, communications, 3.3. Instrumentation, laboratory techniques, and

and computers. The determination of an appro- analytical methods
priate level of effort, and the creation of an
organizational environment that will facilitate the Laboratory techniques or analytical methods
earliest possible identification of technological used in basic research, particularly in physics,
opportunities without too much constraint on the often find their way either directly, or indirectly
research agenda is a continuing challenge to re- via other disciplines, into industrial processes and
search planning in respect to this particular process controls largely unrelated either to their
mechanism of science-technology interaction. original use or to the concepts and results of the
research for which they were originally devised
2.2. Science as a source of engineering design tools (Rosenberg, 1991). According to Rosenberg
and techniques (19911, “this involves the movement of new in-
strumentation technologies.. . from the status of
While the process of design is quite distinct a tool of basic research, often in universities, to
from the process of developing new knowledge of the status of a production tool, or capital good, in
natural phenomena, the two processes are very private industry.” Examples are legion and in-
intimately related. This relationship has become clude electron diffraction, the scanning electron
more and more important as the cost of empiri- microscope (SEMI, ion implantation, synchrotron
cally testing and evaluating complex prototype radiation sources, phase-shifted lithography, high
technological systems has mounted. Theoretical vacuum technology, industrial cryogenics, super-
prediction, modeling, and simulation of large sys- conducting magnets (originally developed for
tems, often accompanied by measurement and cloud chamber observations in particle physics,
empirical testing of subsystems and components, then commercialized for ‘magnetic resonance
has increasingly substituted for full scale empiri- imaging’ (MRI) in medicine). In Rosenberg’s
cal testing of complete systems, and this requires words, “the common denominator running
design tools and analytical methods grounded in through and connecting all these experiences is
phenomenological understanding. This is particu- that instrumentation that was developed in the
larly important for anticipating failure modes un- pursuit of scientific knowledge eventually had
der extreme but conceivable conditions of service direct applications as part of a manufacturing
of complex technological systems. (See Alit et al., process.” Also, in considering the potential eco-
1992, Chapter 4). For a discussion of technical nomic benefits of science, as Rosenberg says,
knowledge underlying the engineering design “there is no obvious reason for failing to examine
process, cf. Chapter 2 (pp. 39-341.) the hardware consequences of even the most
Much of the technical knowledge used in de- fundamental scientific research.” One can also
sign and the comparative analytical evaluation of envision ultimate industrial process applications
alternative designs is actually developed as ‘en- from many other techniques now restricted to the
gineering science’ by engineers, and is in fact the research laboratory. One example might be tech-
major activity comprising engineering research in niques for creating selective chemical reactions
academic engineering departments. This research using molecular beams.
is very much in the style of other basic research in
the ‘pure’ sciences and is supported in a similar
manner by the Engineering Division of the Na- 2.4. The development of human skills
tional Science Foundation, i.e. as unsolicited, in-
vestigator-originated project research. Even An important function of academic research
though it is generally labelled as ‘engineering’ often neglected in estimating its economic bene-
rather than ‘science’, such research is really an- fits is that it imparts research skills to graduate
other example of basic research whose agenda students and other advanced trainees, many of
happens to be motivated primarily by potential whom “go on to work in applied activities and
applications in design ‘downstream’ though its take with them not just the knowledge resulting
theoretical interest and its mathematical sophisti- from their research, but also the skills, methods,
cation are comparable with that of pure science. and a web of professional contacts that will help
 H. Brooks / The relationship between science and technology 481

them tackle the technological problems that they that only 2.5% of the scientists surveyed had
later face.” (See Rosenberg (1990) and Pavitt received their Ph.D. training in solid state physics;
(19911.) This is especially important in light of the 19% were chemists, and 73% had received their
fact that basic research instrumentation so often doctorates in physics fields other than solid state,
later finds application not only in engineering with nuclear physics predominating (Brooks,
and other more applied disciplines such as clini- 1985). In fact, the shift of physics graduate study
cal medicine, but also ultimately in routine indus- into solid state and condensed matter physics
trial processes and operations, health care deliv- (about 40% of all physics Ph.D.s by the early
ery, and environmental monitoring. 1970s) occurred after many of the fundamental
A study based on a ranking by 6.50 industrial inventions had already been made. The skills
research executives in 130 industries of the rele- acquired in graduate training in nuclear physics
vance of a number of academic scientific disci- had been readily turned to the development and
plines to technology in their industry, first, on the improvement of solid state devices (Brooks, 1978).
basis of their skill base and, second, on the basis
of their research results, showed strikingly higher
ratings for the skill base from most disciplines 2.5. Technology assessment
than from the actual research results. In the most
extreme case, 44 industries rated physics high in The past two decades have witnessed an enor-
skill base (second only to materials science, com- mous growth of interest and concern with predict-
puter science, metallurgy and chemistry, in that ing and controlling the social impact of technol-
order), whereas physics was almost at the bottom ogy, both anticipating new technologies and their
of the list in respect to the direct contribution of social and environment implications and the con-
academic research results to industrial applica- sequences of ever-increasing scale of application
tions. Only in biology and medical science were of older technologies (Brooks, 1973). In general,
the contributions of skill base and research re- the assessment of technology, whether for evalu-
sults comparable (Nelson and Levin, 1986; Pavitt, ating its feasibility to assess entrepreneurial risk,
1991, p. 114 (Table 1)). The conclusion was “that or for foreseeing its societal side-effects, requires
most scientific fields are much more strategically a deeper and more fundamental scientific under-
important to technology than data on direct standing of the basis of the technology than does
transfers of knowledge would lead us to believe” its original creation, which can often be carried
(Pavitt, 1991). From these data, Pavitt inferred out by empirical trial-and-error methods. Fur-
that “policies for greater selectivity and concen- ther, such understanding often requires basic sci-
tration in the support of scientific fields have entific knowledge well outside the scope of what
probably been misconceived”, for the contribu- was clearly relevant in the development of the
tion of various disciplines to the development of technology. For example, the manufacture of a
potentially useful skills appears to be much more new chemical may involve disposal of wastes
broadly distributed among fields than are their which require knowledge of the groundwater hy-
practically relevant research contributions. A part drology of the manufacturing site. Thus, as the
of the problem here is, of course, that this con- deployment of technology becomes more exten-
clusion is contrary to much of the rhetoric used in sive, and the technology itself becomes more
advocating the support of basic research by gov- complex, one may anticipate the need for much
ernments. more basic research knowledge relative to the
As a further example of the importance of the technical knowledge required for original devel-
widely usable generalized skills derived from par- opment. This has sometimes been called ‘defen-
ticipation in any challenging field of research, the sive research’ and, it can be shown that, over
National Research Council in 1964 surveyed time, the volume of research that can be de-
about 1900 doctoral scientists working in industry scribed as defensive has steadily increased rela-
in solid state physics and electronics. By that tive to the research that can be described as
date, most of the basic ideas underlying the most ‘offensive’ - i.e. aimed at turning up new techno-
important advances in solid state electronics had logical opportunities. This has led me to call
already been developed. It was found, however, science the ‘conscience’ of technology.
482 H. Brooks / The relationship between science and technology

2.6. Science as a source of development strategy ful in the fields of materials science and con-
densed matter physics (Materials Advisory Board,
Somewhat similarly to the case of technology 1966). In fact, materials science was created as a
assessment, the planning of the most efficient new interdisciplinary field of academic research
strategy of technological development, once gen- initially as an outgrowth of an effort to under-
eral objectives have been set, is often quite de- stand some of the materials processes and prop-
pendent on science from many fields. This accu- erties that were important to improving the qual-
mulated stock of existing scientific (and techno- ity and performance of semiconductor devices.
logical) knowledge helps to avoid blind alleys and One of the most dramatic examples of the
hence wasteful development expenditures. Much generation of a stimulus to a new field of basic
of this is, of course, old knowledge, rather than research by a discovery made in the course of a
the latest research results, but it is nonetheless technology-motivated investigation was the dis-
important and requires people who know the covery and quantitative measurement by a Bell
field of relevant background science. One piece Laboratories group in 1965 of the background
of evidence of this is the observation that very microwave radiation in space left over from the
creative engineers and inventors tend to read original ‘big bang’, for which Penzias et al. ulti-
very widely and eclectically both in the history of mately received the Nobel prize. A brief account
science and technology, and about contemporary of the development of this subfield of cosmology
scientific developments. is given in Physics Survey Committee (1972b).
Other examples are tunneling in semiconductors
(Suits and Bueche, 1967, pp. 304-3061, the pur-
3. Contribution of technology to science suit of which as a basic science beyond practical
needs led ultimately to the discovery of the
While the contributions of science to technol- Josephson effect in superconductors and the in-
ogy are widely understood and acknowledged by vention of the Josephson junction. The develop-
both the public and scientists and engineers, the ment and application of superconducting junc-
reciprocal dependence of science on technology tions is briefly summarized in Physics Survey
both for its agenda and for many of its tools is Committee (1972a, pp. 490-492). In this example,
much less well appreciated. This dependence is it is more difficult to decide whether research was
more apparent in the ‘chain-link’ iterative model motivated by technology. The Physics Survey
of Kline and Rosenberg (1986) than it is in the Committee (1972b) gives numerous examples of
linear-sequential model more common until re- the mutual reinforcement of theoretical and tech-
cently in public discussions of technological inno- nological stimuli in the co-evolution of a new
vation and technology policy. The relationships field of science and technological application,
here are also more subtle and require more ex- where the triggering events are difficult to disen-
planation. tangle.
Observations “are sometimes made in an in-
3.1. Technology as a source of new scientific chal- dustrial context by people who are not capable of
lenges appreciating their potential significance” (Rosen-
berg, 1991, p. 337) or, perhaps more frequently,
Problems arising in industrial development are lack the incentives or resources to pursue, gener-
frequently a rich source of challenging basic sci- alize, and interpret the observation, thus lacking
ence problems which are first picked up with a the ‘prepared mind’ which is so essential to fun-
specific technological problem in mind, but then damental scientific discovery. This may be so
pursued by a related basic research community simply because the organization is dependent on
well beyond the immediate requirements of the commercial revenue for support, so it cannot
original technological application that motivated afford to pursue promising concepts unless their
them (Rosenberg, 1991). This research then went potential application is fairly clear and immedi-
on to generate new insights and technological ate, or it may be because of a mindset that is
ideas from which new and unforeseen technology belittling of mere theory. A classical example is
originated. This process has been especially fruit- the so-called Edison effect originally discovered
 H. Brooks / The relationship between science and technology 483

by Thomas A. Edison, but not pursued because much of the focus has been on curative technol-
he was too “preoccupied with matters of short-run ogy, anything which could improve the survival
utility”. To quote Asimov (1974, p.51, “The Edi- chances of the individual sick patient, compared
son effect, then, which the practical Edison with the statistical morbidity or mortality of popu-
shrugged off as interesting but useless, turned out lations, has been accorded highest priority, espe-
to have more astonishing results than any of his cially in the US. This has led to industries that
practical devices.” Indeed, many important ob- are disproportionately R&D intensive with a cor-
servations made incidentally during the course of responding emphasis on the science base in re-
major industrial or military technological devel- lated fields in academia and government labora-
opments may, because of the highly specialized tories. The same motivation has seemed to per-
context in which they are made, or because of vade the environmental field in respect to regula-
military or proprietary confidentiality, never get tion. However, this has not so far led to a corre-
into the general scientific literature, nor get prop- sponding R&D intensity, although there are some
erly documented so that they can be understood signs that this might be about to change (cf.
and appreciated either by other industrial re- Wald, 1993).
searchers or basic scientists interested in and
capable of pursuing their broader scientific signif- 3.2. Instrumentation and measurement techniques
icance (Alit et al., 1992, pp. 390-393).
In addition, of course, technological develop- Technology has played an enormous role in
ment indirectly stimulates basic research by at- making it possible to measure natural phenomena
tracting new financial resources into research ar- that were not previously accessible to research.
eas shown to have practical implications. This has One of the most dramatic recent examples of
happened repeatedly for radical inventions such this, of course, has been the role of space tech-
as the transistor, the laser, the computer, and nology in making a much greater range of the
nuclear fission power, where much of the science, electromagnetic spectrum accessible to measure-
even the most basic science, has followed rather ment than was possible when observation was
than preceded the original conception of an in- limited by the lack of transparency of the atmo-
vention. Indeed, the more radical the invention, sphere to X-rays, y rays, the far ultraviolet, and
the more likely it is to stimulate wholly new areas some parts of the infra-red. The sciences of cos-
of basic research or to rejuvenate older areas of mology and astrophysics have been revolutionized
research that were losing the interest of the most by the opening up of these new windows. In this
innovative scientists, e.g. classical optics and particular case, the new capability would proba-
atomic and molecular spectroscopy in the case of bly never have been created for scientific pur-
the laser, and basic metallurgy and crystal growth poses alone, but basic scientists were quick to
and crystal physics in the case of the transistor, as seize the new opportunities that were made avail-
well as the burgeoning of the new science of able by the space program.
“imperfections in almost perfect crystals” (Shock- In other cases, such as nuclear and elementary
ley et al., 1952; Bardeen, 1957). particle physics, much of the new technology has
There are two areas in which the search for been developed and engineered by the physicists
radical technological breakthroughs has been un- themselves. In perhaps the majority of cases, lab-
usually important; defense and health care. In oratory instruments have been originally devel-
each case, the value of improved performance oped by research scientists, but were later com-
almost regardless of its cost, not only in R&D. mercialized to be sold to a much broader re-
but also in ultimate societal performance, has search community. This latter process has been
played a fundamental role in stimulating not only very important for the rapid diffusion of new
technological development but also related fields experimental techniques and is probably a prime
of basic research. In the defense case, it has been mechanism for knowledge transfer between dif-
generally believed that even a small technological ferent disciplines, which in turn has greatly accel-
edge in the performance of individual weapons erated the progress of science overall. The pat-
systems could make all the difference between tern of interaction has been described in the
victory and defeat. In the biomedical case, where following terms for the case of the transfer of
484 I% Brooks / The relationship between science and technology
physics techniques to chemistry, but this pattern
is similar for transfer between any two disci-
plines, or, indeed, for diffusion among re-
searchers and subfields of a single discipline:
When the method is first discovered, a
few chemists, usually physical chemists, be-
come aware of chemical applications of the
method, construct their own homemade de-
vices, and demonstrate the utility of the new
tool. At some point commercial models of
the device are put on the market. These are
sometimes superior, sometimes inferior, to
the homemade machines in terms of their
ultimate capabilities to provide information.
However, the commercial instruments gen-
erally are easier to use and far more reli-
able than the homemade devices. The im-
pact of the commercial instruments
rapidly felt, is often very far-reaching, and
sometimes virtually revolutionizes the field.
Chemists with the new instruments need
not be concerned with developing the prin-
ciple of the device; they are free to devote
their efforts to extracting the useful chemi-
cal information that application of the de-
vice affords. This pattern characterizes the
development of optical, infrared and radio
frequency spectroscopy, mass spectrometry,
and X-ray crystallography. (Physics Survey
Committee, 1972a, p. 1015)
The effectiveness of this pattern depends on
close collaboration between vendors and scien-
tific users, and between engineers and scientists,
so that instruments and laboratory techniques
often become a mechanism by which some of the
pathologies of overspecialization in science are
moderated. The existence of an entrepreneurial
scientific instrument industry, closely coupled to
research scientist users, and enjoying the
economies of scale derived from one of the largest
markets of research activity in the world, has
been an important, and perhaps underestimated,
source of competitive advantage for the US re-
search system in basic science - an advantage
which was achieved earlier than in other coun-
tries because of the enormous government invest-
ments in defense-related R&D in the US com-
pared with other countries during the first two
decades following World War II. This instrument
industry, combined with other research supply
industries, comprised an unexcelled infrastruc-
ture, which may have had much broader general
utility for commercially oriented innovation than
the specific ‘spin-offs’ from highly specialized de-
fense R&D.
4. The positive externalities of innovative activity
The interest of economists in the economics of
research, particularly in the economic rationale
for both public and private investment in basic
research, is of relatively recent vintage. As pointed
out by Pavitt, economists have made an impor-
tant contribution by being the first to articulate
the ‘public good’ aspects of science and conse-
quently its eligibility for public or collective sup-
is port. However, as Pavitt also emphasizes, there
has been considerable confusion in the resulting
public discussion “between the reasonable as-
sumption that the results of science are a public
good . . , and the unreasonable assumption that
they are a free good” (Pavitt, 1991). The latter
interpretation has led to a rapidly growing view
that the generous public support for academic
research in the US has been, in effect, a subsidy
to our overseas competitors who have beat us out
in the marketplace by taking advantage of the
openness of our academic system to commercially
exploit research rest&s for which they have not
paid. The ‘pure public good’ assumption about
basic science neglects the fact that a substantial
research capability (and indeed actual ongoing
participation in research) is required to “under-
stand, interpret and appraise knowledge that has
been placed on the shelf - whether basic or
applied. . . The most effective way to remain
plugged into the scientific network is to be a
participant in the research process” (Pavitt, 1991)
Similarly, Dasgupta has also argued that training
through basic research enables more informed
choices and recruitment into the technological
research community. These arguments are cer-
tainly valid, but have proved very difficuit to
quantify.
It is notaule that almost all the countries that
have successful diffusion-oriented technology
policies (Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Japan,
Korea) that emphasize the rapid adoption and
diffusion of new technology, especially produc-
 H. Brooks / The relationship between science and technology 485

tion technology, as a national strategic objective cognitive psychology. Furthermore, there is

(Ergas, 1987), have among the highest ratios of extensive, often polemical as well as careful
R&D expenditure (public and private) to GDP medical documentation that testifies to the
among industrialized countries, as well as excep- rampant nonapplication or misapplication
tionally high levels of educational performance at of medical knowledge to everyday clinical
all levels. It seems reasonable to assume that a situations. . . The difficulties follow from the
significant fraction of R&D support in these limitations of unaided human minds in ap-
countries is for the purpose of enhancing aware- plying a very large body of knowledge, when
ness of what is going on in the world of S&T any portion of that knowledge base is inter-
rather than necessarily for generating new knowl- mittently and unpredictably relevant in day-
edge for the first time “in the universe” (to use to-day work. Specialization represents an
Nelson’s phrase) (Nelson and Rosenberg, 1993). attempt to deal with the problem. Unfortu-
In principle, one could argue that there is a nately it runs afoul of the persistent failure
trade-off between investment in R&D and in- of real problems to fit within the socially
vestment in information infrastructure for the and historically defined boundaries of medi-
efficient distribution of R&D results to their cal specialties. Medical knowledge, viewed
potential users. The main reason that the perfor- as a whole, is as highly interconnected as
mance of R&D is necessary for the absorption the minds and bodies of its subjects. Tracing
and appraisal of technology is that scientists en- these interconnections wherever they lead
gaged in research actually spend a large fraction in response to a real problem, as if follow-
of their time and effort communicating with oth- ing a map, is what medical problem solving
ers in order to be able to take the fullest advan- requires. (Weed, 1991, p. xvi)
tage of the progress made by others in planning
their own research strategy. Thus their excellence Much the same could be said about the huge
as a conduit for research knowledge to the orga- body of engineering and scientific knowledge as
nizations in which they work tends to be an related to the problems presented in the process
automatic by-product of their active engagement of technological innovation and new product de-
in research. But still this is no guarantee that velopment in industry. In addition, of course, a
their information retrieval habits are optimal from significant proportion of the knowledge required
the point of view of fellow engineers or scientists in technological innovation is ‘tacit’ or ‘em-
engaged in technological development or new bedded’ in people, not codified or written down,
product design. Thus these scientists are not au- and not communicable (at least at present) except
tomatically matched in their information retrieval by people working side-by-side. In the innovation
behavior to the information needs of the ‘down- process the importance of personal contact and
stream’ phases of the innovation process. geographical proximity between the generators
Weed (1991) has studied this problem from the and users of knowledge is supported by the ob-
standpoint of medical practitioners delivering servation from patenting studies that the aca-
health care appropriate to unique individual pa- demic research cited in industrial patents origi-
tients, a process he describes as “problem-knowl- nates to a surprising extent in universities in
edge coupling”. The challenge is how to map the relatively close geographical proximity to the
vast body of collective knowledge embodied in patenting industrial laboratory (Pavitt, 1991, p.
the biomedical literature with the knowledge 116; Jaffe et al., 1993, pp. 577-598). But there is
needed to deal with the specific needs implicit in ample other literature citing the importance of
the symptoms and medical history of the individ- embedded knowledge. The question suggested by
ual patient. According to Weed: Weed’s work is whether dependence on personal
contact, tacit knowledge, and ‘serendipity’ to in-
Our confidence in our innate human ca- form the application of knowledge could be grad-
pacity to make judgments as sound and ually reduced by more systematic exploitation of
reliable as our collective knowledge theoret- some of the tools of modern information technol-
ically allows is simply unsupported by over ogy, so that performance of research in organiza-
30 years of intensive research in clinical and tions might become less essential to their capacity
486 H. Brooks / The relationship between science and technology

for the absorption of technology. I am rather Kline, S.J. and N. Rosenberg, 1986, An overview of innova-
tion, in R. Landau and N. Rosenberg (editors), The Posi-
inclined to doubt it because the growing ‘scienti-
tive Sum Strategy: Harnessing Technology for Economic
zation’ of technology is likely to offset greater Growth (National Academy Press, Washington, DC), pp.
efficiency in formal systems of knowledge transfer 275-306.
from science to technology. Nevertheless, more Asimov, I., 1974, Of what use?, in E.H. Kone and H.J. Jordan
effective use of modern information tools, and (editors), The Greatest Adventure: Basic Research that
Shapes Our Lives (The Rockefeller University Press, New
better documentation for future use of organiza-
York).
tional experience in the product development Materials Advisory Board, National Research Council, 1966,
process could still be of significant value in its Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Principles of Re-
own right. search-Engineering Interaction, ARPA, MAB-222-M
(National Academy of Sciences-National Research Coun-
cil, Washington, DC).
Nelson, R.R., 1992, National innovation systems: A retrospec-
tive on a study, Industrial and Corporate Change 1, (21:
5. References
347-374.
Nelson, R.R. and N. Rosenberg, 1993, Technical innovation
Alit, J.A. et al., 1992, Beyond Spinoff, Military and Commer- and national systems, in R.R. Nelson (editor), National
cial Technologies in a Changing World (Hatvard Business Innovation Systems: A Comparative Analysis (Oxford Uni-
School Press, Boston, MA), April. versity Press, New York/Oxford), pp. 1-21.
Bardeen, J., 1957, Crystal imperfections, in J.E. Goldman Nelson, R.R. and R. Levin, 1986, The influence of university
(editor), The Science and Engineering of Materials (Wiley, science research and technical societies on industrial R&D
New York), Chapter 4, pp. 82-102. and technical advance, Policy Discussion Paper Series
Brooks, H., 1973, The state of the art: technology assessment Number 3, Research Program on Technology Change (Yale
as a process, International Social Science Journal 22, (31 University, New Haven, CT).
(UNESCO, Paris). Pavitt, K., 1991, What makes basic research economically
Brooks, H., 1985, Returns on federal investments: the physical useful?, Research Policy 20: 109-119.
sciences, Workshop on The Federal Role In Research and Physics Survey Committee, 1972a, Physics in Perspective, Vol.
Development (NAS/NAE/IOM), November (available II, Part A (National Academy of Sciences, Washington,
from the NRC Information Office). DC), pp. 490-492.
Brooks, H., 1991, Innovation and competitiveness, in The Physics Survey Committee, 1972b, Physics in Perspective, Vol-
Technology Race: Can the U.S. Win? The J. Herbert ume II, Part B, The Interfaces (National Academy of
Hollomon Memorial Symposium, MIT, April (presented Sciences, Washington, DC), pp. 796-798.
by The Technology and Culture Seminar and the Center Rosenberg, N., 1990, Why do firms do basic research (with
for Technology Policy and Industrial Development). their own money)?, Research Policy 19: 165-174.
Brooks, H., 1993, Regions don’t live on R&D alone, in Rosenberg, N., 1991, Critical issues in science policy research,
Connection: New England’s Journal of Higher Education Science and Public Policy 18 (6): 335-346.
and Economic Development, Vol. 8, No. 1, Spring/ Shockley, W.E., J.H. Hollomon, R. Maurer and F. Seitz
Summer. (editors), 1952, Imperfections in Nearly Perfect Crystals
Charpie, Robert A. (Chair), 1967, Panel on Invention and (Wiley, New York.
Innovation, Technological Innovation: Its Environment and Suits, C.G. and A.M. Bueche, 1967, Cases of research and
Management, Department of Commerce, January, Chart development in a diversified company, in Applied Science
7, p. 9. and Technological Progress, House Committee on Science
Frederickson, Donald S., 1993, Biomedical science and the and Astronautics, 90th Congress, 1st Session (June), pp.
culture warp, in: W.N. Kelley, M. Osterweis and E. Rubin 297-346.
(editors), Emerging Policies for Biomedical Research, United States Office of Scientific Research and Development,
Health Policy Annual III (Association of Academic Health 1945, Science: The Endless Frontier, A Report to the
Centers, Washington, DC). President on a Program for Postwar Scientific Research
Ergas, H., 1987, Does technology policy matter?, in B.R. (U.S. National Science Foundation, Washington, DC) (re-
Guile and H. Brooks (editors), Technology and Global print, 1960).
Industry: Companies and Nations in the World Economy Wald, M.L.,1993, Government dream car, Washington and
(National Academy Press, Washington, DC), pp. 191-245. Detroit pool resources to devise new approach to technol-
Jaffe, A.B., M. Trajtenberg and R. Henderson, 1993, Geo- ogy, The New York Times, 30 September, pp. Al, D7.
graphic localization of knowledge spillover as evidenced by Weed, L.L., 1991, Knowledge Coupling: New Premises and
patent citations, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 108, New Tools for Medical Care and Education (Springer,
(31: 577-598. New York).
Science, Society, and Technology: Three Cultures and Multiple Visions
Author(s): Sumit Bhaduri
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Journal of Science Education and Technology, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Sep., 2003), pp. 303-308
Published by: Springer
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Journal of Science Education and Technology, Vol. 12, No. 3, September 2003 (© 2003)

Science, Society, and Technology- Three Cultures

and Multiple Visions1

Suniit Bhaduri2

The article reviews the strikingly divergent viewpoints of intellectuals- scientists and
non-scientists - about "Science" and "Technology." It shows that while scientists implicitly
accept the difference between "Science" and "Technology,"to non-scientists that difference
is irrelevant. The most important differences between "Science" and "Technology" that lie
in their relative scales, outputs and accuracy of predictions are highlighted. The complexity
of and difficulty in trying to quantify the contribution of science and technology to economic
growth are discussed. Views of science and technology that include their societal perceptions
are recommended.
KEY WORDS: science;technology;society;economics;two cultures;sciencewars;sciencestudy.

BACKGROUND scope andaim,its genealogicalconnectionsto Snow's

C. P. Snow's Two Cultures(Snow, 1965a), writ-
ten almost40 years ago, has been widelyreferredto,
praised,attacked,and commentedupon by scientists
and nonscientists belonging almost exclusively to
the academicprofession.In this book Snow laments
the indifferenceand ignoranceof nonscientistswell
versed in the humanities,about the intellectualand
aestheticcontentof modernscience.Less noticedbut
more importantin the context of the present pa-
per, Snow also points out the increasingimportance
of appliedscience or technology.He recommendsa
restructuringof curriculathat proactivelytakes into
accountthese trends.
The continuingrelevanceof Snow'swork is ev-
ident from two randomlychosen recent examples.
According to the blurb on the back cover of John
Brockman'sThe ThirdCulture(1995), the magazine
New Scientistdescribed it as "The most important
book on how scienceis done since TheDouble Helix."
While The ThirdCultureis considerablydifferentin
1Basedon a talk
givenby the authorat the IndianAssociationfor
the Cultivationof Science (IACSc)on the Occasionof its 125th
Anniversary.
2RelianceIndustriesLimited,SwastikMill Compound,Chembur,
Mumbai400071,India;e-mail:sumit_bhaduri@ril.com.
originalworkareclearlyacknowledgedby the author
(Brockman,1995). The second example is an attack
on Snow'stwo culturethesis reportedin the journal
Nature:in 1997DavidEdgertona historianof science
described Snow's lamentationsas "declinistwhing-
ing" (Edgerton,1997).
From the time of publicationof Snow's Two
Culturesin 1965, both academia and science have
changed profoundly,in keeping with dramaticeco-
nomic and sociopoliticalchanges.One certainlycan
no longer complainabout the fact that nonscientists
have no opinion on mattersscientific,since subjects
such as historyof science,philosophyof science,and
science study are now established and respectable
specializationsin highereducation,andbookssinging
the virtues,ills, or wondersof science often become
best-sellers. The media the world over routinely
covers one "path breaking scientific discovery"
or another and many social groups or individuals
forcefullyexpress their reservationson science and
emerging technologies in different forums. Indeed
while the attention to technology,both criticaland
supportive,is understandableand welcome, science
for its own sake could perhapsdo with less hype and
more long-termsober attention.
As its title suggests,this paper'sintentionis to
show how scientistsand nonscientistshave different

303
1059-0145/03/0900-0303/0 © 2003 Plenum Publishing Corporation
304
visions of science and technology.More important,
the paper also aims to show that the dichotomy
between science and the humanitiesis no longer a
matterof two cultures;rather,the third culture,the
cultureof technology,dominatesour intellectuallife
and societal concerns.It is important,especiallyfor
practicingscientists,to recognizethatto the restof so-
ciety the distinctionbetween science and technology
has become increasinglyblurred.To a nonacademic
and a non-scientistthe only science that exists out-
side everydaytechnologicalwonders,if it exists at all,
dealswiththe esotericconceptsof certaintypesof sci-
ence. The runawaysuccessof books such as The Tao
of Physics,writtenin the mid-seventies,and A Brief
Historyof Time,writtenin the late eighties,illustrates
this best.
WHATDO SCIENTISTSAND
TECHNOLOGISTSDO?
However,betweenthe extremesof the greatsto-
ries of sciencewiththeirfairy-tale-likecharmandthe
marvelsof the latest technology,there lies a whole
rangeof modestactivitiesdirectedtowardincremen-
tal improvementsin understandingand knowledge.
The improvementsattempt to improve our under-
standingof a givenphenomenonor class of phenom-
ena, or of the quality of a technologicalproductor
process.It is this activity,carriedout by millions of
obscurescientistsand technologists,which gives sci-
ence its socialcharacter.
The basic characteristicof science that has re-
mainedunchangedover the centuriesis that it starts
with observations that can be made by anybody,
anywhere, under well-defined conditions. It then
comes up with a story or a mathematicalformu-
lation that connects the observations and predicts
the outcome of deliberateactions,again underwell-
defined conditions.In philosophicaldiscussionsthe
"observations"as well as the "outcome of deliber-
ate actions"are commonlyreferredto as "empirical
evidence."Similarly,the "story"or the "mathemat-
ical formulation"is referred to as an "explana-
tory model" or simply a "theory" that connects
the "empiricalevidence"within a cause and effect
framework.
It has been pointed out, again by philosophers,
that the story part of science may well be just that,
i.e. a story,and need not necessarilyreflect a higher
or more absolute level of "truth"than a so-called
non-scientificexplanation.To quote WillardQuinn,
Bhaduri
a philosopher:
I ... believe in physical objects and not in Homer's
gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe
otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing
the physical objects and the gods differ only in de-
gree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our
conception only as cultural posits. (A Logical Point
of View, p. 44, as quoted by Ayer, 1984)
A large part of science however does not stop
at taking only these two steps, i.e., that of mak-
ing observationsand providinga theory to explain
the observations.It takes a very important third
step that makes all the difference to the everyday
lives of academics,nonacademics,philosophers,and
nonphilosophersalike:it predictsthe outcome of de-
liberateactionsunderspecifiedconditions,andit does
so withreasonableaccuracymostof the time.In other
words, science enables us not just to interpret the
world but provides us with the potential to change
it in a predictablemanner.Thisstep, when combined
with many others,transformsthe potentialabilityof
science to change the world into an actual reality,
and this is how scientific ideas are converted into
technology.
One may debate whetherthe purposeof philos-
ophy is to interpretthe world or to change it. The
fact is that a very substantialpart of science does get
convertedto technologyand changesthe world in a
drasticandirreversiblemanner,while the predictions
some times are incompleteor off the mark.We will
come backto these shortcomingsof technologylater.
For the time being, we concentrateonly on science
and note that to a number of renowned scientists,
curiosity-drivenscience is a uniquelysatisfyingpro-
fession. Most academicscientists,whetherphysicists
or biologists,would argue that only curiosity-driven
researchcould provide them with the key to under-
standreality,and that a desireto changerealityis not
somethingthat drivesthem to do science.
SCIENCE- A VIEW FROMWITHIN
To a theoretical physicist or a mathematician,
derivationof a mathematicalformulawith or with-
out a physicalpicturemay be of utmost importance.
When they view the overall goal of what they do to
understandnature,technologyexpectedlyis nowhere
on the horizon.Even physicalrealitymay be of sec-
ondary importance.According to Paul Dirac, "The
mainobjectof physicalsystemsis not the provisionof
picturesbut the formulationof laws governingphe-
nomena"(Gardner,1983).
Science,Society,and Technology- Three Culturesand MultipleVisions
The discoverer of the "CatastropheTheory,"
Rene Thorn,makesa little more allowancefor physi-
cal realitywhen he says thatthe "humanmindwould
not be fully satisfied with a universe in which all
phenomenawere governedby a mathematicalpro-
cess thatwascoherentbut totallyabstract"(Gardner,
1983).S. Chandrasekhar, an astrophysicist,highlights
the importanceof aestheticmotivationin science.Ac-
cording to Chandrasekhar,while "a scientist seeks
continuallyto extendthe domainof validityof certain
basic concepts,"he does so because "inthe arts as in
the sciencesthe questis afterthe sameelusivequality:
beauty"(Chandrasekhar,1991).To Ilya Prigogine,a
physicalchemist,"scienceis a riskygame,but it seems
to havediscoveredquestionsto whichnatureprovides
consistentanswers"and there is a "subtleformof re-
alityinvolvingboth time andeternity"(Prigogineand
Stengers,1985).
Naturalselectionandthe theoryof evolutionoc-
cupya centralplacein the worldof biologicalsciences,
a worldverydifferentfromthatof physics.In hisbook
Chanceand Necessity,biochemistJacquesMonodin-
dicateshis preferencefor a naturethathas something
like a project,and for naturalselection not being to-
tallyarbitrary. He says,"Allthe functionaladaptations
of livingbeings. . . fulfillparticularprojectswhichmay
be seen as so many aspects or fragmentsof unique
primaryproject,which is the preservationand mul-
tiplication of the species" (Monod, 1974). On the
other hand, to RichardDawkins,another biologist,
"Naturalselection,the blind,unconscious,automatic
process. . . hasno purposein mind.It hasno vision,no
foresight,no sightat all.If it canbe saidto playthe role
of watchmakerin nature,it is the blindwatchmaker"
(Dawkins,1991).
As all of the above quotes indicate,at one level
these renownedscientistsshare a common vision of
science. To them the formulationof basic laws and
conceptsto understandand explainthe universeand
its complexitiesis what science is all about. They do
not talk about technologyor changingthe worldbe-
cause they distinguishscience from its social mani-
festation, i.e. technology.To many non-scientistin-
tellectuals,this distinctioneither does not exist or is
irrelevant.
SCIENCE- A VIEW FROMWITHOUT
In his muchtalked about book TheEnd of His-
toryand TheLastMan,FrancisFukuyamapropounds
the theory that history is directionaland universal.
305
Theendpointof universalhistoryis liberaldemocracy
based on free market economy.Accordingto him,
one of the main driversof directionaland universal
historyis what he calls "thelogic of modernscience"
(Fukuyama,1993).Thus,to quote him,
The first way in which modern natural science pro-
duces historical change that is both directional and
universal is through military competition . . . The sec-
ond way in which modern natural science can be
expected to produce directional historical change is
through the progressive conquest of nature for the
purpose of satisfying human desires, a project that we
otherwise call economic development. (Fukuyama,
1993)
In the contextof the presentdiscussion,the use of the
words "modernnaturalscience"ratherthan "tech-
nology"is to be noted.
In anotherbook, Understanding the Present,au-
thor Bryan Appleyardmakes a strong case for the
total incompatibilityof science with religionand for
the failureof science to provideany spiritualsignifi-
cance or solace to humanexistence.He startshis first
chapterwith a quotationfromStephenHawking:"If
we find the answerto that, it would be the ultimate
triumphof humanreason- for then we shouldknow
the mind of God" (Appleyard,1992). He follows it
up with another quote from Nehru, the first Prime
Ministerof independentIndia:"Thefuturebelongs
to science and those who make friendswith science"
(Appleyard,1992).
It is reasonable to assume that by "science"
Nehru meant the scientifictemperament,as well as
the power of technology.In the presentcontextwhat
is interestingis the facilitywithwhichtechnology,the
scientific temperament,and the popular version of
hardscienceof a particularkindare combinedto cre-
ate a monolithicimage of science that could be at-
tacked. Appleyardis well aware that science is not
technologybut his contentionis that scientistshave
been claimingto have specialinsightsinto humanex-
istence on the strengthof technology.In his words,
"Ourvague awarenessof and gratitudefor the ease
and ubiquityof technologypreparesus to acceptthe
larger claim of science that it alone can lead us to
God" (Appleyard,1992).
Theclaimsthatscienceprovidesobjectiveknowl-
edge whichis superiorto other formsof knowledge,
and that the accepted theories and explanationsof
science have little to do with economics,politics,and
historyof the society in whichscientistslive, have in-
creasinglycome underattack.Indeed,in recentyears
the debate between some scientists and those who
306
attacktheseclaimshasbeen so intensethatit hasbeen
referredto as the "sciencewars."PaulFeyerband,the
celebrityscience baiter and philosopherof science,
probablybest illustratesthis division.
Accordingto Feyerband,science is
Conspicuous, noisy and impudent but it is inher-
ently superior only for those who have already de-
cided in favor of a certain ideology . . . One must
read them like fairy tales which have lots of inter-
esting things to say but which also contain wicked
lies."
He believes that scientists"havemore money,more
authority,more sex appealthan they deserve It is
time to cut them down to size, and to give them a
moremodestpositionin society"(AgainstMethod,as
quotedby Schick,1997).
Snow says something similar but less extreme
about academicscientists:
It is only fair to say that most pure scientists have
themselves been devastatingly ignorant of produc-
tive industry . . . Their instinct- perhaps sharpened
in this country by the passion to find a new snob-
bism wherever possible, and to invent one if it does
not exist- was to take it for granted that applied sci-
ence was an occupation of second rate minds. (Snow,
1965b)
What Snow calls "snobbism"in the UK of the late
fifties,is probablywhatFeyerbandcalls "sex appeal"
in the United Statesin the mid-seventies.
A debate on these and other similarpronounce-
ments would probablycreate a lot of heat and a few
universityjobs for the new disciplinecalled "science
study."It may also have some effect on society'sper-
ceptionof academicscience.However,it would have
little or no effect either on the way science is done
or on the scientificfindingsthat eventuallybecome
technologies through governmental or industrial
support.
As emphasizedearlier,it is the practicaleffec-
tiveness of science in makingan amazingdifference
to the materialconditionsof humanexistencethathas
earnedit the respectof andacceptabilityfromsociety.
C. P. Snow did point this out in his book. He made a
distinctionbetweenthe industrialrevolutionandwhat
he called the scientificrevolution,and said that "an-
otherchange,closelyrelatedto the first,but far more
deeply scientific,far quickerand probablyfar more
prodigiousin its result.. . comes fromthe application
of real scienceto industry"(Snow,1965c).
Bhaduri
SCIENCEAND TECHNOLOGY:HOW
DIFFERENTARE THEY?
However, though closely related, science and
technologyare not identical.Indeedthe gulfbetween
the two could be as wide as that between readingthe
recipe for an exotic dish in a magazineand havingit
madeby a gourmetcook, or betweencomprehending
the grammaticalrequirementsof the Indianclassical
musicraga Malkaunsin the abstractand listeningto
an expertplayingor singingit. The completeidentifi-
cationof sciencewith technologydoes no good to sci-
ence, or to technology,or to the rest of society.What,
then, are the basic differentiatingfeatures between
the two?
The firstdifferentiatingfeaturebetween a given
scientificfindingandthe technologythatuses it is that
of scale.A scientificexperimentcarriedout in the lab-
oratoryto prove the validityof an idea is carriedout
on a smallscale,typicallyby a few individualsor a rela-
tivelysmallgroupof people.To translatethe idea into
technology,many more people, especiallyengineers,
have to be involvedand the scale of operation,what-
ever the measuringscale may be, often increasesby a
millionor even a billiontimes.Thisis truefor all prod-
uctsandservicesthatmoderntechnologyprovides,be
they drugs,man-madematerialssuch as plasticor ce-
ment, or fiber optic networks that run all over the
globe.
The second differentiatingfeature between sci-
ence and technologyis in the nature of their output
and their impact on the rest of society. The output
of scientificactivity basicallycomprisespapers and
patents.In most cases,the findingsof scientificactiv-
ity are reportedin publicationsand sometimes,when
suchfindingsaresupposedto havetechnocommercial
significance,patentsaretaken.Inrecenttimes,report-
ing scientificfindingsin the media has also become
common.However,the accuracyof such reportsand
the motivationbehind them are often questionable.
The results reported in scientific journals un-
dergo "peer review" and, apart from dissemination
of knowledge among fellow practitioners,serve the
functionof providinga mechanismfor the firstclaim
of a discovery.It has been said that regardlessof the
qualityof the science content, one could alwaysfind
a journalthat would publisha given paper.Similarly,
there are patents that are neither novel nor useful.
However,these are aberrationsand one of the basic
andmostimportantcharacteristicsof scientificknowl-
edge and of a scientificpaper or patent is its public
Science, Society, and Technology- Three Cultures and Multiple Visions
character.To be of any significance,the observations
reportedin themmustbe reproducibleandnovel.The
theory that connects them must survivea period of
criticalstudy.
The output of technologyis not just public,it is
public in an emphatic and ever-expandingmanner.
The fruitsof technologyarethusconstantlysubjected
to tests not just by the developersof the technology,
but also by the usersof that technology.To surviveor
to find increasinguse, the productsof a given tech-
nology mustwithstandthe pressuresof a competitive
market.Theymustmeet the expectationsof the users
and pass the test of publicacceptance.
The third differentiatingfeature between sci-
ence and technologylies in their relativeabilitiesto
predictthe outcomeof actionsundera definedset of
conditions.The differenceslie in the level of accuracy
of the predictions.Scientificexperiments,as noted,
are usuallycarriedout undera relativelynarrowset
of conditions. Predictions under such well-defined
conditionscanbe madewithhighaccuracy.However,
when science becomes technology,new conditions,
including social ones, are introduced. These new
elements occasionallycause unanticipatedhazards,
or have undesirable environmentalor ecological
impacts.The satisfactionof a materialneed through
a given technology often generates a problem, to
solve whichanothertechnologyis required.A simple
example is the use of catalyticconvertersin motor
carsto reducepollutiondue to exhaustgases.If there
were no cars runningon fossil fuels, we would not
requirecatalyticconverters!
SCIENCE,SOCIALSCIENCES,AND
TECHNOLOGY- WHERE IS THE MEETING
GROUND?
If the relationshipbetween science and technol-
ogy is complex,it is obviouslyfar more so when eco-
nomicgrowthis addedto thesetwo as a thirdvariable.
Althoughscientistsmayrefuseto take note of this in-
terrelationship,it is obvious that when the economy
does badlyso does basicsciencebutthe conversedoes
not necessarilyapply.An example of this interrela-
tionshipis the directionof sciencein the UK over the
last 25 yearsor so.
Sciencein Britainwas doingmoderatelyand the
economyvery badlywhen Mrs.Thatcherbecamethe
PrimeMinisterin 1979.In so far as scienceand scien-
tists went she made her intentionsquite clear when
she announcedthat the partywas over or words to
307
that effect. She wanted less of curiosity-drivensci-
ence, somethingat whichBritainhas been tradition-
ally good. A monetarypolicy broadlyrun along the
conservativelines prescribedby economist Milton
Friedman3becamethe hallmarkof Thatcherism.The
debateon the successandfailuresof suchaneconomic
policy is best left to professionaleconomists.British
science,however,was badly damagedand technolo-
gies thatvisiblyadd to the economiccompetitiveness
of a nationare still to emerge.
Although technologyis known to be an impor-
tantdriverof economicgrowth,a quantificationof its
impactis difficultif not impossible.In 1957economist
Robert Solow was the first to analyze the causes
of productivitygains and to break them down into
several categories (Solow, 1957). Apart from vari-
ous formsof capitalinvestmenttherewas a so-called
residualin his analysis,whichwasattributedto "tech-
nicalchange."
Subsequently, a new generation of analysts,
mainlyin the United States,hasmadepredictionsand
quantitativeinterpretationsof the impactof technol-
ogy on economy.However, the results are far from
being unequivocal.Thus,the estimatedcontribution
of computersin boosting recent productivityvaries
from80 to 12%.It has been pointedout thatthe high
estimate mayjust be the result of mistakinga short-
term upwardmovementin the businesscycle with a
long-termrisein productivity.Thepointis,economics
does not have as much predictivepower as some of
its practitionerswould like to believe.
Tosummarize,then,the hallmarkof science,hav-
ing the potentialto changethe worldin an accurately
predictablemanner,becomesfarless aswe movefrom
scienceto technologyandfromtechnologyto society.
The path from scientificdiscoveryto technologyin
mostcases is nonlinear.A technocommercially viable
technology always has a core science but it also re-
quires massive input from many other scientificand
non-scientificdisciplines.Since all the inputmay not
be availableat the sametime,the time takenfromthe
core scientificdiscoveryto its technologicalapplica-
tion is elastic. The indiscriminateuse of technology
with disregardto social, ecological,and carefultech-
nical analysiscan have disastrousconsequences.For
obvious reasons,these concernsare especiallyacute
in developingcountriesand it is these concernsthat
3Readers unfamiliar with Milton Friedman and "Monetarism"
may visit the Web site on the history of economic thought,
http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/home.htm.
308
gave rise to the conceptof appropriatetechnology.It
is these concernsagainthat are often glossed over in
the oversimplifiedmodelsfor economicdevelopment
in the ThirdWorld.
The motivationbehind, and the sources of sup-
portfor,scienceandtechnologyaredifferent.Science
maybe donewitha viewto applicationin a broadlyde-
finedareaor it couldbe purelycuriosity-driven. Tech-
the
nology,on otherhand, has cleargoalsand is always
driveneitherby strategicor economicconsiderations.
The sourcesof funds are either governmentsor pri-
vate industry,but their relative contributionsvary
from countryto country.While technologydevelop-
mentbecauseof its scale is alwaysexpensive,the cost
of mainstreamscientificresearchover the years has
also increased.This is because the techniquesof ex-
perimentalsciencehavebecomemoreexpensive,and
alsobecausethe quantityof scientificoutput,although
not necessarilythe quality,usuallygoes up if morere-
sourcesare committed.
This financialconcernputs the pressureon the
scientistto look for funds.Getting substantialfunds
for sciencewith promisesof deliveringwinningtech-
nologiesseems to be a commonfeatureof scienceto-
daythe worldover.Big scienceis now a statussymbol
withinthe scientificcommunity.However, there are
several examplesfrom all branchesof science, both
the traditionaland the currentfashionableones, to
show that real breakthroughcomes from the fringes
and not from mainstream,heavily funded research
areas.
In conclusion,intellectualsusually have some-
thing to say about each other's specializationand
quite often it is not complimentary.Economics has
been called a "dismalscience,"while sociology has
been describedas nothing else but a painful elabo-
ration of the obvious.When theories of science are
describedmore as "social constructs"than "objec-
tive truths"scientists should not take it too much
to heart. The basic difference between social sci-
ence and science is that for the former,experiments
Bhaduri
cannot be performedin the laboratories.Although
historicalevidence may be put forward to support
or reject a given theory,such evidence often is not
conclusive. But then it has also been pointed out
that "Science does not answer all good questions.
Neither does philosophy"(Dennett 1991). This lim-
itation, in fact, is applicableto our entire system of
organizedknowledge.The social acceptabilityof sci-
ence mainly and ultimatelydepends on the kind of
technologyit provides.The futureof mankindis inex-
orablylinked to the unknowntrajectoriesof current
and future technologies.A successfulnavigationof
thisunknownrequiresthe predictiveabilityof science
temperedwith reasonabledoubts and wisdom,and a
largepartof both mustcome from other branchesof
knowledge.
REFERENCES
Appleyard, B. (1992). Understanding the Present, Pan Books,
London, pp. 1-4.
Ayer, A. J. (1984). Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Vintage
Books, New York, p. 252.
Brockman, J. (1995). The Third Culture, Simon and Schuster,
New York.
Chandrasekhar, S. (1991). Truth and Beauty ,Penguin Books,
New Delhi, India, pp. 4, 52.
Dawkins, R. (1991). The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin Books,
New Delhi, India, p. 5.
Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness Explained, Little, Brown &
Company, Boston, p. 22.
Edgerton, D. (1997). Nature 389: 221.
Fukuyama, F. (1993). The End of History and the Last Man, Avon
Books, New York, pp. xv, 73, 76.
Gardner, M. (1983). Science: Good, Bad and Bogus, Avon Books,
New York, p. 373.
Monod, J. (1974). Chance and Necessity, Fontana Books, London,
p. 24.
Prigogine, I., and Stengers, I. (1985). Order Out of Chaos [preface],
Fontana Paperbacks, London, p. 5.
Schick, T., Jr. (1997). Skeptical Inquirer, March/April: 37.
Snow, C. P. (1965a). Two Cultures, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, UK.
Snow, C. P. (1965b). Two Cultures, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, UK, pp. 31-32.
Snow, C P. (1965c). Two Cultures, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, UK, p. 29.
Solow, R. M. (1957). Review of Economics and Statistics, 39, 312.
Mind Association

Against Method. by P. K. Feyerabend

Review by: Rom Harre
Mind, New Series, Vol. 86, No. 342 (Apr., 1977), pp. 294-298
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2253728 .
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294 BOOK REVIEWS

freedomand rationalitycan combine in a will determinedby-the moral

law. Scott-Taggarttries to meet Walsh's challenge in a learned and
instructivepaper. He believes he can show thatit is rationalto be moral
provided that we prise offrationalityfrom consistency.The immoral
person is not inconsistentbut ratherfails to accept principlesthere is
good reason to accept. Any person,who is not mentallysick, must be
preparedto abstractfromhis personal circumstancesand thus concede
'a point of leverageforchargesof inconsistency'.
Edgley in his stimulatingpaper denies that the traditionalcontrast
between violence and reason entitlesone to conclude that violence is
contraryto reason. Liberal intellectuals,in his view, have been mes-
merized both by a purely theoreticalconception of reason and by a
technologicalconceptionof practicalreason, and have thus mistakenly
supposed that it is always irrationalto use violence. Violence, Edgley
maintains,is not necessarilycontraryto reason, althoughthe fact that
somethingis an act of violence is a reason, althoughnot necessarilya
conclusiveone, against doing it. Edgley's thesis merelyremovesa con-
ceptual prop from the 'vulgar system of morality'known as liberal
intellectualism,but his own somewhatviolentstyle causes some of his
criticsto miss the modest and unobjectionablethesis concealed in his
essay. Consequentlysome of the exchanges are regrettablypolemical
and only confusethe reader. Worthyof special attentionare Manser's
and Milligan's balanced comments.Milligan's liberalintellectualreplies
thatit is onlyreasonableto use violenceas a pis allerwhenthe methodof
reason cannot resolve a dispute or remove a clamantinjustice.Manser
spots the dangersof slidingfromone use of the word 'reason' to another.
In an importantpassage he points out thatto give someone a reason for
actionis not the same as reasoningwithhim,it is not whatwe ordinarily
mean by 'reason' in the contrastbetweenreason and violence. Edgley's
replyto this misses the point. Liberal intellectualswho have contrasted
reason with violence have been contrastingreasoning(i.e. arguing)with
violence. Edgley's remarks leave one very puzzled about how, for
example,workersby strikingmay 'give employersa reason foragreeing
to their demand'. It is afterall the employerswho decidewhetherthe
workers'strikewill be a reasonforthemto do somethingand, ifso, what.
Plainlysome painstakingand unhastyworkneeds to be done in thisarea
(see, for example, Milligan's Mind article, April I974, 'Reasons as
Explanations').
UNIVERSITY OF DUNDEE NEIL COOPER

AgainstMethod.By P. K. FEYERABEND.
London: N.L.B., I975. Pp. 339. /5.75.

This book is a weavingtogetherof threemain themes; (i) an attackon

'Puritanism' in thought,word and deed in favour of an ostensibly
libertarianideology; (ii) a critiqueof all kinds of logicisttheoriesin the
philosophyof science in favourof an interestingepistemologicaltheory
BOOK REVIEWS 295

of the transmutationof experience through conceptual innovation;

(iii) a critique of the neo-Popperiantheoryof science, the theorythat
it is researchprogrammesratherthan individualtheoriesthatare tested,
provisionallyaccepted,or discarded.
Though each themeis givenabout equal attentiontheyare developed
to verydifferent depths. Professor, Feyerabendgives only a perfunctory
discussionof the 'researchprogrammes'idea, dismissingit out of hand
forits dependenceon rationalcriteriaofchoice,again amongstcompeting
programmes,since in his view only a philosophyof science based upon
the idea of irrationalityis likelyto be adequate. But since neo-Popperian-
ism avoids the sins of logicism,he is preparedto give the idea qualified
approval.
The anarchistor 'Dada-ist' aspects of the book are based upon the
idea that thereis a parallel between political and epistemicanarchyso
that the abandonmentof any and all principlesof method, including
adherence to any basis of rationalityis treatednot only as being like
political anarchism,but as an integralpart of an anarchisticstandpoint
in which all orderis abandoned.
The political aspect of ProfessorFeyerabend's anarchy is not well
thoughtout. He fallsinto all the usual trapsset foranarchistswho hope
for a moral theme to emergefromchaos. Indeed, thoughthe rhetoric
is radicalmostreadersof a radicalpersuasionwill not findthe underlying
exploitativeideologyfarto seek. The asides about women,about friends
and colleagues, indeed about anyone who is likely to place trust in
someone else, exhibitan attitudeof contempt.The upshot is a plea for
the kind of freedomexemplifiedin the Spanish proverb, 'Viva yo'.
Real radical politicsis aimed at preservationof the dignityof everyone
through the eliminationof all causes of contempt; financial,racial,
sexual etc. ProfessorFeyerabendclaims a total licence for himselfand
othergreat souls such as Galileo, a licence which includes the rightto
make offensiveand wounding commentsabout people who are in no
position to defendthemselves.Indeed, ProfessorFeyerabendseems to
insiston the idea that success or power must go to those who have the
least respectfor consistencyand truthin the pursuit of some kind of
exploitativeparadise of pleasure.
But theposturingsand misplacedtrendinessofthepoliticalFeyerabend
are forgivenand forgottenin the lightof the brillianceof his historico-
philosophicalanalysis.
ProfessorFeyerabend's philosophyof science turns on two points:
(i) thatthe veryworld is changedin the radical transitionsfromone set
of concepts to another,and that the change is broughtabout by non-
rationalmeans, by which he means by means irreducibleto any com-
binationof moves in logic; (ii) thatthe whole of human cultureoughtto
be taken to be available as,a resourcefor the advancementof science,
in particularremoteculturesconsideredprimitiveor even bizarreought
not to be neglected.The firstpoint is farfromnovel. Whewell deriveda
similaridea fromhis developmentof Kantian philosophyof science and
both Hanson and Waismann developed the same thoughtout of their
contact with Wittgenstein.But it is ProfessorFeyerabend's detailed
 296 BOOK REVIEWS

examinationof the case of Galileo that liftshis book into a major con-
tributionto the philosophyof science for he followsthroughin detail
the process only sketchedby Whewell et al.
Feyerabend's critique of the logicist philosophyof science involves
three main points. (i) The idea that there is a neat schema beginning
with a theoryconcordantwith all the knownfactswhich is then tested
and overthrown by a discordantfact,is seriouslyunrealisticsincetheories
never agree with all the facts in their domain of putative explananda.
Accordingto Feyerabendthis is partlybecause of the limitationsof any
theoryand partlybecause the 'evidence' does not merelydescribesome
objective state of affairsbut also expresses some subjective,mythical
and long-forgotten views concerningthis stateof affairs.
The resolutionof this situationis seen by Feyerabendin a close look
at the idea of a 'natural interpretation'and the ways in which such
interpretations are overthrownby the workof scientificinnovators.The
argumentat thispointbecomeshistoricaland involvesa quite marvellous
analysis of 'what Galileo did'. Feyerabendchooses the example of the
towerargumentin which Galileo persuades his companionsby a series
of devices involvingboth logic and what Feyerabendcalls 'propaganda
and trickery',to get themto see the naturalnessof the fallingof a stone
parallel to a tower even when stone and tower are whirlingwith the
motion of the earth. This leads to a transitionfrom one natural in-
terpretation to another,the difference betweenthembeing a view about
the operativenessof motion. In the pre-Galileannaturalinterpretation,
all motionis effectivein alteringthe paths of fallingbodies, so thatif a
stone fallsverticallythe earthmust be at rest. AfterGalileo has taught
his companionsto see a new kind of naturalnesswhichinvolvesthe idea
that only relativemotion is causally operativeon observedtrajectories,
the fallingstone proves somethingquite different, namelythat thereis
no relativemotionbetweenthe top of the towerand the earth.Thus, as
Feyerabend shows, each interpretation involves a differentprediction
fromthe assumptionofthemotionofthe earth.But he goes on to propose
somethingmore controversialand less easy to accept, namely, that
Galileo is workingupon his companionsby somethingFeyerabendcalls
'the method of anamnesis',that is that it is necessaryfor Sagredo and
Simplicioto forgetthe steps by which they have been broughtto this
interpretation. He sees Galileo as some kind of Machiavellianforcinga
change of experienceupon his companionsby a series of steps which
leads them to abandon, imperceptibly,their previous point of view.
Feyerabend'sconclusionis, 'Speaking paradoxically,but not incorrectly,
one may say that Galileo inventsan experiencethat has metaphysical
ingredients.It is by means of such an experiencethat the transition
froma geostaticcosmologyto the pointofview of Copernicusand Kepler
is achieved.'
(2) But Feyerabendgoes further.It was not just that Galileo changed
the natural interpretation and consequentlythe facts. He also changed
the verysensationsupon which those factswere supposedlybased. This
Galileo achieves, accordingto ProfessorFeyerabend,by his successful
promulgationof the idea that the telescope reveals reality and this
BOOK REVIEWS 297
despite the factthat the transitionfromthe revelationsof the telescope
on earthto the heavenswere highlydubious. In fact,those scholarswho
refusedto acceptthe evidenceof 'theirown eyes'were,in a way,showing
the best rationalresponseto Galileo's telescope. For Feyerabend,then,
the period duringwhich the telescope came to be accepted as an aid to
the observationof the heavens was a period in which the insttument's
capabilitieswere maintainedagainst all reason, as one mightsay, since
in the stateof the artat thatperiodit was impossibleto separateillusions
fromveridicalreceptions.Thus it was only in termsof a verypowerful
picture of the world and its structurethat Galileo could maintainthe
phenomenalveracityof his instrument.
(3) The upshot of all this is Feyerabend's most fundamentalpoint,
namelythatnovel theoriesare almostcertainlyalreadyrefutedby experi-
ence and experimentwhen they are born, so that the methodologyof
conjectureand refutation,his particularbete noire,could not possibly
be applied to them. But he uses his fascinatinganalysisof the Galilean
period to argue forthe idea thatthe progressof science (a conceptionhe
nowhere elucidates) is brought about by the mutual support of two
refutedpointsofview,in thisexamplethe idea thatthetelescopeprovides
a faithfulimage of the sky and that the Copernicantheoryprovidesan
adequate physicsof the heavenlymotions. It is a pitythat Feyerabend
does not addressthe problemof what Galileo was after.For if one could
see Galileo's effortsin termsof the attemptto createa climateof opinion
in which a certainpictureof the world prevailed,then we could under-
stand how he was justifiedin assemblingtheorieswhichwere not strictly
supported,or worse, refutedby common observation,as grounds for
his grand design. It is in thatcontextthat Galileo's brilliancein altering
not onlythe naturalinterpretation but the verysensationsupon which it
was based, makes sense. It also becomes clear under such a view why
Galileo was under the necessityto use propaganda as much as experi-
mentin supportof his viewpoint.
Thus, Feyerabend'sphilosophyof science, which looks to be strange
and counter-intuitive as he himselfsets it out, can be made to make
perfectlygood sense withina generallyrealistviewpointwhich sees the
aim of science as the constructionof a conceptionof the world in terms
of which its causal productionscan be understood.Thus, Feyerabend's
spectacular motto, 'anythinggoes' is not established by his Galileo
example. Indeed, I thinkwhat followsfromhis historicalexamples is
that not anythinggoes. One could see the historicalcase being made
ratherfora view thatthe logical-positivist-instrumentalist conceptionof
science is not only unsound as a rationalreconstruction of the finished
products of science, but leads to absurdly over-preciseand logicised
conceptionsof method. If we see science as the endeavourto construct
an adequate conceptionofthenaturalworld,thenthe kindsofprocedures
which Feyerabendshows us to have actuallyoccurredin the historyof
scienceat certaintimesand places ofparticularimportance,isjust thekind
of method thatwould be called for.But this method is not anarchistic;
ratherit is in the service of a preciselydefinableprocedure.But since
the step to a new pictureof the world involvesa drasticchange in what
298 BOOK REVIEWS

one takes to be natural,then it is not surprisingthat the methods of

concept-modification, by whatever means they are achieved, are the
methodsthatare requiredto bringthatchange about.
But there are still some reservations.In common with many philo-
sophers of science of continentalorigin,ProfessorFeyerabend is very
vague on certain central concepts. He uses the word 'science' freely,
and gives some instances,such as Renaissance mechanicsand earlyand
middle period quantum mechanics. But he nowheregives a clue as to
what he takes science to be or scientiststo be tryingto do. I thinkthis
must be partlybecause of an apparentnarrownessof his reading(com-
pensated in the analyticalchaptersby extraordinary depth) which leads
him to overlookthe persistentefforts by otheranti-logiciststo tryto get
clear about the nature of science as an enterpriseand its products as
artefactsthe results of work. If, say, Professor Feyerabend thinks
scientistsare tryingto providea code by which theycan make available
to otherpeople theirinsightsintothe structureof natureand its manner
of working,then this is a radicallydifferent idea of the verynature of
the enterprisefromthatproposedby those-and theyare mostlylogicists
of one sortor another-who thinkof science as the rules foranticipating
experience. Similarly,even after reading the book with interestand
attention,I am quite uncertainas to what he takes the oft referredto
product, 'a theory',to be. The same vagueness as to a centralconcept
infectslogicistphilosophyof science too and makes not only for great
difficultyin understandingit, but also forsome ambiguityin the theory
itself,particularlyforexample,the statusof theoreticalpropositions.In
Feyerabend's case the problem that stems directlyfrom his coyness
one has in connectingtheepistemology
about scienceitselfis the difficulty
withits product.Feyerabendhas shown,it seem to me withconsiderable
success,thata verywide varietyofconsiderationsare at workin justifying
but if we have no idea what the
and criticisingpieces of scientificeffort,
enterpriseis for, it is difficultto form any just appreciationof the
historical examples. The Galilean example suggests that Professor
Feyerabendmust have in mind some kind of representation theory,that
is thatscientificworkis directedtowardsthe developmentof a conception
ofthe structureoftheworldin termsofwhichwhathappensin it is made
intelligible.The strengthof his counter-examplesto logicist epistem-
ologies is amplifiedif we see them as positiveinstancesof the processes
by whichboth the world as perceivedand the mode of representation of
its deeper structuresare changedin harmonyin such a way as to narrow
the scope ofa givenscientificexplanationbut to greatlyincreaseits depth.
ProfessorFeyerabendhas discoveredan importantand startlingnew
formof consilience,by means ofwhicha systemoftheworld and its sub-
sidiarytheoriesand a radicallynew formof perceptionis made available
forbelief.But thisdoes nothingto provehis widertheory,thatthereis no
methodin theadvancementof science,sincehe makesno attemptto show
that this non-logicistformof consilience,upon which his argumentis
largelybased, occurs frequently,or even more than once. But he does
driveyetanotherstake and thistimea formidableone, throughthe heart
of the vampireof logicism.
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD ROM HARRE
 2
The Kuhnian Revolution

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970, first published

in 1962) challenged the dominant popular and philosophical pictures of the
history of science. Rejecting the formalist view with its normative stance,
Kuhn focused on the activities of and around scientific research: in his work
science is merely what scientists do. Rejecting steady progress, he argued
that there have been periods of normal science punctuated by revolutions.
Kuhn’s innovations were in part an ingenious reworking of portions of the
standard pictures of science, informed by rationalist emphases on the power
of ideas, by positivist views on the nature and meaning of theories, and by
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ideas about forms of life and about perception. The
result was novel, and had an enormous impact.
One of the targets of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is what is known
(since Butterfield 1931) as “Whig history,” history that attempts to construct
the past as a series of steps toward (and occasionally away from) present views.
Especially in the history of science there is a temptation to see the past through
the lens of the present, to see moves in the direction of what we now believe
to be the truth as more rational, more natural, and less needing of causal
explanation than opposition to what we now believe. But since events must
follow their causes, a sequence of events in the history of science cannot be
explained teleologically, simply by the fact that they represent progress. Whig
history is one of the common buttresses of too-simple progressivism in the
history of science, and its removal makes room for explanations that include
more irregular changes.
According to Kuhn, normal science is the science done when members of
a field share a recognition of key past achievements in their field, beliefs about
which theories are right, an understanding of the important problems of
the field, and methods for solving those problems. In Kuhn’s terminology,
scientists doing normal science share a paradigm. The term, originally
referring to a grammatical model or pattern, draws particular attention to
 The Kuhnian Revolution 13

Box 2.1 The modernity of science

Many commentators on science have felt that it is a particularly modern

institution. By this they generally mean that it is exceptionally rational, or
exceptionally free of local contexts. While science’s exceptionality in either
of these senses is contentious, there is a straightforward sense in which
science is, and always has been, modern. As Derek de Solla Price (1986 [1963])
has pointed out, science has grown rapidly over the past three hundred years.
In fact, by any of a number of indicators, science’s growth has been steadily
exponential. Science’s share of the US gross national product has doubled
every 20 years. The cumulative number of scientific journals founded has
doubled every 15 years, as has the membership in scientific institutes, and
the number of people with scientific or technical degrees. The numbers of
articles in many sub-fields have doubled every 10 years. These patterns
cannot continue indefinitely – and in fact have not continued since Price
did his analysis.
A feature of this extremely rapid growth is that between 80 and 90 per-
cent of all the scientists who have ever lived are alive now. For a senior
scientist, between 80 and 90 percent of all the scientific articles ever
written were written during his or her lifetime. For working scientists the
distant past of their fields is almost entirely irrelevant to their current research,
because the past is buried under masses of more recent accomplishments.
Citation patterns show, as one would expect, that older research is considered
less relevant than more recent research, perhaps having been superseded
or simply left aside. For Price, a “research front” in a field at some time can
be represented by the network of articles that are frequently cited. The front
continually picks up new articles and drops old ones, as it establishes new
problems, techniques, and solutions. Whether or not there are paradigms
as Kuhn sees them, science pays most attention to current work, and little
to its past. Science is modern in the sense of having a present-centered out-
look, leaving its past to historians.
Rapid growth also gives science the impression of youth. At any time, a
disproportionate number of scientists are young, having recently entered
their fields. This creates the impression that science is for the young, even
though individual scientists may make as many contributions in middle
age as in youth (Wray 2003).
14 The Kuhnian Revolution

a scientific achievement that serves as an example for others to follow. Kuhn

also assumes that such achievements provide theoretical and methodo-
logical tools for further research. Once they were established, Newton’s
mechanics, Lavoisier’s chemistry, and Mendel’s genetics each structured
research in their respective fields, providing theoretical frameworks for and
models of successful research.
Although it is tempting to see it as a period of stasis, normal science is
better viewed as a period in which research is well structured. The theoretical
side of a paradigm serves as a worldview, providing categories and frame-
works into which to slot phenomena. The practical side of a paradigm serves
as a form of life, providing patterns of behavior or frameworks for action.
For example, Lavoisier’s ideas about elements and the conservation of mass
formed frameworks within which later chemists generated further ideas.
The importance he attached to measurement instruments, and the balance
in particular, shaped the work practices of chemistry. Within paradigms research
goes on, often with tremendous creativity – though always embedded in firm
conceptual and social backdrops.
Kuhn talks of normal science as puzzle-solving, because problems are to be
solved within the terms of the paradigm: failure to solve a problem usually
reflects badly on the researcher, rather than on the theories or methods of
the paradigm. With respect to a paradigm, an unsolved problem is simply
an anomaly, fodder for future researchers. In periods of normal science the para-
digm is not open to serious question. This is because the natural sciences, on
Kuhn’s view, are particularly successful at socializing practitioners. Science
students are taught from textbooks that present standardized views of fields
and their histories; they have lengthy periods of training and apprenticeship;
and during their training they are generally asked to solve well-understood
and well-structured problems, often with well-known answers.
Nothing good lasts forever, and that includes normal science. Because
paradigms can only ever be partial representations and partial ways of deal-
ing with a subject matter, anomalies accumulate, and may eventually start
to take on the character of real problems, rather than mere puzzles. Real
problems cause discomfort and unease with the terms of the paradigm, and
this allows scientists to consider changes and alternatives to the framework;
Kuhn terms this a period of crisis. If an alternative is created that solves some
of the central unsolved problems, then some scientists, particularly younger
scientists who have not yet been fully indoctrinated into the beliefs and
practices or way of life of the older paradigm, will adopt the alternative.
Eventually, as older and conservative scientists become marginalized, a
robust alternative may become a paradigm itself, structuring a new period
of normal science.
 The Kuhnian Revolution 15

Box 2.2 Foundationalism

Foundationalism is the thesis that knowledge can be traced back to firm

foundations. Typically those foundations are seen as a combination of
sensory impressions and rational principles, which then support an edifice
of higher-order beliefs. The central metaphor of foundationalism, of a build-
ing firmly planted in the ground, is an attractive one. If we ask why we
hold some belief, the reasons we give come in the form of another set of
beliefs. We can continue asking why we hold these beliefs, and so on. Like
bricks, each belief is supported by more beneath it (there is a problem here
of the nature of the mortar that holds the bricks together, but we will ignore
that). Clearly, the wall of bricks cannot continue downward forever; we do
not support our knowledge with an infinite chain of beliefs. But what lies
at the foundation?
The most plausible candidates for empirical foundations are sense
experiences. But how can these ever be combined to support the complex
generalizations that form our knowledge? We might think of sense experi-
ences, and especially their simplest components, as like individual data points.
Here we have the earlier problems of induction all over again: as we have
seen, a finite collection of data points cannot determine which generaliza-
tions to believe.
Worse, even beliefs about sense impressions are not perfectly secure. Much
of the discussion around Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970
[1962] ) has focused on his claim that scientific revolutions change what
scientists observe (Box 2.3). Even if Kuhn’s emphasis is wrong, it is clear
that we often doubt what we see or hear, and reinterpret it in terms of
what we know. The problem becomes more obvious, as the discussion of
the Duhem–Quine thesis (Box 1.2) shows, if we imagine the foundations to
be already-ordered collections of sense impressions.
On the one hand, then, we cannot locate plausible foundations for the
many complex generalizations that form our knowledge. On the other hand,
nothing that might count as a foundation is perfectly secure. We are best
off to abandon, then, the metaphor of solid foundations on which our know-
ledge sits.

According to Kuhn, it is in periods of normal science that we can most

easily talk about progress, because scientists have little difficulty recognizing
each other’s achievements. Revolutions, however, are not progressive, because
they both build and destroy. Some or all of the research structured by the
16 The Kuhnian Revolution

pre-revolutionary paradigm will fail to make sense under the new regime;
in fact Kuhn even claims that theories belonging to different paradigms are
incommensurable – lacking a common measure – because people working
in different paradigms see the world differently, and because the meanings
of theoretical terms change with revolutions (a view derived in part from
positivist notions of meaning). The non-progressiveness of revolutions
and the incommensurability of paradigms are two closely related features
of the Kuhnian account that have caused many commentators the most
difficulty.
If Kuhn is right, science does not straightforwardly accumulate know-
ledge, but instead moves from one more or less adequate paradigm to another.
This is the most radical implication found in The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions: Science does not track the truth, but creates different partial
views that can be considered to contain truth only by people who hold those
views!
Kuhn’s claim that theories within paradigms are incommensurable has a
number of different roots. One of those roots lies in the positivist picture
of meaning, on which the meanings of theoretical terms are related to observa-
tions they imply. Kuhn adopts the idea that the meanings of theoretical terms
depend upon the constellation of claims in which they are embedded. A change
of paradigms should result in widespread changes in the meanings of key
terms. If this is true, then none of the key terms from one paradigm would
map neatly onto those of another, preventing a common measure, or even
full communication.
Secondly, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn takes the notion
of indoctrination quite seriously, going so far as to claim that paradigms even
shape observations. People working within different paradigms see things
differently. Borrowing from the work of N. R. Hanson (1958), Kuhn argues
there is no such thing, at least in normal circumstances, as raw observation.
Instead, observation comes interpreted: we do not see dots and lines in
our visual fields, but instead see more or less recognizable objects and
patterns. Thus observation is guided by concepts and ideas. This claim
has become known as the theory-dependence of observation. The theory-
dependence of observation is easily linked to Kuhn’s historical picture,
because during revolutions people stop seeing one way, and start seeing another
way, guided by the new paradigm.
Finally, one of the roots of Kuhn’s claims about incommensurability is
his experience as an historian that it is difficult to make sense of past sci-
entists’ problems, concepts, and methods. Past research can be opaque, and
aspects of it can seem bizarre. It might even be said that if people find it
too easy to understand very old research in present terms they are probably
 The Kuhnian Revolution 17

doing some interpretive violence to that research – Isaac Newton’s physics

looks strikingly modern when rewritten for today’s textbooks, but looks much
less so in its originally published form, and even less so when the connec-
tions between it and Newton’s religious and alchemical research are drawn
(e.g. Dobbs and Jacob 1995). Kuhn says that “In a sense that I am unable
to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their
trades in different worlds” (1970 [1962]: 150).
The case for semantic incommensurability has attracted a considerable
amount of attention, mostly negative. Meanings of terms do change, but
they probably do not change so much and so systematically that claims in
which they are used cannot typically be compared. Most of the philosophers,
linguists, and others who have studied this issue have come to the con-
clusion that claims for semantic incommensurability cannot be sustained, or
even that it is impossible (Davidson 1974) to make sense of such radical
change in meaning (see Bird 2000 for an overview).
This leaves the historical justification for incommensurability. That prob-
lems, concepts, and methods change is uncontroversial. But the difficulties
that these create for interpreting past episodes in science can be overcome
– the very fact that historical research can challenge present-centered inter-
pretations shows the limits of incommensurability.
Claims of radical incommensurability appear to fail. In fact, Kuhn quickly
distanced himself from the strongest readings of his claims. Already by
1965 he insisted that he meant by “incommensurability” only “incomplete
communication” or “difficulty of translation,” sometimes leading to
“communication breakdown” (Kuhn 1970a). Still, on these more modest
readings incommensurability is an important phenomenon: even when
dealing with the same subject matter, scientists (among others) can fail to
communicate.
If there is no radical incommensurability, then there is no radical division
between paradigms, either. Paradigms must be linked by enough con-
tinuity of concepts and practices to allow communication. This may even
be a methodological or theoretical point: complete ruptures in ideas or
practices are inexplicable (Barnes 1982). When historians want to explain
an innovation, they do so in terms of a reworking of available resources.
Every new idea, practice, and object has its sources; to assume otherwise is
to invoke something akin to magic. Thus many historians of science have
challenged Kuhn’s paradigms by showing the continuity from one putative
paradigm to the next.
For example, instruments, theories, and experiments change at different
times. In a detailed study of particle detectors in physics, Peter Galison (1997)
shows that new detectors are initially used for the same types of experiments
18 The Kuhnian Revolution

and observations as their immediate predecessors had been, and fit into
the same theoretical contexts. Similarly, when theories change, there is no
immediate change in either experiments or instruments. Discontinuity in one
realm, then, is at least generally bounded by continuity in others. Science
gains strength, an ad hoc unity, from the fact that its key components rarely
change together. Science maintains stability through change by being dis-
unified, like a thread as described by Wittgenstein (1958): “the strength
of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through
its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.” If this is right then
the image of complete breaks between periods is misleading.

Box 2.3 The theory-dependence of observation

Do people’s beliefs shape their observations? Psychologists have long

studied this question, showing how people’s interpretations of images are
affected by what they expect those images to show. Hanson and Kuhn took
the psychological results to be important for understanding how science
works. Scientific observations, they claim, are theory-dependent.
For the most part, philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists agree
that observations can be shaped by what people believe. There are substantial
disagreements, though, about how important this is for understanding
science. For example, a prominent debate about visual illusions and the extent
to which the background beliefs that make them illusions are plastic (e.g.
Churchland 1988; Fodor 1988) has been sidelined by a broader interpretation
of “observation.” Scientific observation has been and is rarely equivalent
to brute perception, experienced by an isolated individual (Daston 2008).
Much scientific data is collected by machine, and then is organized by
scientists to display phenomena publicly (Bogen and Woodward 1992). If
that organization amounts to observation, then it is straightforward that
observation is theory-dependent.
Theory and practice dependence is broader even than that: scientists attend
to objects and processes that background beliefs suggest are worth look-
ing at, they design experiments around theoretically inspired questions, they
remember relevance and communicate relevant information, where relevance
depends on established practices and shared theoretical views (Brewer and
Lambert 2001).
 The Kuhnian Revolution 19

Incommensurability: Communicating Among

Social Worlds

Claims about the incommensurability of scientific paradigms raise general

questions about the extent to which people across boundaries can
communicate.
In some sense it is trivial that disciplines (or smaller units, like specialties)
are incommensurable. The work done by a molecular biologist is not
obviously interesting or comprehensible to an evolutionary ecologist or a
neuropathologist, although with some translation it can sometimes become
so. The meaning of terms, ideas, and actions is connected to the cultures
and practices from which they stem. Disciplines are “epistemic cultures” that
may have completely different orientations to their objects, social units of
knowledge production, and patterns of interaction (Knorr Cetina 1999).
However, people from different areas interact, and as a result science
gains a degree of unity. We might ask, then, how interactions are made
to work.
Simplified languages allow parties to trade goods and services without
concern for the integrity of local cultures and practices. A trading zone (Galison
1997) is an area in which scientific and/or technical practices can fruitfully
interact via these simplified languages or pidgins, without requiring full
assimilation. Trading zones can develop at the contact points of specialties,
around the transfer of valuable goods from one to another. In trading zones,
collaborations can be successful even if the cultures and practices that are
brought together do not agree on problems or definitions.
The trading zone concept is flexible, perhaps overly so. We might look
at almost any communication as taking place in a trading zone and demand-
ing some pidgin-like language. For example, Richard Feynman’s diagrams
of particle interactions, which later became known as Feynman diagrams,
were successful in part because they were simple and could be interpreted
in various ways (Kaiser 2005). They were widely spread during the 1950s
by visiting postdoctoral fellows and researchers. But different schools,
working with different theoretical frameworks, picked them up, adapted
them, and developed local styles of using them. Despite their variety, they
remained important ways of communicating among physicists, and also tools
that were productive of theoretical problems and insights. It would seem to
stretch the “trading zone” concept to say that Feynman diagrams were parts
of pidgins needed for theoretical physicists to talk to each other, yet that is
what they look like.
20 The Kuhnian Revolution

A different, but equally flexible, concept for understanding communica-

tion across barriers is the idea of boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989).
In a historical case study of interactions in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate
Zoology, Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer focus on objects, rather
than languages. The different social worlds of amateur collectors, professional
scientists, philanthropists, and administrators had very different visions of the
museum, its goals, and the important work to be done. These differences
resulted in incommensurabilities among groups. However, objects can
form bridges across boundaries, if they can serve as a focus of attention in
different social worlds, and are robust enough to maintain their identities
in those different worlds.
Standardized records were among the key boundary objects that held
together these different social worlds. Records of the specimens had differ-
ent meanings for the different groups of actors, but each group could
contribute to and use those records. The practices of each group could
continue intact, but the groups interacted via record keeping. Boundary objects,
then, allow for a certain amount of coordination of actions without large
measures of translation.
The boundary object concept has been picked up and used in an enorm-
ous number of ways. Even within the article in which they introduce the
concept, Star and Griesemer present a number of different examples of bound-
ary objects, including the zoology museum itself, the different animal species
in the museum’s scope, the state of California, and standardized records
of specimens.
The concept has been applied very widely in STS. To take just a few
examples: Sketches and drawings can allow engineers in different parts
of design and production processes to communicate across boundaries
(Henderson 1991). Parameterizations of climate models, the filling in of
variables to bring those models in line with the world’s weather, connect
field meteorologists and simulation modelers (Sundberg 2007). In the
early twentieth century breeds of rabbits and poultry connected fanciers to
geneticists and commercial breeders (Marie 2008).
Why are there so many different boundary objects? The number and variety
suggest that, despite some incommensurability across social boundaries, there
is considerable coordination and probably even some level of communica-
tion. For example, in multidisciplinary research a considerable amount of
communication is achieved via straightforward translation (Duncker 2001).
Researchers come to understand what their colleagues in other disciplines
know, and translate what they have to say into a language that those col-
leagues can understand. Simultaneously, they listen to what other people
 The Kuhnian Revolution 21

have to say and read what other people write, attuned to differences in
knowledge, assumptions, and focus. Concepts like pidgins, trading zones,
and boundary objects, while they might be useful in particular situations,
may overstate difficulties in communication. Incommensurability as it is found
in many practices may not always be a very serious barrier.
The divisions of the sciences result in disunity (see Dupré 1993; Galison
and Stump 1996). A disunified science requires communication, perhaps in
trading zones or direct translation, or coordination, perhaps via boundary
objects, so that its many fibers are in fact twisted around each other. Even
while disunified, though, science hangs together and has some stability. How
it does so remains an issue that merits investigation.

Conclusion: Some Impacts

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions had an immediate impact. The word

“paradigm,” referring to a way things are done or seen, came into common
usage largely because of Kuhn. Even from the short description above it is
clear that the book represents a challenge to earlier important beliefs about
science.
Against the views of science with which we started, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions argues that scientific communities are importantly organized around
ideas and practices, not around ideals of behavior. And, they are organized
from the bottom up, not, as functionalism would have it, to serve an
overarching goal. Against positivism, Kuhn argued that changes in theories
are not driven by data but by changes of vision. In fact, if worldviews are
essentially theories then data is subordinate to theory, rather than the
other way around. Against falsificationism, Kuhn argued that anomalies are
typically set aside, that only during revolutions are they used as a justifica-
tion to reject a theory. And against all of these he argued that on the largest
scales the history of science should not be told as a story of uninterrupted
progress, but only change.
Because Kuhn’s version of science violated almost everybody’s ideas of
the rationality and progress of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
was sometimes read as claiming that science is fundamentally irrational, or
describing science as “mob rule.” In retrospect it is difficult to find much
irrationalism there, and possible to see the book as somewhat conservative
– perhaps not only intellectually conservative but politically conservative (Fuller
2000). More important, perhaps, is the widespread perception that by
examining history Kuhn firmly refuted the standard view of science.
22 The Kuhnian Revolution

Whether or not that is true, Kuhn started people thinking about science in
very different terms. The success of the book created a space for thinking
about the practices of science in local terms, rather than in terms of their
contribution to progress, or their exemplification of ideals. Though few of
Kuhn’s specific ideas have survived fully intact, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions has profoundly affected subsequent thinking in the study of
science and technology.
2 The Social Study of Science before Kuhn

Stephen Turner

The controversy over Thomas Kuhn’s astonishingly successful Structure of Scientific Rev-
olutions ([1962]1996), which denied the possibility of a rational account of conceptual
revolutions and characterized them in the language of collective psychology, created
the conditions for producing the field that became “science studies.” The book was
the immediate product of an existing tradition of writing about science, exemplified
by the works of James Bryant Conant and Michael Polanyi, and the distal product of
a literature on the social character of science that reaches back centuries. This litera-
ture was closely connected to practical problems of the organization of science and
also to social theory debates on the political meaning of science. The basic story line
is simple: a conflict between two views of science, one of which treats science as dis-
tinguished by a method that can be extended to social and political life, and a respond-
ing view that treats science as a distinctive form of activity with its own special
problems and does not provide a model for social and political life. Interlaced
with this story is a puzzle over the relationship between science and culture that flour-
ished especially in the twenties and thirties. In this chapter I briefly reconstruct this
history.

BACON, CONDORCET, AND THE BEGINNINGS OF AN EXPLANATORY INTEREST IN

SCIENCE

The fons et origo of this discussion is Francis Bacon’s vision of a political order in which
the class of scientists is given power by an enlightened ruler in his House of Solomon
in “The New Atlantis” ([1627]1860–62, vol. 5: 347–413). This vision had a practical
effect on the attempts by the Royal Society in London to distinguish itself by its
methodological practices and internal governance as a type of political body in rela-
tion to the Crown (Sprat, [1667]1958: 321–438; Lynch, 2001: 177–96; Shapin, 1994)
and to do the same with parallel institutions elsewhere in Europe (Hahn, 1971: 1–34;
Gillispie, 2004). The Victorians assured that Bacon would be best known for his
ideas about induction as a method (cf. Peltonen, 1996: 321–24) and, as his major
German expositor put it, “how his whole nature was, in every way, instinctively
opposed to verbal discussions” (Fischer, 1857: 307). But Bacon’s extensive body of writ-
34 Stephen Turner

ings included not only writings on method but also on “counselors” to the Crown,
or experts, on the merits of republics, on the nature of political authority, on the
proper internal organization of science, on funding and authority over science, and
on collective research.
The fundamental issues of science studies can be teased out of these works, but only
with difficulty, because of the intentional absurdity of Renaissance style. The main
“political” argument, for example, is presented as a fiction, and like other political
works by ambitious office seekers, Bacon’s message is shrouded in ambiguities. The
basic and most influential claim (though he was far more subtle than this) (cf.
Whewell, 1984: 218–47; Fischer, 1857) was that scientific truth can be produced by
following a technique of assembling facts, generalizing about them, and ascending to
higher level generalizations from them; that following this method precluded con-
testation and controversy, which were the great evils of “the schools”; that the tech-
nique is open to all, or public and democratic, because it “places all wits . . . nearly on
a level” (quoted in Peltonen, 1996: 323); that it can and should be pursued collec-
tively or cooperatively; that it requires that the mind be freed of prejudices or assump-
tions (and perhaps of theories); that something like social science or “civil knowledge”
was also possible and necessary; and that kings would be better able to accept counsel
on the basis of merit than on the basis of trust of obedient favorites. This now famil-
iar picture of science and its extension to the social world was then novel and radical.
Bacon’s politics fit with his hostility to contestation, and although his recent admir-
ers (e.g., Peltonen, 1996) have argued that he was not the stereotypic proponent of
royal absolutism and unfettered state power that he was once thought to be, Bacon’s
primary role in the history of political thought has been as the archenemy of Edward
Coke, the judge who, as defender of the common law and the rule of law, was a
key progenitor of modern liberalism (cf. Coke, 2003). It sharpens and assumes new
forms.
The Baconian picture is recast in a recognizably modern form in Condorcet’s “Frag-
ment on Bacon’s New Atlantis” ([1793]1976), and in chapter X of Condorcet’s Outlines
of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind ([1795]1955), which promoted
the idea that science was the engine of human progress. Condorcet deals with such
issues as scientific rivalry, which he regards as a normal product of the passions of
scientists for their work but which can take pathological institutional forms; with the
failure to utilize talent, which he regards as a major flaw of the old Regime; with con-
cerns about financing and the forms of scientific association and internal governance,
which he resolves with an argument for science’s need for autonomy, or freedom from
political control; and with the need for scientific knowledge of the social and politi-
cal world. The argument for autonomy is grounded on the consideration that only
scientists have the capacity to govern scientific activity. Though Condorcet believed
in the benefits of science and the diffusion of scientific knowledge, he, characteristi-
cally, also grasped the contrary idea that there was nothing automatic about the
benefits of advances in science, and he concluded that the production of these
benefits required state action.
The Social Study of Science before Kuhn 35

Condorcet’s preferred method of extending the benefits of science was education,

by which he meant the kind of education that was useful for “citizens” and would
enable them to think on their own ([1795]1955): 182).1 But he also recognized that
no educational program would make scientists and citizens epistemic equals.2 More-
over, education was politically ambiguous: not only did it require the exercise of state
power, there was a sense, which he shared with other Philosophes, that progress resulted
from collective submission to reason and science, each understood as authoritative in
its own right. Condorcet attempted to put a nonauthoritarian face on this submission
to science and scientists: he expressed a “hope” that the citizens thus instructed would
acknowledge the “superiority of enlightenment” of their intellectual betters in choos-
ing leaders ([1793]1976: 283). But this would necessarily amount to a regime of expert
rule, with democratic consent.

SAINT-SIMON AND COMTE: SCIENCE REPLACES POLITICS

The implication that social knowledge allowed for the replacement of politics was
always the most problematic element of this picture, for it placed science and politics
in direct competition. In 1803, in the aftermath of the restoration of French politics
and as part of the return to normalcy after the revolution, the section on social and
political science of the French Academy was suppressed (Columbia Electronic Ency-
clopedia, 2001–2004).3 This action served to draw a line between acceptable science
and dangerous science and to reject the extension of science to politics. One conse-
quence was that social and political speculation, and in particular speculation on
science and politics, now fell to thinkers outside the academy and on the margins of
science, notably Henri de Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon’s faith in scientists as the saviors
of society (a faith which diminished in the course of his life) was similar to Con-
dorcet’s, and he carried forward and generalized similar concerns especially with the
problem of the full utilization of talent, making this theme central to his social theory,
as expressed by the slogan “Each according to his capacity, to each capacity accord-
ing to its works” on the masthead of the Saint-Simonian newspaper Le Globe (Manuel;
1995: 163).4
But Saint-Simon radicalized Condorcet’s invasion of the political. His explicitly
antipolitical and implicitly antiliberal idea that in the future the rule of man over man
would be replaced by “the administration of things” proved to have a long future in
the hands of Marxist-Leninism.5 Politics would vanish, he argued, because social
antagonism would disappear in a society in which capacities were fitted to tasks. The
theory of “capacities” assumed that capacities were transparent. His model was science.
Within science, in Saint-Simon’s view, scientific merit was sufficiently transparent
that scientists would naturally recognize and defer to greatness in others, allowing for
the fulfillment and utilization of talent, and creating within science a natural hierar-
chy. This was in turn a model for the natural hierarchy of the new scientific and indus-
trial order he envisioned.6 Saint-Simon’s young secretary, Auguste Comte, revised and
extended his sketchy but illuminating ideas into a complete intellectual system,
36 Stephen Turner

Positivism, which provided both a philosophy of science and a model for the relations
of science and society, and was also an explicit repudiation of liberalism, which Comte,
like most of the advanced continental thinkers of the time, regarded as a transitory
historical phenomenon doomed by its overwhelming defects (Comte, [1830–42]1864,
[1877]1957).
Saint-Simon was not a methodological thinker, but Comte was. His newly chris-
tened science of “sociology” which represented the fulfillment of the dream of extend-
ing science to society and politics, required him to reflect extensively on what science
was, to classify the sciences, and to give an account of method. His central “discovery,”
the law of the three stages, which he took to be the core finding of sociology, was a
law about the internal development of scientific disciplines: the first stage was the the-
ological or fictitious, the second the metaphysical or abstract, and the third the sci-
entific or positive, in which such metaphysical notions as causation were supposed to
disappear, leaving only predictive law (Comte, [1830–42]1858: 25–26). The principle
was reflexive, indeed self-exemplifying: sociology was to be the last science to reach
the positive stage, and the law predicted that it would do so. Comte never strayed far
from the lessons of science as a model. Indeed, the history of science, specifically
Joseph-Louis de Lagrange’s history of rational mechanics (which explored the filiation
and descent of ideas), was the model for the specific “historical” method that he
claimed was appropriate for sociology ([1830–42]1858: 496).7
The laws themselves were “objective.” But in the end, according to Comte’s later
account, when sociology had reached the positive stage, all the sciences would become
subordinate to it, and the relation of all knowledge to the subject, man, would be
revealed.8 At this point the sciences would be the servants of man, by analogy to
medicine. Moreover, a fully developed sociology that related all knowledge to the
subject would teach the critical anti-individualist lesson of the dependence of each
person on others. Sociology would be both policy science and state ideology.
Comte’s account of politics was similar to Saint-Simon’s but with an even more
strident hostility to liberal discussion.9 Comte ([1830–42]1864, IV: 50ff) expressed his
disgust for the idea that everyone should be permitted to have their opinion heard,
that the ignorant and expert should be equally empowered, and to “conscience.”

[T]here is no liberty of conscience in astronomy, in physics, or even in physiology, that is to say

everyone would find it absurd not to have confidence in the principles established by the men
of these sciences. (Comte [1830–42]1864, IV: 44n, trans. in Ranulf, 1939: 22)

Science, in particular the science of sociology, was consequently both model and
means for overcoming the “anarchy of opinions” by providing consensus. In contrast,
liberal politics and free discussion, from the point of view of the prospect of such
knowledge, was no more than the politics of ignorance and pointless dissension.
Comte, to put it simply, had assembled all the elements of a powerful argument to
resolve the ambiguities of Condorcet by eliminating its liberal squeamishness about
authority and consent. For Comte, the issue was this: if science is correct, and science
includes knowledge of the social world and politics, why shouldn’t scientists rule over
The Social Study of Science before Kuhn 37

the ignorant, or rule through their control of education? And is not the rule, de facto
if not de jure, of scientists the condition of progress? Is the public’s failure to consent
to such rule anything other than a failure of scientific education? And if the under-
standing and recognition of the authority of science are the central condition of
progress, shouldn’t science be imposed on the ignorant, just as the dogmas of Catholi-
cism had been so effectively imposed in the past (Comte [1830–42]1864, IV: 22, 480;
V: 231)? Given his premises, the conclusion was difficult to avoid, and even John
Stuart Mill, his admirer who rejected his later work, admitted that as a matter of logic,
Comte was correct ([1865]1969: 302).

THE LIBERAL CHALLENGE

Although each of these premises, and the related picture of science they depended on,
would be rejected by Comte’s critics, a fully coherent response, with an alternative
image of science, was slow to develop. The main obstacle to constructing an alterna-
tive was the notion of scientific method itself. Although Mill was a paragon of
liberalism, he was trapped between his father’s faith in free discussion, which he
expounded in his famous On Liberty ([1859]1978), and his own methodological views,
which were centered on the idea that the canons of induction lead to proven knowl-
edge. The canons produced consensus apart from discussion, by the following of
rules—even in the social sciences, where their value was limited by the problem
of causal complexity. Moreover, Mill was a utilitarian, who believed that moral and
political questions resolved into questions of the greatest good for the greatest number.
So he was compelled, in the conclusion of Book VI of A System of Logic, to say that
questions of politics were a matter of practical science, subordinate to the principle
of utility (1974). To the extent that this is true, there is much for indoctrination to
be about, and little if anything for democratic discussion to be about, a point not
lost on his critics (cf. Cowling, 1963).10
Mill did not resolve the conflict between science and free discussion. In On Liberty,
science is simply omitted. In his address to the University of St. Andrews that dis-
cusses science, freedom of speech is commended, but for schools of theology, and
although science education is discussed at length in this text, it is not mentioned in
connection to free discussion. Mill’s critique of the later Comte expresses concerns
about the practical implementation of the authority of science. He notes that Comte’s
position relies on the consensus of scientists but that this authority “entrusted to any
organized body, would involve a spiritual despotism” (Mill, [1865]1969: 314). But he
does not question the notion of consensus itself. Mill’s conflict is nevertheless deep:
if science is distinguished by the possession of a consensus-producing method, its
reliance on human institutions is incidental or inessential and the authority of science
overrides free discussion.
There were other important, and less ambivalent, though also less direct, responses.
When William Whewell wrote the history of core intellectual advances in science, he
also wrote about the difficulties that major ideas had in becoming accepted, which
38 Stephen Turner

undermined the idea that within science truth was readily recognized and acknowl-
edged (Whewell, 1857; cf. 117–20, 130–33, 150–53, 177–79, 184–88). A section of
Buckle’s History of Civilization in England, one of the most influential works of the nine-
teenth century, argued that state patronage of knowledge in France had diminished
French intellectual life ([1857]1924: 490–516). The idea that science was a product of
routinizable methods itself became the subject of an intense debate, much of it criti-
cal of Mill. This debate set the stage for a new formulation of the basic Baconian
picture of science.

PEARSON AND MACH

Although there are questions about the nature of Comte’s influence on the next stage
of the discussion, Ernst Mach and Karl Pearson in their writings come into focus as
transitional figures between two widely separated bodies of thought: Comte’s posi-
tivism and the Communist theorists of science of the 1930s. One of the latter,
Lancelot. T. Hogben, recalled that his generation had “been suckled on the Grammar
of Science,” Pearson’s major text on science (Hogben, 1957: 326, quoted in Porter, 2004:
7). Mach developed and popularized a philosophy of science that was congenial to
certain subsequent developments, notably Logical Positivism, and served as a carrier
for some key ideas of Comte’s (Blackmore, 1972: 164–69).11 Both had a view of science
as “economical” or oriented to “efficiency.” Pearson connected this to contemporary
ideas of national efficiency, Mach to a movement of scientists led by Wilhelm Ostwald
called “energeticism” that opposed the atomic theory and extended the law of con-
servation of total energy to a normative notion of the economy of energy in social
life. This idea also influenced their ideas about the relation of theory to data. Because
they thought of theory as economical expressions of data, they were hostile to realis-
tic interpretations of theoretical entities that went beyond the data. The standard view
placed them together: “just as Mach opposed the atomic theory, so Pearson fought
Mendelism” (Blackmore, 1972: 125; cf. Porter, 2004: 269–70 for a more nuanced
view).
The Grammar of Science ([1892]1937) began in this vein, with a discussion of the
purpose of science, which Pearson claimed was the same as that of any other human
activity: to promote the welfare of human society, to increase social happiness, and
to strengthen social stability. Stability was strongly associated with consensus, and as
in Comte, science was a model for the achievement of consensus. Yet Pearson appeared
to be of two minds about the problem of consensus, as indicated in his phrase
“unforced consensus,” which reflected both his idea, shared with Mach, that the age
of force had ended, and his insistence on consensus as a condition of social stability
and that social stability was the ultimate goal of science. The conflict lies in the rela-
tion of the two ideal elements of the ideal of unforced consensus. One is that “force”
in the form of a scientific hierarchy persecuting scientific heresy would be fatal to
progress. The other is that consensus is the primary good that science provides. And
for Pearson the scientific method assures consensus without force.
The Social Study of Science before Kuhn 39

Citizens must, of course, accept the consensus produced by science, and this is where
education and popularization come in. Pearson was concerned with the right way to
inculcate the scientific, unbiased cast of mind. Merely reading about science did not
lead to this result: what did so was the close scientific study of some small area
([1892]1937: 15–16). And one could expect such experience to transfer to the role of
the citizen. This would produce consensual politics without coercion ([1892]1937:
11–14).
Although he was a socialist, Pearson was no egalitarian with respect to the hierar-
chy of scientific talent. The role of the semi-educated citizen was still primarily one
of respect for the “Priests” of science.12 But he also believed, in the phrase of nine-
teenth century Catholicism, in “no rights for the wrong.” Lack of conformity to the
canons of legitimate inference, Pearson says, is “antisocial” if it involves believing “in
a sphere in which we cannot reason,” and there is no “right” to holding false beliefs
that lead to negative consequences in matters that are “of vital importance to others”
([1892]1937: 54–55). And he argued that “the abnormal perceptive faculty [i.e., the
kind that failed to arrive at the consensual conclusion assumed to be more or less
automatically produced by persons with normally evolved perceptual powers],
whether that of the madman or the mystic, must ever be a danger to human society,
for it undermines the efficiency of the reason as a guide to conduct” ([1892]1937: 120).
Pearson’s optimism about the efficacy of the scientific method as a source of con-
sensus was grounded in his philosophy of science. The facts of science for him are
perceptual successions, and so the idea of arriving at an unforced consensus on them
is plausible. What is controversial is the idea that political questions can be resolved
into issues of perceptual succession. Pearson’s examples of how this should work
included Poor Law reform, where “the blind social instinct and the individual bias at
present form extremely strong factors of our judgment” (Pearson, [1892]1937: 29),
preventing their objective solutions through considerations of national efficiency.13

THE PROBLEM OF CULTURE

The thinkers we have considered here, in the line from Bacon to Pearson, had an
“extensive” conception of science, one in which science, understood for example as
a method, could be applied to something beyond its normal subject matter. Science
could be conceived “extensively” in a variety of ways: as incorporating technology
and engineering, as including “social” and “mental” sciences, as including the policy
sciences, and even as a foundation for ethics, a popular theme in the post-Darwinist
period. The nature of science came to be discussed in terms of the essence which
carried over. It was in response to this that a “liberal” view of science finally emerged.
Pearson, and later the heterodox economist Thorstein Veblen, talked about science
and engineering as a cast of mind that carries over from one activity or topic to
others, and the theme was deeply embedded in the culture of the time (Jordan, 1994).
There was also a strong current of sociological thinking that developed a variant of
this thesis. William F. Ogburn’s Social Change ([1922]1966), one of the most
40 Stephen Turner

influential works of sociology of the interwar years, which introduced the term “cul-
tural lag,” into the language, was akin to technological determinism.14
The “cultural” significance of science soon became a hotly contested issue. In the
German speaking world, the issue took the form of a discussion of the idea of a sci-
entific Weltanschauung. Mach and his successors, including the Logical Positivists and
especially Otto Neurath, were interpreted, and sometimes interpreted themselves, as
providing a scientific alternative to retrograde Weltanschauungen (cf. Richardson,
2003), and Neurath used the term Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung, or scientific con-
ception of the world, to distinguish the scientific alternative from mere “world views”
(Richardson, 2003: 68–69). This quest for a scientific conception of the world played
a role in German thought analogous to the role that the problem of the replacement
of traditional religion had played in British and French thought.
The problem of whether science could provide a Weltanschauung-substitute in turn
produced an issue about the cultural status and character of science that was highly
consequential for what followed, first in the German-speaking world (Lassman and
Velody, 1989), and ultimately, as Logical Positivism was imported, in the Anglo-Amer-
ican world. But the discussion also led indirectly to a body of explicitly “sociological”
thought about the nature of world views and the causal relations between science and
civilization, and ultimately to the “classical” sociology of knowledge of Mannheim
and to the development of Marxist accounts of science.
The carry-over thesis answered the question of causal direction in the science-society
relation by making science the prime mover. But the question could also be put as
follows: Did advances in science, or indeed the phenomenon of modern science itself,
depend on cultural conditions? Philosophers, such as Alfred North Whitehead
([1925]1967), and civilizational sociologists, such as Sorokin ([1937]1962) and Max
Weber ([1904–05]1949: 110; [1920]1958: 13–31), ran the direction of causality in this
other way, from culture to science, seeing features of modern western culture as con-
ditions for the growth of science and the scientific mentality.15
The idea of the scientific resolution of policy questions, already formulated by Mill,
also played a significant role in this period, in a variety of forms. Fabian socialism in
Britain and a huge array of reform movements in the United States, as well as bodies
such as the German Verein für Sozialpolitik, promoted scientific or engineering solu-
tions to social and policy problems and an “efficiency” movement. The Russian
Revolution proclaimed itself to be “scientific” in that it was based on the scientific
materialism of Marx and Engels: this was a realization in practice of the extension of
science to absorb and obliterate politics. The experience of “War Socialism” in
Germany during WWI persuaded many thinkers, notably Otto Neurath, of the prac-
ticality and desirability of a planned economy (cf. O’Neill, 1995; Steele, 1981). The
issue of the efficacy of planning was to become central to the later literature.
The idea of experiment also served as a political model. John Dewey, in such works
as Human Nature and Conduct, pronounced the experimental method to be the great-
est of human achievements, and he promoted the idea of its application to human
affairs, replacing “custom” and attachment to traditions, such as constitutional
The Social Study of Science before Kuhn 41

traditions, as a basis for political action (1922). Yet Dewey distinguished the techniques
of science from the spirit: he wanted the spirit, and its creativity, in politics, but not
the techniques or the experts that employed them, or the experts themselves, whom
he dismissed as specialists and technicians whose work needed to be “humanized”
(Dewey, [1937]1946: 33). This reasoning, and the movement it represented, was not
attractive to scientists themselves (Kuznick, 1987: 215).
In connection with science, the model of “conceptual schemes,” under the influ-
ence of L. J. Henderson, became a Harvard commonplace (Henderson, [1941–42]1970).
The reception of this way of thinking about science was aided by developments in
science and mathematics, such as the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries and the
broader recognition that what appeared as physical truth was dependent on nonem-
pirical choices of mathematical structures. This was a thesis developed by Poincaré,
but quickly absorbed and underlined by other thinkers, notably the Vienna Circle,
and in the extended discussion of the theory of relativity that followed (Howard, 1990:
374–375). The broader relativistic implications of this idea were recognized at the time.
When Neurath wrote that the choice of mathematical structures for a theory was not
an empirical matter, Max Horkheimer cited the passage as evidence that he embraced
hyperrelativism ([1947]1972: 165). This assimilation of scientific premises to “culture”
took many other forms as well, for example, in such influential texts as Alfred North
Whitehead’s Science in the Modern World ([1925]1967) and Process and Reality
([1929]1978), and even more explicitly in E. A. Burtt’s Metaphysical Foundations of
Modern Physical Science: A Historical and Critical Essay (1927). This was part of a larger
and pervasive climate of opinion,16 shared by Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge
(though Mannheim specifically exempted science from the subject matter of his “soci-
ology of knowledge”) but also by Ludwig Fleck, who used the notion of Denkgemein-
schaft to account for the problem of the reception of scientific ideas ([1935]1979), an
issue that was soon to become central.
This general approach was paralleled in France in a series of historical studies broadly
influenced by the French neo-Kantian tradition and phenomenology, which focused
on conceptual change and difference, and in particular on conceptual breaks and rup-
tures. Pierre Duhem was one of the pioneers of this approach, especially for his studies
of medieval physics, which he showed to be methodologically sophisticated and
coherent, and his holism, which led him to reject the idea of crucial experiments.
Later French historians of science, such as Alexandre Koyré, who focused on the sci-
entific revolution, stressed the radical nature of change between the conceptual
systems it involved (1957). This austerely presuppositional approach, influenced in his
case by Husserl, largely ignored experiment and data as relevant to scientific change.
His contemporary, Gaston Bachelard, performed a similar analysis of the transforma-
tion represented by Einstein’s special theory of relativity (1984). His concept of the
“epistemological break” was a means of expressing the interconnected or holistic
aspect of such transformations, including their relations to general philosophical out-
looks. Georges Canguilhem extended this notion of epistemological breaks in relation
to the creation of fields of knowledge, especially, in the life sciences, through concepts
42 Stephen Turner

of normality (1978). Canguilhem was the reporter for Michel Foucault’s dissertation
on psychiatry. Foucault extended this reasoning to new topics and new disciplinary
fields and to the phenomenon of disciplining itself, thus completing the extension of
explanations of the history of science in terms of breaks to the explanation of the
history of culture. By focusing relentlessly on theory rather than experiment, tech-
nology, and instrumentation, and by its concern with rupture, the French discussion
(which of course influenced English-language history of science, particularly with
respect to the scientific revolution) simply bypassed the issues that arose in the English
and German language discussions of science, not only becoming Kuhnians avant la
lêttre but using this new understanding of science as a model for the understanding
of intellectually organized social life generally.
The English and German discussions arrived at a similar point through a much more
tortured route, and the reasons are relevant to the subsequent history. During the early
twentieth century neo-Kantianism was in “dissolution,” but the dissolution took
various forms. Both Heidegger and Positivism provided different approaches to the
problem of a priori truth, and each undermined the “presuppositions” model (cf. Fried-
man, 1999, 2000, 2001), as did the later Wittgenstein ([1953]1958, para. 179–80).
These criticisms pointed in the direction of a notion of practice or tacit knowledge.
Karl Popper attacked the presuppositions model by arguing that presuppositions
changed every time a theory changed, and he attacked Mannheim for his idea that
identifying presuppositions placed one in a position to “critique.” The discussion of
conceptual schemes, frameworks, and the like persisted in the history of science during
this period, but it was not until the fifties, with N. R. Hanson’s Wittgenstein-
influenced Patterns of Discovery (1958), which undermined the notion of raw obser-
vational data, that it came into its own in philosophy proper.

WEBER’S “SCIENCE AS A VOCATION”

The German postwar discussion of the idea of science as a Weltanschauung produced an

especially important response that did not directly figure in the historical and philo-
sophical literature, but later appeared in the influential “sociological” approach to
science developed by Merton. The idea that Wissenschaft had a cultural and political
task of providing a worldview gained significance as a result of the cultural crisis pro-
duced by military defeat. This idea was to receive its classic critique in two speeches by
Max Weber: one on “Politics as a Vocation” ([1919]1946a), the other on “Science as a
Vocation” ([1919]1946b).17 In “Science as a Vocation” Weber provided a history of
motivations for science from Plato through Schwammerdam’s proof of God’s provi-
dence in the anatomy of a louse, dismissing them all and concluding the list with the
brutal comment on “the naive optimism in which science, that is the technique of
mastering life which rests on science—has been celebrated as the way to happiness.
Who believes in this?—aside from a few big children in university chairs” (Weber,
[1919]1946b: 143). These big children would have included Pearson, Mach, and
Ostwald, whom he took the trouble to denounce in a separate article, particularly for
The Social Study of Science before Kuhn 43

the utilitarian theory of knowledge Ostwald shared with Mach, who spoke of theories
as economizations (Weber, [1909]1973: 414). The brunt of his emphasis in the speech,
aside from its anti-utilitarian view of science,18 was on specialization as a condition for
genuine achievement. This also undermined the “extensive” conception of science: the
achievements of the specialist do not generalize into lessons about the mastery of life.
The message in the speech on politics was also explicit: “the qualities that make a
man an excellent scholar and academic teacher are not the qualities that make him a
leader . . . specifically in politics” ([1919]1946b: 150). The aspiring political leader was
constrained by the realities of modern party politics and the demands of creating a
following, as well as the intrinsic demands of the pursuit of power, demands so
onerous that very few people had the personal qualities for such a career. This
account of the political sphere—with its emphasis on the necessity of power for the
achievement of any meaningful end, as well as its relentless reminders that the means
specific to the state is violence and that to engage in politics is to contract with
diabolical powers—served to place the sphere of the political beyond the prospect
of transformation by intellectuals. And Weber made a particular point about the
limitations of the bureaucratic mentality in the face of the demands of politics, thus
undermining any thought that politics could be replaced by the administration of
things.19

HESSEN AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE DEBATE

In 1931 the discussion of science was transformed by the emergence of a fully devel-
oped Marxian account of science, sponsored at the highest level of the Soviet ideo-
logical apparatus by Nikolai Bukharin. Bukharin’s own main theoretical work was
entitled Historical Materialism and opened with these sentences: “Bourgeois scholars
speak of any branch of learning with mysterious awe, as if it were a thing produced
in heaven, not on earth. But as a matter of fact any science, whatever it be, grows out
of the demands of society or its classes” (Bukharin, [1925]1965). A volume of articles
applying these ideas to the history of science was produced for an international con-
gress of historians of science in London, and it had a profound, galvanizing effect,
especially in Britain (Delegates of the U.S.S.R., 1931).20 The thesis they presented was
in fact a dramatic one that had the effect of incorporating “premises” talk into the
Marxian theory of base and superstructure. The major point of this text was to show
in detailed case studies that science was also the product of the demands of the time
for technological results, that the demands were specific to particular social forma-
tions and historical situations, and that “theory” was ultimately driven by techno-
logical practice, so that the idea of an autonomous realm of pure science was a sham
and an ideological construction (Hessen, 1931).
The British discussion of science had evolved differently than the German one. At
the 1927 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, E. A.
Burroughs (1927: 32), Bishop of Ripon, suggested a moratorium on science for a decade
to allow for a reconsideration of its social consequences. Josiah Stamp pursued this
44 Stephen Turner

theme in his Presidential Address at the 1936 meeting of the same association when
he called on scientists to consider the social responsibility of scientists ([1936]1937).
In this context of social concern and deepening economic and political crisis, a
message about science from the Soviet Union, already idealized by British Fabian
socialists such as the Webbs, was bound to have an impact.
One of Marx’s central ideas was that the revolutionary moment occurs when the
conflict between the forces of production and the capitalist class structure and system
of economic relations is at its height. One of the central ideas of both the fascists and
the Soviets was that of rational planning in the economy and other spheres of life.
These ideas had a strong grip on the public and on policy makers during the Depres-
sion. In the case of science, a large literature developed on “the frustration of science,”
the idea that capitalists, incompetent bureaucrats, and politicians stood in the way of
the kinds of scientific developments that could overcome the failures of capitalism.21
These ideas became the core of a Left view of science, which focused on conditions
outside of science, such as the demands of the economy for particular kinds of tech-
nology, which either propel or retard relevant scientific development.22 In line with
the Marxist theory of history, the explanations of scientific development were
implicitly teleological. But the detailed explanations themselves were novel and quite
different from other histories of science, especially when they showed how the
development of particular ideas was closely entwined with the technology of the time.
A particular favorite was the argument that the availability of slaves in the ancient
world and the consequent contempt for “work that could be carried out by slaves”
led to Aristotle’s failures to recognize relevant facts, such as the fact, known to ancient
craftsmen but whose significance was not grasped until Galileo, that water could not
be raised more than thirty feet by pumps (Hogben, 1938: 367–68).
The leading Marxist commentators on science argued that the Soviet Union was the
one country in which science had obtained its “proper function,” as its most impor-
tant figure J. D. Bernal put it.23 They viewed the Soviet system as benign and also
argued that neutrality was impossible for the scientist, especially in face of the anti-
scientific drive of Fascism. They argued further that money for science would flow
freely in a rationally organized planning regime rather than a market economy and
that “any subject is capable of being examined by the scientific method” (Huxley,
1935: 31) including the economic system and society. They held that history was
presently in a transitional phase moving toward a state in which science, understood
extensively as implying “a unified, coordinated, and above all conscious control of
the whole of social life” (Bernal, 1939a: 409), would abolish the dependence of man
on the material world. Its rightful role was to become the conscious guiding force of
material civilization, to permeate all other spheres of culture.24 This claim allowed
Bernal to say, echoing Pearson on unforced consensus, that science already is Com-
munism, since it is performing the task of human society, and in the Communist way,
in which “men collaborate not because they are forced by superior authority or
because they blindly follow some chosen leader, but because they realize that only
in this willing collaboration can each man find his goals. Not orders, but advice,
The Social Study of Science before Kuhn 45

determines action” (1939a: 415–16).25 In practice, as Bernal envisioned it, scientists

would be organized into trade-unions which would cooperate with other trade-unions
in producing and carrying out the five-year plans.26

THE CRITIQUE OF EXTENSIVENESS

Bernal and his comrades understood that the issue that made their position unper-
suasive to other scientists was the notion that planning would be applied to science
itself. This raised the question of what sort of freedom of inquiry would exist under
planning. These were not issues that could be confined to the Soviet Union. Nazi
science was not only planned, it was “extensive” in a problematic sense that was also
relevant to Lenin’s notion that no cultural organization in the Soviet regimes should
be autonomous from the party. Under the Nazis, science was expected, though in prac-
tice this often meant little, to conform to Nazi ideology. Scientists who were Jews were
expelled, and a loud campaign was mounted against the “Jewish influence” in science.
A paper by a German scientist, Johannes Stark, originally published in a Nazi journal,
was translated and published in Nature (Stark, 1938). Stark’s paper focused the anxiety
of scientists and the Left about Nazism and prompted a huge response (Lowenstein,
2006). The response in the United States, however, was cast in terms of “freedom” and
assertions about the link between scientific freedom and democracy, leading to man-
ifestoes and resolutions in defense of science and democracy (Boas, 1938; Merton,
1942: 115; Turner, 2007).
This discussion provided the initial spur to a renewed debate on the autonomy of
science. Bernal, mindful of the successes of German planned science, defined the issues
in terms of a conflict between freedom and efficiency, a conflict which he thought
could be resolved within the framework of planning. But the issue of freedom under
planning was to be a theme in a larger and more wide-ranging political discussion.27
The issue of planning and the problem of the autonomy of science, which were
originally distinct, now converged. Robert Merton, who had emerged as a respected
figure for his study of religion and the Royal Society, wrote two papers, “Science and
the Social Order”([1938]1973) and “A Note on Science and Democracy” (1942), both
about autonomy and written with an eye to Nazi science, which extended Weber’s
cryptic account of science in “Science as a Vocation.” Merton described four norms of
science: universalism, organized scepticism, “communism” or sharing of scientific
results, and disinterestedness. In 1938 Merton noted that this was a “liberal” argu-
ment, for, as he put it, in a liberal society integration derives primarily from the body
of cultural norms ([1938]1973: 265). Merton’s norms were not rooted in, nor even
consistent with, the attitudes of the public, which could be expected to resent them.
It was for this very reason that science was vulnerable to fascism, which trades on
popular antirationalism and places centralized control on science. But conflicts
occurred in democracies as well, especially when the findings of science invalidated
dogmas (cf. 1942: 118–19). Thus, science and democracy are not compatible unless
there is a recognition of the autonomy of science, and such recognition was always
46 Stephen Turner

under threat by the normal extension of science into new topics, such as social science
investigations of areas considered sacred (1942: 126).
These were writings in “sociology” and reflected one of the dominant research con-
cerns of sociology in the period: the professions. Merton stayed away from issues of
scientific content and was careful to avoid taking sides between Left and liberal views
of science. For the most part, his argument preceded the bitter debate over planning
that broke out in the 1940s between Bernal’s Social Relations of Science movement
and the antiplanning Society for Freedom in Science (McGucken, 1984: 265–300).
The leading intellect of the anti-Bernal group was Michael Polanyi. Polanyi pro-
vided, where Merton did not, an argument for the autonomy of science based on the
claim that science had no need for political governance in the form of planning
because it was already “governed” sufficiently by its own traditions and because the
nature of scientific discovery itself could not be rationalized in the fashion assumed
by the planners (an argument that turned into an assault on the notion of scientific
method itself). Polanyi, like Conant, who made the issue of reception a centerpiece
of his view of science, denied that science proceeded by overthrowing theories on the
basis of new observations, noting that it often required the assimilation of significant
changes in unarticulated background knowledge (e.g., 1946: 29–31). Science was,
Polanyi argued, a community as distinct from the sort of “corporate” bureaucratic
order that was subject to planning.28 Planning would destroy the feature of commu-
nity life that made possible the growth of ideas, which was, for Polanyi, the ability of
scientists to freely choose which ideas to pursue.29 He based his claims about science
on an elaborately developed account of the ultimately inarticulable cognitive processes
of scientific discovery and the way in which discovery is dependent on local tradi-
tions and a special level of community life that honors “scientific conscience” and the
use of scientific judgement (1946: 52–66). This was an attack on any mechanical or
“logical” account of science.30
Polanyi’s argument addresses the problem of science and democracy in a novel way
that contrasts with Merton’s. If science, understood as nonmechanical activity of dis-
covery dependent on inarticulable knowledge, is subject to democratic control it will
not flourish. But science, Polanyi says, is not an anomaly for democracy. It is similar
in character to other communities, such as the church and the legal profession, which
are granted autonomy on the basis of their strongly traditional, self-governing char-
acter. Democracy itself, Polanyi argued, is strongly traditional and moreover depends
on a tradition “of free discussion” and decisions based on “conscience” (1946: 67) like
that of science. So the relation between science and democracy should be one of
mutual recognition and respect, from one traditional community to another, consis-
tent with the recognition that the fruits of science can best be gained by granting
autonomy to the scientific community (cf. Polanyi 1939, 1941–43, 1943–45, 1946,
[1951]1980).31
These were abstract considerations. There was also a practical battleground for the
Left view of science: education and public understanding. From Condorcet on, the
Left view of science education was that the workers should be made to think
The Social Study of Science before Kuhn 47

scientifically through some sort of basic training in science itself. Nor was this merely
a pious hope: many British scientists participated in workingmen’s educational pro-
jects that realized this goal, and the idea is reflected in the titles of the texts written
by the key Left thinkers about science in the 1930s, such as Mathematics for the Million
(Hogben, [1937]1940; see also Hogben, 1938; Levy, 1933, 1938, 1939; Crowther, 1931,
1932; Haldane, [1933]1971, [1940]1975). The critics of this view included James Bryant
Conant (1947: 111–12n), who dismissed as a failure the fifty years of applying
Pearson’s idea that elementary instruction in science would make for better citizens.
He reformed science education at Harvard accordingly, with the idea that, instead of
engaging in rudimentary exercises, it was better for students to get some knowledge
of the nature of science by working through case studies of major changes in “con-
ceptual schemes”—the favored Harvard language—such as the Copernican and chem-
ical revolutions.32 The set of case studies that was produced for this course (Conant,
1957), which Conant at first taught and which ran for nearly a decade (Fuller, 2000:
183), became the background for Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn
himself, who was recruited by Conant as an instructor for the course (Kuhn, 2000:
275–76), wrote the case study of the Copernican revolution, which became his first
book (Kuhn, 1957). Conant was equally aggressive in attempting to reform recruit-
ment into scientific careers, which he hoped to make more open and meritocratic, a
goal consistent with his “opportunity” liberalism (1940).
Although there are some differences in emphasis between Conant, Merton, and
Polanyi, to a remarkable extent they overlap, and Conant and Polanyi are particularly
close. Both Conant and Polanyi had a Liberal approach to science in the following
sense: they thought it was best to govern science indirectly, by facilitating competition
among scientists.33 But Conant, acknowledging the realities of “big science,” thought
it was necessary to have a set of major elite universities with massive resources, anal-
ogous to major corporations, in order to make this competition meaningful. The argu-
ment for extensiveness depends on a reductive account of science, identifying
transportable features, such as a “method” with unique intellectual authority. Conant
objected to the notion that there was a universal method of science and to the “wide
use of the word science” (i.e., what I have been calling extensiveness).34 Almost any
account of science that characterized the activity of science as continuous with non-
scientific forms of reasoning, psychology, perception, and forms of organization, and
accounted for it as a complex but distinctive amalgam of these features, made science
less transportable. Moreover, this style of explanation inevitably conflicted with the
more expansive claims of science to intellectual authority.35

POSTWAR SCIENCE STUDIES: THE ERA OF DISCIPLINES AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

The response of physicists to the Bomb, the coming of the Cold War, the betrayal
of atomic secrets by scientists, the Oppenheimer case, the Lysenko affair36 (which
finally discredited the Soviet model of science), and the rise of an aggressively anti-
Stalinist Left37 transformed this debate. Scientists on the Left turned to the nuclear
48 Stephen Turner

disarmament movement. The rapid growth of universities in the postwar period also
led to a greater focus on disciplinary discourse and consequently narrowing of inter-
est in topics “belonging” to other disciplines.38 The previously marginal field of phi-
losophy of science became the most prestigious and powerful subfield of philosophy
while shedding its past interests in Left wing politics.39 Much of its energy was taken
up with consolidating the standard view of the logical structure of scientific theories.40
Sociology of science, however, declined precipitously.
A bibliography by Barber and Merton in 1952 defines its literature: an amalgam of
Left commentary on science with studies of technology, including Ogburn’s Social
Effects of Aviation (1946), works by scientists and historians with a “social contexts”
component, government documents, Polanyi and Conant, and studies of Soviet
Science. The sociology of knowledge and Mannheim were intentionally omitted
(Barber & Merton, 1952: 143n); Fleck had yet to be discovered. Ogburn was at the end
of a long career, Stern was to die in the fifties. In American sociology only three major
scholars, Merton, Barber, and Edward Shils, continued to write on science, and Barber,
a follower of Talcott Parsons, was the only one of these to do so systematically and to
teach the subject. Merton left the field. Aside from the bibliography with Barber
(Barber & Merton, 1952) and the introduction to Barber’s book (1952), Merton pub-
lished only one paper on science, on the importance of claims of priority, between
1942 and 1961. Shils became involved with the atomic scientists’ movement, became
close to Leo Szilard, sponsored the hiring of Polanyi at the University of Chicago, and
was involved, along with Polanyi, in the Congress of Cultural Freedom and its
Hamburg conference on Science. What he wrote on science was largely restricted to
the scientists’ movement (1972: 196–203).41 This interest did lead to a minor classic,
The Torment of Secrecy (1956), on the inherent conflict between science and security
in liberal democracies. His basic formulation of the autonomy of science split the
difference between Merton and Polanyi: like Polanyi, he argued that “there is an
inner affinity between science and the pluralistic society” (1956: 176), and that the
“tradition of the free community of science” grew up independently of modern indi-
vidualistic liberalism; like Merton, he was concerned with “populistic hostility to
science” (1956: 181) which exacerbated the intrinsic problems of political supervision
of science.
Parsons, the inescapable “theorist” of this era in sociology, wrote a great deal on
universities as institutions, but little on science.42 Parsons saw science through the lens
of his own view of the professions as essential building blocks of modernity, especially
by virtue of their embodiment of the normative commitments of modernity, and thus
as sharing in the central values of the society (cf. Parsons, 1986). The same thinking
informed Barber’s Science and the Social Order (1952), the first text that was recogniz-
able as a theoretical and empirical overview of the sociology of science. In his 1990
collection of essays on science, Barber argued for “the special congruence of science
with several characteristic subsystems of modern ‘liberal’ societies’ ” (1990: 40) as well
as “the independent rationality of science.” The emphasis on the place of science in
the social system was, as Barber commented, “Parsonian all the way” (1990: 39).
The Social Study of Science before Kuhn 49

Despite Barber’s Science and the Social Order, which was one of the earliest in a long
series of works by Parsons’s students that were designed to colonize and bring theo-
retical order to the study of different societal “subsystems,” the study of science did
not flourish. Merton became a major figure in sociology but not for his writings on
science. Like the Parsonians, he wrote on the professions, engineering, nursing, tech-
nologists, and medical students. When he returned to writing on science in the1960s,
“ambivalence” replaced the conflict between science and society of his 1938 essay, and
the model of ambivalence was the reluctance of patients to accept the authority of
physicians’ advice ([1963b]1976: 26).
In the 1960s and ‘70s, Merton and his students became associated with the argu-
ment that science functioned meritocratically, which was a version of the argument
that the autonomy of science ought to be honored, but it was a characteristically
depoliticized argument and avoided issues involving the intellectual substance of
science in favor of external indicators, such as Nobel prizes and citations, which could
be correlated with one another (e.g., Cole and Cole, 1973).43 Merton barely acknowl-
edged such thinkers as Polanyi.44 Although Merton himself was partial to the history
of science and not narrowly “sociological” in his writing about science, the abstractly
quantitative approach of the Mertonian “program” made it largely irrelevant to the
discussion of science that Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions was opening up,
which was dominated by issues relating to the collapse of the theory-observation dis-
tinction that had been central to the standard model of scientific theory of the Logical
Positivists.
Kuhn was the intellectual heir of Conant (though also influenced by Polanyi and
the Quinean critique of Carnap), but he was Conant with the politics left out. He was
nevertheless a genuinely interdisciplinary thinker who had been especially ensnared
by the disciplinary divisions of the 1950s. But this situation was quickly changing.
Departments of history and philosophy of science were established at London (1949)
and Melbourne (1946), and Indiana (1960) and Pittsburgh (1971), and others were to
follow. Kuhn was appointed to a comparable position at Princeton.45 Minerva was
established in 1962. At Edinburgh, the interdisciplinary unit of Science Studies was
established in 1964. A department of history and sociology of science was established
at the University of Pennsylvania (1971). The continuities with the older discussion
were highly visible. Polanyi’s concerns and those raised by the atomic scientists’ move-
ment guided Minerva. The historian of the Bernal circle, Gary Werskey, was appointed
at Edinburgh, a program motivated in part by concerns about explaining how science
actually worked, a project parallel to Conant’s but this time pursued by veterans of
the Social Responsibility of Science movement, the heir to the Social Relations of
Science movement (MacKenzie, 2003).
The institutional stage was thus set for the developments that produced “Science
Studies.” Ironically, among the central intellectual conditions for the rise of science
studies was the separation between the disciplines that occurred in the 1950s. Now
it represented an opportunity for debate. The rational reconstructions given by
philosophers of science and the Popperian model of falsification became targets for
50 Stephen Turner

sociologists of science, and the agonistic relation that emerged (Zammito, 2004) was
to provide the motive force for the revival of science studies as an interdisciplinary
field. The conflict between science as an authoritative technique and science as a form
of life was to take a new form: initially defined in disciplinary terms as a conflict
between philosophy and sociology of science, and eventually in political terms as a
dispute over the authority of science and of experts that Bacon himself would have
recognized.

Notes

1. “by a suitable choice of a syllabus and methods of education, we can teach the citizen everything
he needs to know in order to be able to manage his household, administer his affairs and employ his
labour and his faculties in freedom . . . not to be in a state of blind dependence on those to whom he
must entrust his affairs or the exercise of his rights; to be in a proper condition to choose and super-
vise them; . . . to defend himself from prejudice by the strength of his reason alone; and, finally, to
escape the deceits of charlatans . . . ” ([1795]1955: 182).

2. “When it comes to the institutions of public instruction, and the incentives that it would be their
duty to provide to those who cultivate the sciences, they can have only a single guide: the opinion of
men enlightened on these questions, which are necessarily foreign to the greatest number. Now it is
necessary to be endowed with a superior reason, and to have acquired much knowledge oneself, to be
able to listen to this opinion or to understand it well.” ([1793]1976: 286).

3. Originally there were three classes of the Academy (physical and mathematical sciences, moral and
political sciences, literature and fine arts), but in1803 a decree of Napoleon I changed the division to
four (physical and mathematical sciences, French language and literature, history and ancient litera-
ture, and fine arts), suppressing the second class (moral and political sciences) as subversive to the state.

4. This was later modified into the more famous Marxist version, “to each according to his needs”
(Manuel, 1966: 84; Manuel, 1976: 65).

5. A notion greatly expanded by Lenin’s account of the withering away of the state in “The State and
Revolution” ([1918]1961).

6. Manuel gives a useful account of Saint-Simon’s shifting view of the role of the scientist, which was
gradually reduced and subordinated to the industrialist (1960), in part as a reflection of his disap-
pointment at the reluctance of scientists—whom he tellingly denounced for their “anarchism” (1960:
348) for failing to submit to the authority of the general theory he proposed—to join his cause.

7. The idea that the history of mathematics might be the key to the understanding of intellectual
progress already appears in Saint-Simon (Manuel, 1960: 345).

8. This was Comte’s theory of the subjective synthesis (Acton, 1951: 309).

9. As Manuel explains his reasoning,

Since men of a class would seek to excel in their natural aptitudes, there could be only rivalry in
good works, not a struggle for power. When class chiefs owed their prestige to their control of men,
they could fight over one another’s ‘governed’, but since there would be no governors and no sub-
jects, from what source would class antagonism be derived? Within a class men of the same capac-
ity would be striving to excel one another with creations whose merits all members of the class would
be able to evaluate. Between classes there could be only mutual aid. There was no basis for hostility,
no occasion for invading one another’s territory. (Manuel, [1962]1965: 134–35).
Views of Karl Popper
The positivistic construal of science was most systematically attacked by Karl Popper who
provided an alternative image of science. His theory of scientific method has won a lot of admirers
both in science and philosophy. Whereas positivists tried to work out a sophisticated version of
the view called inductivism, Popper sought to resurrect its rival, namely, hypothesism. In what
follows, we shall consider his views on the nature of sciences along with his attack on positivistic
theory of science. It might be pointed out that for Popper the value of the philosophical interest in
scientific knowledge lies in its ability to shed light on the central question of philosophy, namely,
the problem of cosmology: „The problem of understanding the world including ourselves and our
knowledge of the world as part of the world‟1. In studying Popper‟s contribution to our
understanding of science one must bear in mind his general philosophical concerns which alone
set in motion, guide and lend deep significance to his painstaking work on the nature of science.
The philosophical inquiry into the nature of scientific method, according to Popper, must confine
itself to the manner in which scientific theories are evaluated and accepted or rejected. Popper
refuses to consider as legitimate the inquiry into the way in which these theories are arrived at.
Therefore, according to Popper, philosophy of science must first confine itself to the context of
justification and refuse to say that anything about the context of discovery. Popper considers the
creative process in and through which scientific ideas are generated to be unamendable to any
rational explanation. Secondly, an adequate philosophy of science, according to Popper, must
provide a criterion of demarcation between science and non-science. Like positivists, Popper is
convinced of the uniqueness and supremacy of science in the overall scheme of our activities aimed
at knowledge acquisition. Hence, both positivists and Popper felt the need to demarcate science
from the rest of knowledge-acquisition activities. That is why positivists who were inductivists
maintained that the hallmark of scientific theories lies in their systematic verifiability. Popper
replaces verifiability by falsifiability. According to Popper, the hallmark of scientific theories lies
in their systematic falsifiability. Popper maintains that what distinguishes science from the rest of
our knowledge is not that scientific statements are verifiable, but that they are falsifiable. The
scientific theories are falsifiable, according to Popper, in the sense that they transparently state
what circumstances lead to their rejection. Whenever scientific theories are advanced, it is also
stated under what conditions they turn out to be false so that we try to obtain those conditions in
order to falsify our claims. An ideal scientific statement is constituted in such a way that its terms
instead of helping to survive enable it to readily accept the risk of being falsified. In other words,
a model of scientific statement should readily yield test implications which we deduce in order to
refute it. A statement however plausible and perfectly consistent with what we observe is not
scientific unless we can easily deduce testable consequences from it. It is in this connection, Popper
attacks Marxism as being pseudo-scientific2. When Marx propounded his theory of capitalist
society, his theory was a falsifiable theory because it yielded test implications such as
disappearances of middle class, revolution in advanced industrial societies, etc. However, these
test implications were not borne out and hence the theory was falsified. But, the followers of Marx
tried to explain the fact that the Marxist predictions did not come about by taking recourse to adhoc
explanations and thus insisted that there was nothing wrong with the theory. In the process, they
went on building safety valves for the theory with the result that the theory becomes unfalsifiable.
A religious theory about the world is, of course, also unfalsifiable. But, the propounders of
religious theories about the world never claim scientificity for their views, whereas Marxists do so
vehemently. Hence, Marxist theory is not merely unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific, but also
pseudo-scientific. It is this pretension to be scientific while being unfalsifiable makes the theory
pseudo-scientific. In accordance with what Popper considers to be the hallmark of scientific
theories, he puts forward an adequate model of scientific method. He characterizes his model of
scientific method as hypothetico-deductive (H-D) model. According to him, the method of science
is not the method of induction, but the method of hypothetico-deduction. What are the fundamental
differences between these methodological models? First, the inductivist model maintains that our
observations are theory-independent and therefore are indubitable. That is to say, since
observations are theory-independent, they have probability value of 1. It also says that our theories
are only winnowed from observations and therefore our scientific theories have the initial
probability value 1 in principle. Of course, inductivists admitted that in actual practice, theories
may contain something more than what observation statements indicate the result; our actual
theories may not have been winnowed from observations. Hence, the need for verification arises.
Popper rejects the inductivist view that our observations are theory-free and hence rejects the idea
that our observation statements have probability equal to 1. More importantly, he maintains that
theories are not winnowed from observations or facts, but are free creations of human mind. Our
scientific ideas, in other words, are not extracted from our observations; they are “pure” inventions.
Since our theories are our own constructions, not the functions of anything like pure observations,
which according to Popper are anyway myths, the initial probability of our scientific theories is
zero.
From this it follows that whereas according to inductivists, what scientific tests do is to merely
find out whether our scientific theories are true. According to Popper, scientific tests cannot
establish the truth of scientific theories, even when the tests give positive results. If a test gives a
positive result, inductivists claim that the scientific theory is established as true, whereas according
to Popper, all that we claim is that our theory has not yet been falsified. Popper suspects even that
“The sun always rises in the east”. In Popper‟s scheme, no amount of positive result of scientific
testing can prove our theories. Whereas inductivists speak of confirmation of our theories in the
face of positive results of the test, Popper only speaks of corroboration. In other words, in the
inductivist scheme we can speak of scientific theories as established truths, whereas in the
Popperian scheme a scientific theory however well supported by evidence remains permanently
tentative. We can bring out the fundamental difference between verificationism (inductivism) and
falsificationism (hypothetico-deductivism) by drawing on the analogy between two systems of
criminal law. According to one system, the judge has to start with the assumption that the accused
is innocent and consequently, unless one finds evidence against her/him, s/he should be declared
innocent. According to the other, the judge has to start with the assumption that the accused is a
culprit and consequently, unless evidence goes in her/his favour, s/he should be declared to be a
culprit. Obviously, that latter system of criminal law is harsher than the former. The inductivist
scheme is analogous to the former kind of criminal law, whereas the hypothetico-deductive scheme
is akin to the latter one. In the inductivist scheme of observation, tentative generalization,
verification and confirmation constitute the steps of scientific procedure. In the Popperian scheme,
we begin with a problem, suggest a hypothesis as a tentative solution, try to falsify our solution by
deducing the test implications of our solution, try to show that the implications are not borne out
and consider our solution to be corroborated if repeated attempts to falsify it fails. Thus, problem,
tentative solution, falsification and corroboration constitute the steps of scientific procedure.
Popper‟s theory of scientific method is called hypothetico-deductivism because, according to him,
the essence of scientific practice consists in deducing the test implications of our hypotheses and
attempt to falsify the latter by showing that the former do not obtain, whereas according to
inductivism, the essence of scientific practice consists in searching for instances supporting the
generalization arrived at on the basis of some observations and with the principle of induction.
Popper claims that the hypothetico-deductive model of scientific method is superior to inductivist
model for the following reasons. First, it does justice to the critical spirit of science by maintaining
that the aim of scientific testing is to falsify our theories and by maintaining that our scientific
theories however corroborated permanently remain tentative. In other words, the hypothetico-
deductivist view presents scientific theories as permanently vulnerable with the sword of possible
falsification always hanging on their head. The inductivist view of scientific method makes science
a safe and defensive activity by portraying scientific testing as a search for confirming instances
and by characterizing scientific theories as established truths. According to Popper, the special
status accorded to science is due to the fact that science embodies an attitude which is essentially
open-minded and anti-dogmatic. Hypothetico-deductivism is an adequate model of scientific
practice because it gives central place to such an attitude. Secondly, Popper thinks that if science
had followed an inductivist path, it would not have made the progress it has. Suppose a scientist
has arrived at a generalization. If s/he follows the inductivist message, s/he will go in search of
instances which establish it as truth. If s/he finds an instance which conflicts with her/his
generalization, what s/he does is to qualify the generalization mentioning that the generalization is
true except in the cases where it has been held to be unsupported. Such qualifications impose heavy
restrictions on the scope of the generalization. This results in scientific theories becoming
extremely narrow in their range of applicability. But, if a scientist follows the hypothetico-
deductive view, s/he will throw away her/his theory once s/he comes across a negative instance
instead of pruning it and fitting it with the known positive facts. Instead of being satisfied with the
theory tailored to suit the supporting observations, s/he will look for an alternative which will
encompass not only the observations which supported the old theory, but also the observations
which went against the old theory, and more importantly, which will yield fresh test implications.
The theoretical progress science has made can be explained only by the fact that science seeks to
come out with bolder and bolder explanations rather than taking recourse to the defensive method
of reducing the scope of the theories to make them consistent with facts. Hence, Popper claims
that the hypothetico-deductive model gives an adequate account of scientific progress. According
to him, if one accepts the inductivist account of science, one fails to give any explanation of
scientific progress. Thirdly, the hypothetico-deductive view, according to Popper, avoids the
predicament encountered by inductivist theory in the face of Hume‟s challenge. As we have seen,
Hume conclusively showed that the principle of induction cannot be justified on logical grounds.
If Hume is right, then science is based upon an irrational faith. According to the hypothetico-
deductive view, science does not use the principle of induction at all. Hence, even though Hume
is right, it does not matter to science if science follows the hypothetico-deductivist lines of
procedure. Also, Popper seeks to establish that inductivism and hypothetico-deductivism are so
radically different that the latter in no way faces any threat akin to the one faced by the former. In
this connection, he draws our attention to the logical asymmetry between verification, the central
component of the inductivist scheme, and falsification, the central component of the hypothetico-
deductivist scheme. They are logically asymmetrical in the sense that one negative instance is
sufficient for conclusively falsifying a theory, whereas no amount of positive instances are
sufficient to conclusively verify a theory. It may be recalled that Hume was able to come out with
the problem of induction precisely because a generalization (all theories according to inductivism
are generalizations) cannot be conclusively verified.
How does Popper characterize scientific progress? According to him, one finds in the history of
science invariable transitions from theories to better theories. What does the word, “better” stand
for? It may be recalled that, according to Popper, no scientific theory however corroborated can
be said to be “true”. Hence, Popper drops the very concept of “Truth” and replaces it by the concept
of “Verisimilitude” (truth-likeness or truth-nearness) in his characterization of the goal of science.
In other words, though science cannot attain truth, that is, though our theories can never be said to
be true, science can set for itself the goal of achieving higher and higher degrees of Verisimilitude,
that is, they can progressively approximate to Truth. So, in science, we go from theory to better
theory and the criterion of betterness is Verisimilitude. But, what is the criterion of Verisimilitude?
The totality of the best implications of hypothesis constitutes, what Popper calls, the empirical
content of the hypotheses. The totality of the test implications, which is borne out, constitutes the
truth content of the hypothesis, and the totality of the test implications, which is not borne out, is
called the false content of the hypothesis. The criterion of the Verisimilitude of a theory is nothing
but truth content minus the falsity content of a theory. In the actual history of science, we always
find the theories being replaced by better theories, that is, theories with higher Verisimilitude. In
other words, of the two successive theories, at any time in the history of science, we find the
successor theory possesses greater Verisimilitude and is therefore better than its predecessor.
Indeed, according to Popper, theory is rejected as false only if we have an alternative which is
better than the one at hand in the sense that it has more test implications and a creator number of
its test implications are already borne out. The growth of science is convergent in the sense that
the successful part of the old theory is retained in the successor theory, with the result the old
theory becomes a limiting case of the new one. The growth of science thus shows a continuity. In
other words, it is the convergence of the old theory into the new one that provides continuity in
the growth of science. It must also be mentioned in this connection that unlike inductivists or
positivists, Popper is a realist in the sense, according to him, scientific theories are about an
unobservable world. This implies that the real world of unobservables though can never be
captured by our theories entirely is becoming more and more available to us. Popper contends that
the greater and greater Verisimilitude attained by our theories evidence that the gap between the
Truth and our theories can never be completely filled, it can be progressively reduced, with the
result the real world of unobservables will be more and more like what our theories say though not
completely so. How does Popper establish the objectivity of scientific knowledge? Inductivists
sought to establish the objectivity of science by showing that scientific theories are based upon
pure observations. The so-called pure observations were supposed to be absolutely theory-free.
They are only “given” and hence free from the subjective inferences. Popper, as we have seen,
rightly rejects the idea of pure observations. Consequently, he cannot accept the inductivist account
of the objectivity of science. First, what engenders scientific objectivity according to Popper is not
the possibility of pure observation, but the possibility of inter-subjective testing. In short, science
is objective because it is public, and it is public because its claims are inter-subjectively testable.
Secondly, Popper makes room for relative autonomy of facts or observations. That is to say,
whereas inductivists considered observations to be “absolutely” theory-free, Popper construes
them to be “relatively” theory-free. He maintains that though an observation must depend upon
some theory, it can be independent of the theory which is tested in terms of it. Hence, a theory
depends upon (rejected or tentatively accepted) a prior observation, which in turn, needs
ratification in terms of a theory prior to it. To the question, “which comes first, observation or
theory?”, the inductivist answers “observation”. Popper answers earlier observation or earlier
theory. To Popper, the question is as illegitimate as the question “which comes first, egg or hen”
that can be only answered by saying “earlier egg or earlier hen”.

Comment on Popperian Methodology In what follows, we shall make a few critical comments
on Popperian methodology which has as many detractors as admirers.
Popper draws an invidious distinction between the context of discovery and the context of
justification, and maintains that philosophy of science as methodology of science must confine
itself to the latter, since according to him, discovery process involves a-rational factors which defy
rational explanation. His rejection of the possibility of a rational account of discovery has been
called into question. He seems to confine his attention to the examples like Kekule‟s discovery of
Benzene structure wherein the central idea occurred to Kekule in a dream. But not all such cases
are standard. Typical discoveries are provided by an elaborate reasoning process. Even in the case
of Kekule, one must explain why only that dream was taken as providing clue to the Benzene
structure. It appears more plausible to say that Kekule had undertaken enough reasoning to get the
hint from that dream. That is to say, though clicks, hunches, intuition and other imponderables do
play a role in the formation of hypothesis, they are preceded and succeeded by a long and guided
chain of reasoning. Perhaps, the main reason for Popper‟s rejection of the possibility of a rational
account of discovery is his identification of the possibility of a rational account of discovery with
the possibility of an inductivist account of discovery. The inductivist account of discovery
maintains the use of the principle of induction coupled with repeated observations leading to
discovery. Later, inductivists like Mill even tried to work out thumb rules of discovery. Popper is
right in showing that inductivists came nowhere near providing an account of discovery. No
amount of observations can suggest us a theoretical idea. But, Popper is wrong in thinking that
from this it follows that a rational account of discovery is an impossibility. Hanson, in his Patterns
of Discovery, comes heavily on Popper and advances a theory concerning discovery on the basis
of the work by Charles Pierce. If according to Popper, the essence of science consists in the way
in which theories are tested, according to Hanson, real science is over with the conception of the
hypothesis. To quote Hanson, „There is something wrong with the H-D account… If it were
construed as an account of physical practice, it would be misleading. Physicists do not start from
hypotheses; they start from data (though not in the inductivist fashion). By the time a law has been
fixed into an H-D system, really original and physical thinking is over. The pedestrian process of
deducing observation statements from hypothesis comes only after the physicist sees that the
hypothesis will at least explain the initial data requiring explanation‟3. Reacting to Popper‟s
contention that the context of discovery is irrelevant from the methodological point of view,
Hanson says, „Galileo struggled for 34 years before he was able to advance his constant
acceleration hypothesis with confidence. Is this conceptually irrelevant? Was it only the
predictions from his hypothesis which commend it to Galileo? The philosopher of science must
answer “NO”‟4. Discussing in detail the process by which Kepler arrived at his final position,
Hanson concludes, „Kepler never modified a projected explanation capriciously: he always has a
sound reason for every modification he made. When exactly satisfied the observations it stood
upon a totally different logical footing from what it would if it has been struck out at random…
and has been found to satisfy observations. Kepler shows his keen logical sense in detailing the
whole process by which he finally arrived at the true orbit. This is the greatest piece of retroductive
reasoning ever performed‟5. The type of reasoning which has gone into Kepler‟s thinking, Hanson
characterizes as retroductive. The form of the inference is – (1) Some surprising phenomenon P is
observed: (2) P would be explicable as a matter of course if a hypothesis H is true: and (3) And
hence, there is a reason to think that H is true. H does not emanate from some unaccountable
creation as hypothetico-deductivists think nor from simple repetitions of observations as
inductivists think. It emanates from a mode of thinking which seeks to find out a plausible pattern
into which what are observed are fitted. A hypothesis provides such as a plausible pattern. Before
we test a hypothesis, it must at least be plausible and not just a conjecture. Of course, apart from
its plausibility, the hypothesis must satisfy further conditions such as if a hypothesis H is meant to
explain a phenomenon P, then H cannot itself rest upon the features in P which required
explanation. „That is why the peculiar colour and odour of Chlorine (P) are not explained by
reference to atoms in a volume of Chlorine, each one having the colour and odour in question (H).
Grasping this point is essential for any understanding of the fundamental concepts of modern
particle physics‟6. Of course, the current work on discovery has gone much ahead of Hanson in
terms of sharpness of articulation and rigour of analysis. But, the credit of putting on defensive the
Popperian position on discovery goes to Hanson‟s path-breaking work.
Another serious lacuna in Popper‟s position concerns his idea of scientific progress. The progress
of science is continuous in the sense that in two successive theories the latter contains the former
or the best part of it. The continuity of scientific progress is exemplified by the fact that between
two successive theories, the former is always the limiting case of the latter. In this connection,
Popper cites the example of Newtonian theory and Einsteinean theory. But, Popper first overlooks
the fact that in the actual history of science, such comparables are rare. For example, it is assured
to say that Phlogiston Chemistry is the limiting case of Oxygen theory or Polemic theory is the
limiting case of Copernican theory. Secondly, Popper‟s idea that our successive theories exhibit
increasing degree of Verisimilitude is more like what our present theory says than what our earlier
theory indicated. It implies, following Popper we must say, that the ultimate constituents of matter
are more like fields (as contemporary physical theory indicates) than particular (as classical
physics indicated). But, this is slightly unintelligible. In short, we are led into unintelligibility, if
we literally apply Popper‟s characterization of two successive theories to the very cases he takes
to be paradigmatic. Finally, in characterizing the old theory as an approximation to the new one,
Popper assumes that the general locations of the new theory imply the same things as in the old
one. That is to say, Popper assumes that when a fundamental shift in theory takes place, the
meaning of the terms remain invariant. This assumption has been called into question by some
philosophers of science who show that the terms like “mass”, “force”, etc. have one meaning in
Newtonian framework and another in the post-Newtonian framework. Thomas S. Kuhn and Paul
Feyerabend, whose views we explicate below, have convincingly argued that a shift from one
theory to another is accompanied by a shift in the meaning of the works that are common to both
the theories. If so, Popper‟s characterization of growth of science, as continuous, collapses.
 Against Method, by Paul
Feyerabend

Forth Edition 2010, published by Verso of

London and New York.

ISBN: 13: 978-1-84467-442-8.

 Against Method
The beginning of twentieth century has marked with
attack on “objective knowledge” from different angles.
 scientific methodology:
➢ reality is out there
➢ Popper procedure or laws
➢ Hypothesis
➢ Arrive at reality
 Historically, Each theoretical progress is
deviated from laws and proper processor

 Our orientation of scientific knowledge

 Difficulty to understand new argument

 Hypothesis may Contradict or confirm theories
with well established experiment

 Proliferation of theories should be more

beneficiary to our knowledge

 Every idea or theory has improved our

knowledge
 If there is fact-theory contradiction it, might be
due to implicit in principal or clash with
ideologies.

 For instance, replacement of Copernicus theory

by Galileo, But how?

 He used more abstract observational language

 He changed method of sensation by telescope,

although he could not justify the change
 Galileo observation with telescope was
inconsistent with theories

 Inability to give proper justification

 At some level, Copernican view was consistent

 But, Copernican view survived because reason

was overruled in the past
 Still Galileo's conception can be used one
several frontier, e.g. mind- body duality
On society level,
 The tussle between Church and Galileo

 Its social and ethical consequence on society

 But his conception narrowed the world view and

leave vas t field unexplored
 It suggest abolishing distinction between a
context of discovery and context of justification

 Norm and fact

 Observational terms and theoretical terms

 Scientific methodology is an anarchic enterprise

Karl Popper
Philosophy of Science
Introduction

• Karl Popper (1902-1994) was one of the most influential philosophers

of science of the 20th century.

• He made significant contributions to debates concerning general

scientific methodology and theory choice, the demarcation of science
from non-science, the nature of probability and quantum mechanics,
and the methodology of the social sciences.
• In 1935, Popper published Logik der Forschung (The Logic of
Research), his first major work in the philosophy of science. Popper
later translated the book into English and published it under the title
The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959).

• In the book, Popper offered his first detailed account of scientific

methodology and of the importance of falsification.
Method of Induction

• Popper argues that there are in fact two closely related problems of
induction: the logical problem of induction and the psychological
problem of induction.

• The problem concerns the possibility of justifying belief in the truth or

falsity of general laws based on empirical evidence that concerns only
specific individuals.
Falsification and the Criterion of Demarcation

• Popper’s early work in the philosophy of science focuses on what he

calls the problem of demarcation, or the problem of distinguishing
scientific (or empirical) theories from non-scientific theories.

• Popper aims to capture the logical or methodological differences

between scientific disciplines, such as physics, and non-scientific
disciplines, such as myth-making, philosophical metaphysics
Critics of Falsification

• falsificationism involves the relationship between theory and

observation.

• Falsifiability contends that falsification fails to provide an

accurate picture of scientific practice

• Popper’s account of corroboration and the role it plays in theory

choice
Science
Technology and
Society

Dr. Vikas Kumar

– What is Science, Technology and Society, and why
should anyone want to study it?
– In particular, why should science students have an
interest in the subject?
 The importance of science and
technology
– There are various scholar agree that science and technology are of great importance in the
world today. Some highly developed countries, such as Sweden and Switzerland, spend 2 or 3
per cent of their gross domestic product (i.e. the total wealth a country produces) on science
and technology.
– science can alter our entire conception of ourselves and our place in the universe. The most
famous instance of this was the series of events known as the Scientific Revolution. During
this turbulent time in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Galileo and other scientists
began to argue that the Earth was not at the centre of the universe, but whirled on its own
axis, and orbited around the Sun.
– Later, Darwin argued that humans arose as the product of natural processes, not divinely
wrought miracles
– In the nineteenth century, science-based technology began to transform whole
industries. In this century, it has made warfare far more dangerous—indeed, a major
nuclear war could wipe out all human life—and has changed virtually all aspects of our
lives.
– the rapid onslaught of computerisation and telecommunications. This has created a
world-wide net of communication, and also wiped out employment for many millions
of people throughout the world. Modern pharmaceuticals can cure diseases which
terrified our forefathers, and yet other diseases arise, sometimes from the effects of
the drugs themselves.
– Science and technology are changing every aspect of our lives, all the time. No one in the
contemporary world is untouched, and the greater our understanding of what is happening, the
greater our ability to ensure that science and technology are used in ways which benefit the
human race, rather than leading to our destruction.
– how science emerges as a social phenomenon, how the social role of the scientist is
institutionalised according to the values of society, how the scientific community becomes
independent of society, how the laboratory emerges as an institution and disciplines are
established within society.
Some basic terms

– Science is our most effective way of understanding the natural

world. All science involves some form of observation or
experiment, and some sort of theorising about how to explain the
evidence collected.
– The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines science as 'systematic,
organised knowledge', and this systematic nature sets science apart
from other types of understanding.
– science is concerned with evidence and with theory. Scientific evidence often
comes from experiments, though some sciences, such as astronomy and
geology, do not do experiments.
– Popper, Kuhn and Feyerabend.
– Broadly, we regard technology as a body of skills and knowledge
by which we control and modify the world. More and more,
technology is being influenced by scientific knowledge, with
spectacular results.
– The technology of shipbuilding and navigation enabled Britain to
conquer a quarter of the world. We should also notice that, from
this viewpoint, medicine is a technology. It enables doctors to
intervene in the human body through drugs or surgery.
– there is another way in which the word society can be applied to science and
technology. Scientists and technologists do not work in isolation. They work in
universities, firms or research groups, and the functioning of these groupings is
also a legitimate focus of study.
The origins of Science,
Technology and Society studies

– Most work has been done since World War II, views of the relationships
between science, technology and society go back for many centuries.
– Probably the first attempt to outline the ideal relationships between science,
technology and society, though, was published in 1527 by the British lawyer and
thinker Francis Bacon, in his book The New Atlantis
– Bacon told of an imaginary journey to a small island in the South Seas, where a
civilisation was based upon science and technology.
– In Bacon's imagination, scientists are accorded the same honours as royalty, and
carry out their work in an organisation (called 'Solomon's House'), making scientific
discoveries, and turning these discoveries into technology.
– It took many centuries for events to catch up with Bacon's vision. Thinkers in the
Enlightenment, during the eighteenth century, laid out a program for extending
knowledge and repelling superstition.
– Politics has played a crucial part in the Science, Technology and Society
movement. One of the earliest efforts arose out of the experience of the 1917
revolution in Russia and the establishment of a (supposedly) socialist state.
– Marx and Lenin argued that a socialist state like the Soviet Union represented a
higher stage in social development than the liberal democracies of the West.
One part of this theory was the materialist interpretation of history, which held
that all significant social and intellectual change is caused by change in the
productive forces of the economy.
– This approach was also applied to science, and the Marxist view of science became known to
scholars in the West through a conference on the history of science, called Science at the
Crossroads, which was held in London in 1931. Notable among the Soviet delegation was a
historian named Boris Hessen, who gave a paper entitled 'The Social and Economic Roots of
Newton's Principia (Hessen 1931)
– The Principia is Sir Isaac Newton's famous book, in which he put forward his three laws of motion,
his law of gravity and much more. Hessen argued that Newton was led to address certain sorts of
problems because their solution would lead to advances in technologies that were important to
the dominant social forces of the time. These technologies included advances in navigation,
mining, and the development of weaponry.
– Although the Soviet Union collapsed in 1992, for a long time many Western
thinkers were impressed by the communist experiment. In particular, it was
noted that science and technology were an important part of communism: the
state financed large scientific and technological projects and did not leave
developments to chance.
– J. D. Bernal, of London University. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1934, he
concluded that science in Britain should be organised, like that in the Soviet
Union, to solve pressing economic problems. He wrote a book called The Social
Function of Science, which appeared in 1939.
– The key point of this book is that science is not primarily a search for the
understanding of the universe; rather, it has a social function. This function is
the improvement of the lot of humanity.
– Many scientists felt strongly that science could not be directed, and in the United
Kingdom after World War II (1939-45) the Society for Freedom in Science was
formed to combat what they called 'Bernalism'.
Perspectives on Science –
Technology Relationship
– Dr. Hsien-Hui Lee observes : “Sparkes illustrated this relationship and pointed
out that even though science and technology overlap in an area which might be
referred to as “applied science”, there are a number of important differences
between the two (table 1), even though these differences might not be self-
evident to an average member of the general public who, through neglect and
through repeated use of the phrase “science and technology” has lost the
distinction between “science” and between “technology….”
– Perhaps the most dramatic of these developments took place in the United
States. A distinguished scientist, Vannevar Bush, was asked to report on a
suitable plan for science after World War II. Bush recommended the setting up
of a National Research Foundation—which later
– became the National Science Foundation. He also wrote a report, Science, The
Endless Frontier (Bush 1945), which advocated the setting up of a national
policy concerned with science.
– Vannevar Bush came to the conclusion that basic research leads to new knowledge, and this
creates the fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn (Bush,
1945,). Without basic research there is no possibility of technological progress.
– This linear or hierarchical model has its roots in economic and prestige factors. Scientists, for
fear of technological outcomes overshadowing scientific research, wanted to establish a linear
dependence between scientific discoveries and technological innovation.
– The most sophisticated version of this thesis in philosophy was produced by Mario Bunge
(Bunge). Bunge defined technology as applied science Bunge defined technology as applied
science Technology creates new scientific possibilities.
– The linear model is based on the assumption that innovating is applied science.
It is linear because there is well defined set of stages that innovations are
assumed to go through. Research comes first, then development, and finally
production and marketing.
The hierarchical/linear model.

– Without some developments in one area there is no possibility for the other to
develop. There are two different versions: one maintains that technology is the
outcome of the application of new scientific knowledge. The other one holds
that without a special technological infrastructure there is no new scientific
knowledge.
– The hierarchical model also moves in another direction, one from technological
innovation to scientific discoveries. For instance, Derek de Solla Price (1984)
argues that there are some technological innovations (arising within normal
technological evolution) that yield new scientific possibilities.
THOMAS KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
(THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC
REVOLUTIONS)
Important Aspects of Kuhn’s
Philosophy of Science
•Scientific progress is revolutionary rather than stable and
cumulative.
•Scientific change cannot be explained entirely as a rational
process; sociology and psychology are needed to explain
scientific change.
General Pattern of Scientific Change

pre-science → normal science → crisis

→ revolution → new normal science →
new crisis → · · · ·
• “pre-science”—disorganized and unstructured activity characterized by total
disagreement and constant debate over fundamentals
• normal science”—structured activity that is directred by a single paradigm,
which is uncritically accepted by the (vast majority of the) scientific
community
• “crisis”—occurs when anomalies become sufficiently numerous and serious to
call the current paradigm into question
• “revolution”—occurs when a crisis is resolved by the scientific community’s
abandoning one paradigm and adopting another paradigm (e.g., the Copernican
revolution)
According to Kuhn, a “paradigm shift” is in some ways like a “religious conversion” and cannot be
explained entirely on the basis of logic or rationality:
1. Different scientists are (psychologically) affected by different factors in their decisions about
whether to adopt a new paradigm.
2. A paradigm presupposes metaphysical and epistemological perspectives from which other
paradigms are inferior. (e.g., The world is deterministic. “Vital forces” exist in nature.)
3. Paradigm shifts do not occur because of a single convincing argument. Rather different
arguments convince different scientists.
4. Arguments that scientists use in debating paradigms operate mainly by persuasion rather than by
logic or rationality.
5. The choice between competing paradigms calls for a “decision between alternate ways of
practicing science.”
6. The decision to accept a new paradigm is often a matter of faith.
7. Scientists who resist paradigm shifts are not wrong or unreasonable. Rather, because of the
changes in the conception of what science is that is associated with the new paradigm, they cease
to be scientists.
A paradigm, therefore, determines not only a set of beliefs about the
world.
It also defines what counts as good science, and even determines what
counts as a scientific fact.

It is a conceptual framework that determines how the world looks to

those who have accepted it.

It defines not only the scientific outlook for practitioners of a particular

science, but also the scientific “form of life.”
There are two aspects to the history of any science:

Normal science: science pursued within the constraints of a particular paradigm,

without questioning its principles. The characteristic activity is “puzzle solving,” i.e.
answering questions set by the paradigm using the methods sanctioned by it.

Revolutionary science: a time of decreasing confidence in the existing paradigm

(because of the accumulation of unsolved puzzles), and conflict with alternative
paradigms.

This is like a political crisis, with uncertainty, and conflict among many views, until a
new order becomes established and a single paradigm takes a position of authority.
Some philosophical claims arising from Kuhn’s view:

The conflict among paradigms can’t be settled on any rational methodological

grounds, because each paradigm contains its own view of rational scientific
methodology.

The conflict can’t be resolved by an appeal to the facts, since each paradigm contains
a view of what counts as a fact, and will determine how its adherents view the facts.

Different paradigms are in fact “incommensurable,” not comparable by any neutral

standard. Adherents of different paradigms “live in different worlds,” and speak
different languages that are not inter-translatable. A change of paradigm involves
changes in the meanings of basic theoretical terms.
Some historical claims arising from Kuhn’s view:

Scientists with different theoretical viewpoints generally fail to understand one

another.

Competing paradigms appeal to different and conflicting sets of facts, and proceed by
conflicting methods.

The arguments made in favor of one theory cannot be fully understood by, or
persuasive for , adherents of the other.

New paradigms introduce new theoretical terms, or change the meanings of old ones,
in ways that are incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t already accept the new
theory.
1 Science and society: a complex
relationship

Science would appear to stand out from other social activities. This phenomenon
has kept thinkers pondering, notably those striving to understand society and its
transformations. Indeed, heads were being scratched well before the sociology of
knowledge and the sociology of the sciences actually came into being. In this first
chapter, we shall overview the analytical work of several classical authors (Comte,
Condorcet, Marx and so on), who studied the relationship between science and
society and, in particular, the conditions behind the presence and development of
science in society. We shall study the analysis put forward by one of the first soci-
ologists of science, Merton, who explored the relationship between Puritanism
and the role of the scientist. Then, referring to the work of Ben-David, we shall
look at the process according to which science emerged as a distinct social activ-
ity. Finally, we shall concentrate on the mechanisms behind the organisation and
governance of the sciences in society. The question of the relationship between
science and society shall be looked at again in Chapter 4 when we study the pro-
duction of scientific knowledge.

Emergence of a Distinct Social Activity

In this first part, we shall see how science emerges as a social phenomenon, how
the social role of the scientist is institutionalised according to the values of society,
how the scientific community becomes independent of society, how the labora-
tory emerges as an institution and disciplines are established within society.

Science as a Social Phenomenon

The idea of science is often associated with that of a world apart, different from
society. Our perception of science is still pervaded by an image of the isolated sci-
entist, excitedly working on things beyond comprehension, or that of the genius,
incarnated by Albert Einstein. Science comes across as a mysterious activity and
scientists as strange beings. There seems to be a rift between the sciences and
other forms of knowledge.
Indeed, for a long time, thinkers like Condorcet (1743–94) suggested that the
emergence of science was a specific social and historical phenomenon, with the
knowledge system being dependent on the structure of society.
For Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the human mind and every branch of
 SCIENCE AND SOCIETY: A COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP 7

Positive
Theological Metaphysical
knowledge
knowledge knowledge

Industrial and scientific

Theological and military society
society

Figure 1.1 Evolution of the nature of knowledge and the type of society

knowledge pass through three states: theological, metaphysical and positive

(Figure 1.1). In the theological state, natural phenomena can be explained by
forces or beings similar to humans: gods, spirits, ancestors, demons and so on.
In the metaphysical state, they are explained by great causes and abstract entities
such as Nature. However, in the positive science state, the human being observes
phenomena and sets up laws to establish links between them, hence abandoning
the search for absolute causes. Scientific disciplines such as mathematics, physics
and chemistry were the first to enter this positive state because the phenomena
with which they are concerned are easier to think about. Scientific disciplines that
are interested in more complex objects such as social phenomena entered the realm
of positive thinking at a later, although ineluctable, date. In the positive state, sci-
entists are able to impose their verdicts on the ignorant. These states correspond
to the evolutionary stages of societies: theological and military society for the first
two, and industrial and scientific society for the third. Science is thus a social and
historical phenomenon linked to a specific form of social organisation in which
labour is organised, in factories, in order to maximise yield and not according to
custom. Moving into this stage of society supposes a dual revolution, one that is
both social and intellectual and which represents a radical break in tradition.
Karl Marx (1818–83) also established a link between a social system state
and a knowledge system state. For Marx, science is a historically dated phenom-
enon, linked to the capitalist production mode.

The Scientific Role as a Byproduct of Social Values

In the 1920–30 period, the sociologist Robert K. Merton (1910–2003) queried the
cultural and historical origins of the scientific community. He described science as
a sphere of social and cognitive activity that is different from other forms of activ-
ity and belief. He characterised the social climate that fostered its emergence, as well
as the technical conditions that made it necessary. According to Merton, science is
an autonomous sphere of activity, able to resist external influences; it defends and
champions the principles of independence, discipline and pure rationality.
Merton founded his analysis on the study of the origins of the scientific
community in seventeenth-century England. He analysed the biographies of the
members of the British elite, the activity of the Royal Society (founded in 1645)
and various works, inventions and publications. He underlined the significant
growth in technical knowledge, skills and machinery in the mining, metallurgy,
8 THE SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENTIFIC WORK

shipbuilding and weapons industries from 1620 onwards. Merton specifically

focused on the values, beliefs and feelings that marked this period of rapid
development in science and technology.
Performing a quantitative study of the changes in career choices of the
English social elite, he observed an evolution: in the first half of the seventeenth
century, the ‘science’ and ‘medicine and surgery’ categories became increasingly
popular. The elite turned more readily towards science than to the army or navy,
or to the arts (painting, sculpture, music, poetry and prose), education, histori-
ography, religion, scholastic knowledge, law or politics. According to Merton,
this phenomenon could be explained by the enhanced value of the social role of
the scientist and by a form of social recognition of science as an activity. At the
time, there was a convergence of values between those of English Puritanism
(interest in earthly things, discipline, condemning of idleness, free examination
and distancing with respect to traditions and utilitarianism), and those arising
from naturalist philosophy and experimental science.1 These values, which placed
experience at the top of the hierarchy of forms of knowledge, influenced the
founders of the Royal Society. They permeated the Baconian movement (as of
1640) and were embedded in scientific education. The convictions at that time,
with respect to man’s mission to the relief of man’s estate, converged towards
the idea of a better understanding and control of nature. The idea of a natural
science, studying the order and regularities of nature, was associated with the
virtues of a new profession dedicated to it. For Merton, the growth of science as a
distinct sphere of activity and the emergence of a new professional role in society
could be explained less by the incoming flow of new knowledge than by the trend
in social values and by the attempts of the members of the Royal Society to justify
the ways of science before God. The Puritan values, combining rationalism and
empiricism, fostered scientific method and gave a new lease of life to the empirical
science that had been decried in the Middle Ages.
Merton’s conclusions, which were similar to those of Max Weber regarding
the growth of capitalism in Germany, led to the idea that the development of
science is conditioned by an emphasis on the religious value of certain activities.
This did not immediately lead to the institutionalisation of science, still con-
sidered an esoteric activity that was potentially dangerous for those in power
and whose practical use had not yet been proven. The emphasis on religious
values created favourable conditions for the development of science and the new
social role of the scientist. This theory is opposed to the common idea accord-
ing to which the recognition of science in society comes from its ability to solve
problems. This is not at all the case; the appearance of modern science can be
explained by the social values that psychologically restrict individuals. The social
role of the scientist is defined by a set of behavioural norms.

The Scientific Community as the Fruit of Autonomisation

The social role of the scientist emerged simultaneously in France and Italy. The
sociologist Joseph Ben-David (1920–86), in The Scientist’s Role in Society (1971),
 2 The institution of science

Historical sociology shows that science is instituted as a relatively autonomous

and disengaged social space, dedicated to the production of objective knowledge.
It outlines the conditions behind its emergence. Now, we are faced with a peculiar
phenomenon: an institution and organisations that sociologists are striving to
describe in an effort to understand the way they work. From their research, a new
form of analysis has arisen, sometimes qualified as the ‘institutional sociology of
science’ or the ‘sociology of scientists’. This sociology of science was in fact born
with the work of the American functionalist sociologist Robert K. Merton (Box
2.1).

Box 2.1 Merton and the founding of the sociology of science

Merton began his work at Harvard University where he was influenced by science historian
George Sarton, founder of the review Isis – which brought together scientists, philosophers,
historians and sociologists – and the Osiris collection of monographs, associated with the
review. Merton published his first works in the review. He joined with Pitrim A. Sorokin,
a rural sociologist and head of the Harvard sociology department, whose lectures he had
followed. He also spent a lot of time with the young Talcott Parsons, an instructor working
for Sorokin who at the time was carrying out an analysis of the fluctuations in truth systems
(conditioning by the dominant culture of what society considers as true or false). Sorokin
showed that the practice of scientific method is the result of the spread in society of the
primacy of sensuality versus faith in the formation of truth. He endeavoured to provide
quantitative measurements of the phenomena studied. Merton followed suit, founding his
research on a quantifiable documentary base: a biographic dictionary and a base of articles.
Merton was interested in the evolutionary forms of different institutional spheres, the
interaction between scientific and economic development and the reciprocal adaptation of
positive sciences and cultural values. He developed a theory according to which interests,
motivations and social behaviours within an institutional sphere (economy, religion and
so on) maintain relations of interdependence with other spheres (including science).
This interdependence comes from the fact that individuals have different roles and social
statuses, corresponding to the institutional spheres in which they move; these spheres are
therefore only partially autonomous. He underlined the role of the puritan ethos of the
seventeenth century in the institutionalisation of science. Merton’s analyses follow on from
those of Weber on the meaning of ascetic rationalism for the development of scientific
empiricism. According to Merton, the transformation of scientific interests (that is, which
problems should be studied) is linked to the dominating values and interests in society. He
pursued this research in his PhD thesis in 1938 (Merton, 1938).
 THE INSTITUTION OF SCIENCE 31

Later, he showed that science only develops in societies where there are specific tacit
values. On the contrary, in Germany, in the 1930s, hostility with respect to science was
amplified in two ways: (i) scientific methods or results were said to be contradictory to the
fundamental values of society; and (ii) a sense of incompatibility was maintained between
scientific ethos and the ethos of other institutions. As of 1933, both of these approaches
converged to limit the scope of science leading to the exclusion of Jewish scientists for
the benefit of Aryans alone, to the submission of research to the immediate needs of
industry, to the dependence of researchers with respect to politics, to a general reign of
anti-intellectualism and to the difficulty of applying a critical approach to the results of Nazi
research.
Merton explained the notion of scientific ethos in his 1942 article entitled ‘Science and
technology in a democratic order’. In this article he presented his conception of the
normative structure. In spite of the diversity of scientific disciplines, the cultural values that
influence them form a common cultural reality. Science can be sociologically defined as
an institution based on a set of values and norms with which the scientist is supposed to
comply; it is neither a set of knowledge items nor a set of methods. Merton identified the
norms of this institution and underlined that the sociologist’s job is to study the conditions
according to which these norms help to regulate scientific activity: study of the influence of
institutional norms on researchers’ behaviour.
After 1957, he worked on quarrels between scientists about priorities and identified
new research themes: the origin and perception of multiple discoveries, the ambivalence
of norms, the prestige and forms of cumulated advantages, the forms and functions of
competition between researchers and the procedures for assessing scientific work.
He published over 50 articles in the sociology of science field – see complete bibliography
published in Social Studies of Sciences, 34 (6), pp. 863–78, December 2004. He was awarded
many prizes and tokens of recognition and was notably the first sociologist to be admitted
to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). He is one of the most often-cited sociologists,
notably for his theoretical contributions to general sociology. His work influenced Eugène
Garfield, creator of the Science Citation Index.

The Normative Structure of the Scientific Community

Merton paved the way for the sociological study of the sciences, whose regulation
mechanisms he studied. He built a middle range theory (neither a general theory
of society nor a local interpretation of limited phenomena), which reported on
the workings of science as a separate and autonomous institution. This theory
explains both the individual and collective behaviours that promote this institu-
tion. Thanks to this institution of science, scientific rationality can be practised
and knowledge built up and disseminated in society; increasing knowledge is the
goal set by society for this institution. The norms governing the behaviour of sci-
entists make this goal achievable; they constitute the normative structure or ethos
of science. It is this structure that fosters the advancement of objective knowledge,
32 THE SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENTIFIC WORK

Hard core of the science

Social structure of the science

Society

Figure 2.1 Hard core and society

protecting it from being trampled on by society, ideologies and specific interests.

Merton thus lays the basis for the institutional analysis of the sciences by focusing
on behavioural norms, social and professional habits and the values and ideas that
guide the behaviour of scientists. He in particular studies the social workings of
science, the process used to check scientific theory, which is fundamentally social
given its public nature. Merton looks into the conditions that enable neutral and
objective science to develop. He drops any sociological pretension to explain the
actual content of scientific activity: the hard core (Figure 2.1).

Behavioural Norms and Ethos of Science

In his 1942 article (reproduced in Merton, 1973), he focuses on the normative

foundation of the scientific community. He makes a distinction between two types
of norms: ethical norms, relating to professional behaviour, and technical norms,
relating to cognitive aspects (the logical and methodological rules of science).
These two normative registers are interdependent. The advancement of know-
ledge depends on the implementation of technical imperatives (having empiri-
cal and reliable proof, ensuring that there is logical consistency) and particular
methods (specific to each discipline). These technical norms depend on ethical
norms that help to reinforce their performance and provide them with a moral
guarantee. Conversely, ethical norms are the result of both the end purpose of the
social institution of science and its technological imperatives. Moral imperatives
have a methodological raison d’être. Merton says that methodological specifica-
tions are often both technological solutions and moral obligations. They are
specifications that are just as moral as they are methodological. They are closely
linked and indebted to the logical rules of science rather than to the form of
society in which they emerge.
According to Merton, sociologists should study the former while the latter
should be left to the care of epistemologists. He studies the ethical rules and
describes the universal morals guiding all scientists, that is, the ethos of science:
‘that emotionally toned complex of values and norms which is held to be binding
on the man of science’ (Merton, 1973, p. 268).
These norms are legitimate preferences and specifications, linked to the
values of the institution. They are not encoded, but interiorised by scientists.
 THE INSTITUTION OF SCIENCE 33

To underline the existence of these norms, Merton refers to various scientific

writings and the indignation caused when the norms are not complied with. He
defines four ethical norms, or institutional imperatives:

• Universalism: scientific productions and the awarding of tokens of recognition to

researchers are subject to pre-established impersonal criteria. Universalism is the
opposite of particularism, which focuses on personal criteria or belonging (gender,
social belonging, national origin and so on). This norm is implemented through review
mechanisms that are based either on public and transparent deliberation between
specialists, or on ‘double-blind’ mechanisms in which the author of a text is not revealed
to those in charge of the review (referees) and whose names likewise remain anonymous
for the author. In the instructions given to those in charge of assessing an American
scientific review, the following can be seen for example: ‘Do not provide information in
your review that reveals your identity and do not seek to discover the identity of the
authors’.1 Merton associates this instruction with the meritocracy ideal that prevails
in science and which pleads in favour of scientific careers being open to appropriately
skilled individuals. It is up to sociology to analyse the systems set up within the scientific
community and their compliance with such a norm, by describing, for example, the
workings of review committees or recruitment juries.
• Communalism (or communism): discoveries constitute collective property, produced
in a collaborative manner and destined to advance society as a whole. This norm is the
opposite of individual appropriation and secrecy; it requires researchers to communicate
their results rather than keeping them for their exclusive use alone. This norm is
implemented through the setting up of publication systems (annals of scientific societies,
scientific reviews, lectures in conferences, online pre-publication and electronic reviews
ensuring that results are quickly and broadly disseminated).
• Disinterestedness: scientific productions are public and verifiable. Scientists must
report on them before their peers, which means that they are encouraged to seek the
truth, produce reproducible results (technical norm) and publicly unmask any erroneous
theories, data of poor quality (biased or falsified) and those having produced such data.
They are supposed to strive towards the advancement of knowledge and not towards the
advancement of their personal interests or those of a specific group, whether financial,
ideological or professional. This norm is linked to the values of altruism and integrity.
• Organised scepticism: researchers and scientific productions should be systematically
assessed using empirical and logical criteria that are not attached to any specific belief.
This prevents statements that have not been thoroughly examined in the light of technical
standards from being accepted prematurely. It requires researchers to remain open to
rational criticism of their work and that of their colleagues. This means that scientists’
work is systematically submitted to the critical assessment of colleagues, who sit on review
boards. It also means that these colleagues are expected to furnish a considerable amount
of anonymous and unpaid work as they examine and constructively comment on the texts
submitted for review. In the instructions given to the assessors of an American review,
34 THE SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENTIFIC WORK

the following instruction can be found: ‘One of the greatest services that reviewers
perform is the development of the research of members who submit their work. It
is critical that all work submitted, regardless of whether or not it is accepted for the
program, be improved by the feedback garnered from the review process. . . . Always
maintain a professional, polite tone to your review. Authors deserve to be treated with
respect, regardless of your evaluation of their work. . . . be sure that your comments
are directed toward the ideas in the manuscript and not toward the authors. Be open-
minded to different theoretical framings. . . . Try to judge manuscripts based on how well
they stimulate thinking and discussion’.2

Merton and his disciples were to complete this normative structure with
norms on originality, humility, rationality, emotional neutrality and individual-
ism. We shall come back to the norms relating to originality and humility in the
context of disputes about priorities.

Transmission and Transgression of the Norms

The sociology of science also examines the way in which norms are passed down
and the mechanisms that encourage scientists to comply with them rather than
transgress them. Because researchers are not forced to either adopt or comply
with them, what exactly prevents these norms from being nothing more but pious
intentions?
The transmission of norms is different according to whether they relate to
technical matters or morals. Technical norms are explicitly taught: they can be
found in methods manuals. The transmission of social norms, on the other hand,
is by and large implicit. They are learnt from contact with other scientists, their
morals and their habits, during the socialisation process in which young research-
ers identify with a group of scientists to which they would like to belong. They are
handed down through the examples set by senior members of the research world,
through the precepts outlined during scientific activity. Once interiorised, these
norms fashion scientists’ professional conscience and behaviour, to the extent that
they become distinctive traits of their personality.
Scientists can be tempted to transgress these norms. They are, after all,
subject to pressure from competition and may be tempted to use illegal means in
order to oust a rival. However, such behaviour is negligible, according to Merton,
and, in the long term, it does not work as it leads to the scientist in question
being sanctioned. Scientists comply with norms spontaneously and because they
are encouraged or obliged to. Merton completes his analysis of the institution
of science with a description of the reward system that backs up the normative
structure: a system of social control. Norms are institutionalised because they are
associated with the dishing out of rewards or sanctions.
Designed to encourage compliance with norms, these rewards are symbolic.
They take the form of honorary prizes such as the Nobel Prize or grants for
studying, travelling or research. A reward can also be the assigning of an eponym
of East Asia it was driven by original equipment manufacture for
foreign companies located abroad, in South-East Asia the process was
primarily driven by transnational corporations. Nevertheless, despite
structural problems, both approaches contributed significantly to
industrial innovation and national economic growth (Hobday 2000).
Thereafter, East Asia developed along unique technological and
learning trajectories dictated by international production networks.15

Finally, innovation system adopted in some of these countries

and primarily in Japan, has been target oriented with significant
commitment towards using science and technology for improving
quality of life for its citizens. Such commitments have been religiously
followed and renewed. The case in point is Japan’s latest S&T Basic
Plan which sets targets along four areas: reconstruction and revival
from the great Japan earthquake; promoting green innovations;
promoting life innovations; and reforming the innovation system
towards promoting science, technology and innovation.

4. Innovation Policies and Enterprise Development in

India
After India’s independence from colonial rule in 1947, nation builders
and policy makers saw merit not only in large-scale industrialisation
promoted by the state but also in parallel development of S&T
infrastructure under state patronage. Not much was expected from
the private sector at that juncture in either of the areas given paucity
of resource in terms of capital, entrepreneurial and intellectual
base.16 While separately industrial policy resolutions and S&T
policy statements were formulated to guide industrial development
and S&T endeavours in the country, overall direction and resource
allocation came from the Five Year Plans. The topmost priority
underlying all policy measures was to demonstrate India’s ability to
produce manufactured commodities across sectors to meet immediate
needs, build a robust S&T infrastructure and create a high-skilled
manpower base. While, the entire model of industrial planning gave

12
only secondary credence to laws of comparative advantage, S&T
policies stressed exclusively on cultivation of science and scientific
research in all its aspects – pure, applied, and educational. S&T
policies explicitly addressing innovation concerns linked to enterprise
development in the private sector have not been in focus in India,
until in the recent decades. In this section, we discuss the policy
framework that constitute India’s five year plans and S&T policy
making to ascertain the link between innovation policy making and
enterprise development in India.

We choose to distinguish between the following time periods:

1) pre-1980s, when India achieved significant technological learning
in the industry (both public and private) while scientific research was
undertaken solely by public funded institutions; 2) the decade of 1980s
itself when there was a perceived urgency for technological self-
reliance although with continued focus on the public sector; 3) post
economic liberalisation (1990 and thereafter) which meant primacy
of private sector efforts however, with very elusive links with S&T
policies; and 4) the decade of 2000s and beyond when innovation
policies towards enterprise development gained more importance
over standalone S&T policies.

4.1 Pre-1980s: The Era of Central Planning

The Scientific Policy Resolution of 1958 captured the vision and
aspirations of a newly independent state and clearly highlighted
the importance of intense cultivation of science on a large scale,
and its application to meet the country’s requirements. Science and
technology, it was stated, can make up for deficiencies in raw materials
by providing substitutes, or, indeed, by providing skills which can be
exported in return for raw materials.17 The government accordingly
sought to foster, promote, and sustain scientific research in general,
to secure for the people of the country all benefits that can accrue
from the acquisition and application of scientific knowledge. The
ultimate goal was to ensure adequate supply, within the country, of

13
research scientists of the highest quality and to encourage individual
initiative for the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, and for
the discovery of new knowledge (see Box 1 for details).

Box 1: Aims of Scientific Policy

To foster, promote, and sustain, by all appropriate means, the

cultivation of science, and scientific research in all its aspects - pure,
applied, and educational;
To ensure an adequate supply, within the country, of research scientists
of the highest quality, and to recognise their work as an important
component of the strength of the nation;
To encourage, and initiate, with all possible speed, programmes for
the training of scientific and technical personnel, on a scale adequate
to fulfil the country’s needs in science and education, agriculture and
industry, and defence;
To ensure that the creative talent of men and women is encouraged
and finds full scope in scientific activity;
To encourage individual initiative for the acquisition and dissemination
of knowledge, and for the discovery of new knowledge, in an
atmosphere of academic freedom;
To secure for the people of the country all the benefits that can
accrue from the acquisition and application of scientific knowledge.
Source: Scientific Policy Resolution 1958, paragraph 7.

Review of India’s Five Year Plans shows that innovation

infrastructure and milieu had been built up in phases. The First Five
Year Plan (1951-56) took up the task of building national laboratories
and research institutions primarily under the Council for Scientific
and Industrial Research (CSIR). The Second Plan (1956-61) promoted
more broad-based scientific research and therefore research facilities
were extended to universities and other research centres. The period
under these two Plans witnessed establishment of new technological
universities (the Indian Institute of Technology – the IITs) for higher
education and research in engineering. Infrastructure at existing

14
institutions of high repute like the Indian Institute of Science was
simultaneously expanded. Interestingly, in both these Plans and in
some others that would follow detailed proposals were drawn up to
prioritise public investment in S&T and education. Each of these Plans
documented comprehensive account of outcomes of all initiatives by
various scientific departments of the government as is expected under
a strict regime of centralised planning.

Under S&T, the Third Plan (1961-66) specifically focused on

promoting research per se, both basic and applied (through the network
of S&T institutions and institutions of higher learning). This Plan
laid special emphasis on agriculture, atomic energy and engineering
research and for the first time sought to streamline commercial
application of research outputs. It also, for the first time, laid adequate
emphasis on quality control, standardisation and productivity in the
industry. Although, the Fourth Plan (1969-74) reiterated and promoted
commitments laid out in the earlier Plans, the Fifth Five Year Plan
(1974-79) took a sectoral approach, which was somewhat a departure
from earlier Plan approaches. This was done to effectively follow up
on Plan priorities and ensure interaction between research agencies
and facilitate technology transfer.

In the intervening period, India took course to institutional

changes in the IPR regime (Indian Patent Act of 1970) by allowing for
no more than process patenting in areas of pharmaceuticals and agro-
chemicals and shortening of life of patents for pharmaceuticals. Such
institutional change paved the way for vigorous technological learning
and process revolution in the Indian pharmaceutical industry (mostly
private sector enterprises). This went a long way in facilitating a large
pharmaceutical industry in India specialising in production of cheap
generic drugs. Although, India switched to TRIPS compatible product
patent regime in 2005, Indian pharmaceutical industry continues to
rely extensively on generic production of off patent drugs.

15
4.2 The 1980s: The Era of Piecemeal Economic Reforms
By the time the second Science and Technology Policy was
introduced in 1983 almost three decades after the first one, realities
had greatly changed. Despite significant achievements in acquiring
technological capabilities across scientific fields, visible impact
of S&T on national competitiveness had perceivably faltered.
Poverty remained a national burden. Against this backdrop, a
detailed Technology Policy Statement was adopted in 1983 that
placed technological self-reliance at the heart of indigenous
technological paradigm. In fact, this policy underscored the need
for contextualising choice of technology according to economic and
social priorities. This was elaborated in terms of a noble resolve to
achieve swift and tangible improvement among the weakest sections
of the population and speedy development of backward regions.
There were other areas of emphasis including technology forecast,
employment, mass production, utilisation of traditional skills and
environmental sustainability. Nevertheless, economic considerations
of self-reliance through indigenous technology development within
the framework of an interventionist, protectionist and inward looking
policy regime remained the cornerstone.

The decade of 1980s coincided with the Sixth (1980-85) and the
Seventh (1985-90) Five Year Plans that largely followed the paradigm
of ‘self-reliance’ as stated in the 1983 Technology Policy Statement.
Technological self-reliance also meant scouting of technological
opportunities and sourcing of technologies from abroad. This was
proposed to be implemented through a comprehensive process
of technology assessment, development, acquisition, absorption,
utilisation and diffusion. Although, industry was encouraged to
undertake capability building and reverse engineering, import
substitution was implemented with rigor. Technology import
and FDI were heavily restricted with a very narrow window for
clearances subject to determination of appropriateness, suitability

16
and unavailability. On the other hand, for the first time, it was
proposed that the government should offer appropriate fiscal
incentives to promote indigenous technology development apart
from direct public funding of R&D. Fiscal incentives to undertake
R&D activities in the form of tax breaks and exemptions fall under
Industrial R&D Promotion Programme (IRDPP) overseen by the
Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) under
the Ministry of Science and Technology. Not surprisingly, till the
early 1990s which marks the era of reforms and liberalisation of
economic policies in India, these incentives were primarily restricted
to promoting technology generation in public sector laboratories and
institutions. In the Box 2 we present the existing provisions under
fiscal incentives in terms of tax reliefs and custom duty exemptions.
Income tax relief on R&D expenditure is allowed for Scientific and
Industrial Research Organisations (SIROs) in the areas of medical,
agriculture, natural and applied sciences as well as social sciences
recognised by the DSIR. 18

The number of in-house R&D units (SIROs) recognised by

DSIR increased steadily from about 100 in 1973 to over 700 in 1980,
over 1100 in 1990 and thereafter hovering between 1200 and 1250. In
2010 the number was around 1350 and by the end of 2011 the number
rose to 1618. Of these, nearly 1480 are in the private sector and the
rest in public/joint sector.19 The in-house R&D units in the industry
are expected to undertake R&D activities according to their business
requirements such as development of new technologies, design and
engineering, process/product/design improvements, developing new
methods of analyzing and testing, research for increased efficiency
in use of resources such as capital equipment, materials and energy,
pollution control, effluent treatment and recycling of waste products.
These activities are distinct from routine production and quality
control and involve dedicated staff and management.

17
 Box 2: A Short Description of Fiscal Incentives for R&D in India

The present structure of Tax Breaks may be listed as:20

1. Super deductions: Weighted income tax deduction of 200 per cent
till 31.03.2017 for all expenditure incurred on scientific research
(excluding expenditure on land and buildings).21 This is extended
to sponsored research programmes undertaken by the industry in
collaboration with national laboratories, universities and institutes.
2. Tax holiday: Companies in the commercial R&D sector, approved
by the DSIR before 31 March 2007 are eligible for 10 years of tax
holiday.
3. Write-offs: Industrial units also enjoy 100 per cent write-off on all
revenue and capital expenditure towards R&D.
4. Depreciation allowance: Accelerated depreciation allowance is
allowed on plant and machinery set up using indigenous technology.
The second form of fiscal incentive refers to exemptions on custom duty
for technology import. Encouraging technology imports through such
mechanisms is considered crucial for capacity building and in-house
R&D and conforms to norms of free trade. Accordingly, SIROs in the
area of medical, agriculture, natural and applied sciences and social
sciences recognised by the DSIR that are eligible for tax concessions
are also eligible for custom and excise duty exemption. Further, excise
duty waiver applies to production of indigenous technology based
goods.22 The pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors enjoy special
privileges in this regard. These sectors are eligible for duty free import
of specific items (comprising analytical and specialty equipment) and
pharmaceutical reference standards required for R&D.

Source: Authors’ compilation.

4.3 Post-1991: The Era of Economic Liberalisation

We note that, since the Eighth Five Year Plan (1992-97) onwards
policy making in the S&T sector has been linked to the overall
economic policy framework of international integration with policy

18
changes favouring industrial R&D, identification of technology
needs and technology development.23 During the later Plans (Ninth,
Tenth and Eleventh Plan periods between 1997 and 2012) greater
emphasis was laid on promotion of basic research, interface between
public institutions and private industry, priority sectors, social needs,
international collaborations and strengthening of human capital.

Over this period there are several instances where the scientific
departments like the DST and the DSIR have been proactive in
collaborating with the industry on public-private partnerships in
an effort to incentivise the private industry towards R&D through
shared costs and rewards. Such PPPs are common for projects
with significant basic research component characterised by high
investment, high risk and uncertainty. PPP in risky projects also
reduces moral hazard problems given joint involvement and shared
rewards.24 The DST launched the Drugs and Pharmaceuticals Research
Programme (DPRP) in 1994 that supports setting up of facilities
for research including industry-institute joint research projects (on
equal sharing basis) in all systems of medicines. Although research
undertaken by the industry has to be fully funded by them, research
projects initiated at the institutes has to be jointly funded by the
government and the industry. Further, government bears all capital
expenditure and takes up a major share of all recurring expenditures.
There are also provisions for soft loans of up to 70 per cent of the
project cost at the industry end and grant-in-aid for clinical trials
in therapeutics meant for neglected diseases. The New Millennium
Indian Technology Leadership Initiative (NMITLI) was promoted by
the CSIR (under DSIR) in the year 2000 and is regarded as the largest
public-private-partnership for R&D in India. The innovative feature
of this programme is that it provides financial support to all players.
The financial support is in the form of grant-in-aid to the institutional
partner in the public sector and as soft loan for the partner industry
with manufacturing base in India.

19
 The Technology Development Board (TDB) established in 1996
after the adoption of Technology Development Board Act, 1995 assists
firms that develop and commercialise indigenous technology or adapt
imported technology for wider domestic applications. Assistance
is implemented by way of soft loan or contribution towards equity
capital. TDB has recently joined hands with two major private equity
investors to invest in equities of start-up companies. There are some
instances where the government and the private players have engaged
in more target oriented projects by collaborating through consortiums.
The Collaborative Automotive Research (CAR) by Technology
Information, Forecasting, and Assessment Council (TIFAC-DST) is
an example. The programme has been successful in bringing together
different stakeholders and nucleating several R&D projects in a
consortia mode.25

4.4 2000 and Beyond

After 1983, the later S&T Policy Statements have been adopted only in
the last decade and exactly within a span of ten years – one in 2003 and
the latest being in 2013. Obviously, these policy frameworks have been
adopted in scenarios when India’s emergence as a fast-growing and
large economy based on contributions from some of the knowledge
intensive sectors had been confirmed. The 2003 policy emphasised on
the need to ensure synergy between scientific research and industry,
provide platforms for translation of industrially relevant knowledge
outcomes and it was expected that industry would be more engaged in
R&D activities. While Science and Technology Policy 2003 intended
to bring in a second wave of strengthening of science similar in spirit
to the Scientific Policy Resolution of 1958, the very recent Science,
Technology and Innovation (STI) Policy 2013 mulls over significant
paradigmatic shifts to achieve innovations at all levels. The Eleventh
Plan had also highlighted the urgency to put in place institutional
mechanisms that may support an innovation ecosystem linking the
public and the private and leverage innovation prospects in the SMEs.

20
The sector contributes nearly 45 per cent of all manufacturing output
in India and makes up for 40 per cent of related exports. Accordingly,
government support for innovations towards enterprise development
is being implemented through multiple channels: a) risk-funding,
entrepreneurship development and incubation; b) cluster based
approach for SMEs; c) information and management support; and d)
Informal and open source innovations.
4.4.1 Risk-funding, entrepreneurship development and
incubation
We understand that fiscal incentives towards innovations and
enterprise development might take the form of risk-funding for
early stage projects for technology generation. This is crucial for
bridging gaps in innovation life cycle, particularly when a nascent
technological idea is being developed as a proof-of-concept that is
expected to demonstrate its commercial and technological feasibility.
This involves risk-taking and government assistance is called for to
encourage private players.
A number of programmes were initiated by the different
scientific departments of the Government of India to support the
small enterprises:

1. The Small Business Innovation Research Initiative (SBIRI)

launched by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) in
2005 supports early stage, pre-proof-of-concept research in
biotechnology by the industry, and late stage development
and commercialisation of new indigenous technologies
particularly those linked to societal needs in healthcare, food
and nutrition, agriculture and other sectors.26
2. Technopreneur Promotion Programme – TePP (promoted
by DSIR)27 supports individual innovators. The programme
entails development of an original idea/invention/know-how
into working prototype/process and promotes novel delivery
models to take S&T innovations to rural India.

21
 3. The TIFAC-SIDBI 28 Revolving Fund for Technology
Innovation Programme (SRIJAN) was launched by TIFAC
in 2010, as a joint TIFAC-SIDBI Technology Innovation
initiative. Under the scheme, TIFAC set up a revolving
corpus with Small Industries Development Bank of India
(SIDBI) to fund industries particularly the Micro Small
and Medium Enterprises (MSME) for scaling up and
commercialisation of novel products and processes. This
policy is expected to encourage and promote innovation
capabilities in emerging technology areas and usher new
business opportunities.
4. Under Technology Development and Demonstration
Programme (TDDP) the DSIR provides partial financial
support towards prototype development, cost of pilot plant,
cost of equipment, test and evaluation of products, user
trials, etc.
Closely linked to risk-funding for technology generation is
government policy for technology led entrepreneurship development.
Technology Business Incubator (TBI) is a programme of the National
Science & Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board
(NSTEDB) under the DST for fostering innovative and knowledge
based start-ups (including university start-ups). This programme
provides specialised support services like early stage financing and
networking among stakeholders. The TBI programme provides seed
fund to incubators. The basic idea of providing seed fund is to equip
a TBI with much needed early stage financial assistance for ideas/
technologies under incubation. This would enable some of these
innovative ideas/technologies to graduate to an appropriate level
and qualify for regular commercial borrowing and venture capital.
Interestingly, the NSTEDB had launched the Science and Technology
Entrepreneurship Development (STED) project much earlier to
support innovative activities in small sized firms in industrially
backward regions.

22
SOCIOLOGY OF
SCIENCE
Science as a Social Phenomenon
• long time, thinkers like Condorcet (1743–94) suggested that the emergence of science was
a specific social and historical phenomenon, with the knowledge system being dependent
on the structure of society.
• Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the human mind and every branch of knowledge pass
through three states: theological, metaphysical and positive.
• theological state, natural phenomena can be explained by forces or beings
similar to humans: gods, spirits, ancestors, demons and so on.
• In the metaphysical state, they are explained by great causes and abstract
entities such as Nature.
• The positive science state, the human being observes phenomena and sets up
laws to establish links between them, hence abandoning the search for
absolute causes. In the positive state, scientists are able to impose their
verdicts on the ignorant.
• These states correspond to the evolutionary stages of societies: theological
and military society for the first two, and industrial and scientific society for
the third. Science is thus a social and historical phenomenon linked to a
specific form of social organisation in which labour is organised, in factories,
in order to maximise yield and not according to custom.
• Karl Marx (1818–83) also established a link between a social system state and a
knowledge system state. For Marx, science is a historically dated phenomenon, linked
to the capitalist production mode.
 The Scientific Role as a Byproduct of Social
Values
• In the 1920–30 period, the sociologist Robert K. Merton (1910–2003) queried the cultural
and historical origins of the scientific community. He described science as a sphere of social
and cognitive activity that is different from other forms of activity and belief. According to
Merton, science is an autonomous sphere of activity, able to resist external influences; it
defends and champions the principles of independence, discipline and pure rationality.
• Robert Merton’s statement, “The institutional goal of science is the extension of certified
knowledge” (1973: 270), is the supporting idea behind his thinking on science. His structural-
functionalist view assumes that society as a whole can be analyzed in terms of overarching
institutions such as religion, government, and science. Each institution, when working well,
serves a necessary function, contributing to the stability and flourishing of society.
 the social structure of science lies in the ethos of
• The key to Merton’s theory of
science, the norms of behavior that guide appropriate scientific practice.
Merton’s norms are institutional imperatives, in that rewards are given to
community members who follow them, and sanctions are applied to those who
violate them. Most important in this ethos are the four norms first described in
1942: universalism, communism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism.
• Universalism requires that the criteria used to evaluate a claim not depend upon the
identity of the person making the claim: “race, nationality, religion, class, and
personal qualities are irrelevant” (Merton 1973: 270).
• Communism states that scientific knowledge – the central product of science – is
commonly owned. Originators of ideas can claim recognition for their creativity, but
cannot dictate how or by whom those ideas are to be used. According to Merton,
communism not only promotes the goals of science but reflects the fact that science is
a social activity, or that scientific achievements are collectively produced.
• Disinterestedness is a form of integrity, demanding that scientists disengage their
interests from their actions and judgments. They are expected to report results fully,
no matter what theory those results support. Disinterestedness should rule out fraud,
such as reporting fabricated data, because fraudulent behavior typically represents the
intrusion of interests. And indeed, Merton believes that fraud is rare in science.
• Organized skepticism is the tendency for the community to disbelieve new
ideas until they have been well established. Organized skepticism operates at
two levels. New claims are often greeted by collections of public challenges.
For example, even an audience favorably disposed to its claims may fiercely
question a presentation at a conference. In addition, scientists may privately
reserve judgment on new claims, employing an internalized version of the
norm.
• In Merton’s thinking, norms govern individual behaviours. His model is based on
economics. Scientists are individuals who compete to produce objective knowledge
in order to acquire esteem.
• Merton’s scientific institution is a model of democracy: scientists are impartial in
their judgements (both open and critical). They exercise self- control and mutual
control over one another – with the youngest also being called on to evaluate senior
members – without there being a need to institute some kind of form of superior
authority, a state with authority to legislate, a police force or legal system that
ensures laws are followed. The scientific institution is thus a model of democracy
for the whole of society. Its development is furthered by the fact that the society
surrounding it is itself democratic. It is far removed from the monarchic systems of
the past.
 SOCIAL
CONSTRUCTION OF
TECHNOLOGY
• Pinch and Bijker’s (1987) article, “The Social Construction of Facts
and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of
Technology Might Benefit Each Other.”

• Technology does not determine human action, but that rather, human
action shapes technology.

• SCOT sees no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ technologies as all technologies have

the potential to be shaped differently based on which actors and groups
are involved.
SCOT’S Main Phases

• Relevant Social Groups

• Interpretative Flexibility

• Closure in Technology: Rethorical and Redefinition of the problem

CHANGING PHASES
OF NATIONAL
POLICIES IN S&T
Dr. Vikas Kumar
Pre -1980s: The Era of Central
Planning
• India’s Scientific Policy Resolution (SPR) of 1958, The SPR resolved to “foster, promote and

sustain” the “cultivation of science and scientific research in all its aspects”. Technology was then

assumed to flow from the country’s established science infrastructure. The SPR also emphasized

the use of the scientific approach in all activities of the nation.

 Aims of Scientific Policy
• To ensure an adequate supply, within the country, of research scientists of the highest quality,
and to recognise their work as an important component of the strength of the nation;
• To encourage, and initiate, with all possible speed, programmes for the training of scientific
and technical personnel, on a scale adequate to fulfil the country’s needs in science and
education, agriculture and industry, and defense;
• To ensure that the creative talent of men and women is encouraged and finds full scope in
scientific activity;
• To encourage individual initiative for the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, and for
the discovery of new knowledge, in an atmosphere of academic freedom;
• To secure for the people of the country all the benefits that can accrue from the acquisition
and application of scientific knowledge
• The First Five Year Plan (1951-56) took up the task of building national laboratories and
research institutions primarily under the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).

• The Second Plan (1956-61) promoted more broad-based scientific research and therefore
research facilities were extended to universities and other research centres. The period under
these two Plans witnessed establishment of new technological universities (the Indian Institute of
Technology – the IITs) for higher education and research in engineering. Infrastructure at
existing institutions of high repute like the Indian Institute of Science was simultaneously
expanded. Interestingly, in both these Plans and in some others that would follow detailed
proposals were drawn up to prioritise public investment in S&T and education.
• Under S&T, the Third Plan (1961-66) specifically focused on promoting research per se, both
basic and applied (through the network of S&T institutions and institutions of higher learning).
This Plan laid special emphasis on agriculture, atomic energy and engineering research and for
the first time sought to streamline commercial application of research outputs. It also, for the
first time, laid adequate emphasis on quality control, standardisation and productivity in the
industry.

• the Fourth Plan (1969-74) reiterated and promoted commitments laid out in the earlier Plans,

• Fifth Five Year Plan (1974-79) took a sectoral approach, which was somewhat a departure
from earlier Plan approaches. This was done to effectively follow up on Plan priorities and
ensure interaction between research agencies and facilitate technology transfer.
The 1980s: The Era of Piecemeal
Economic Reforms
• The Technology Policy Statement (TPS) of 1983, enunciated at a time of constraints on
import of technology, emphasized the need to attain technological competence and
self-reliance. Several of its statements were converted into action.

• Poverty remained a national burden. Against this backdrop, a detailed Technology

Policy Statement was adopted in 1983 that placed technological self-reliance at the
heart of indigenous technological paradigm.
• The decade of 1980s coincided with the Sixth (1980-85) and the Seventh (1985-90) Five
Year Plans that largely followed the paradigm of ‘self-reliance’ as stated in the 1983
Technology Policy Statement. Technological self-reliance also meant scouting of
technological opportunities and sourcing of technologies from abroad. This was
proposed to be implemented through a comprehensive process of technology
assessment, development, acquisition, absorption, utilisation and diffusion.
Post-1991: The Era of Economic
Liberalisation
• Eighth Five Year Plan (1992-97) onwards policy making in the S&T sector has been linked to the
overall economic policy framework of international integration with policy changes favouring
industrial R&D, identification of technology needs and technology development.

• The Technology Development Board (TDB) established in 1996 after the adoption of Technology
Development Board Act, 1995 assists firms that develop and commercialise indigenous
technology or adapt imported technology for wider domestic applications.

• Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Plan periods between 1997 and 2012 greater emphasis was laid on
promotion of basic research, interface between public institutions and private industry, priority
sectors, social needs, international collaborations and strengthening of human capital.
 2000 and Beyond
• The Science and Technology Policy (STP) of 2003 brought science and technology (S&T) together. It
emphasized the need for investment into R&D to address national problems. It called for integrating
programmes of socioeconomic sectors with the national R&D system. It also articulated the need for
technological innovation and creation of a national innovation system. The world has changed vastly since
then in all spheres of human activity.

• The 2003 policy emphasised on the need to ensure synergy between scientific research and
industry, provide platforms for translation of industrially relevant knowledge outcomes and it was
expected that industry would be more engaged in R&D activities. While Science and Technology
Policy 2003 intended to bring in a second wave of strengthening of science similar in spirit to the
Scientific Policy Resolution of 1958
• The Prime Minister of India, at the Indian Science Congress-2010 declared 2010-20 as the
“Decade of Innovations” and formed the National Innovation Council. The Prime Minister and
Minister of Science & Technology declared at the 99th Science Congress the bringing forth of a
policy that develops the synergy between science, technology and innovation.

• The STI Policy 2013 is in furtherance of the declaration and aims to bring fresh perspectives to
bear on innovation in the changing context. The policy thus seeks to focus on both people for
science and science for people and combine the benefits of excellence and relevance.
Social construction of technology (also referred to as SCOT) is a theory within the field of
Science and Technology Studies (or Technology and society). Advocates of SCOT -- that is,
social constructivists -- argue that technology does not determine human action, but that
rather, human action shapes technology. They also argue that the ways in which a technology
is used cannot be understood without understanding how that technology is embedded in its
social context. SCOT sees no 'right' or 'wrong' technologies, as all technologies have the
potential to be shaped differently based on which actors and groups are involved. SCOT
pioneered a new way to examine the social context of technological innovation. In contrast to
the linear model of technological innovation, which imagines a linear succession of basic
science, applied science, development, and commercialization (Madhjoudi, 1997), SCOT
sees a variety of groups (called relevant social groups) competing to control a design, which
at this point is far from preordained (SCOT calls this the phase of interpretive flexibility).
Each group has its own idea of the problem that the new artefact is supposed to solve and, in
consequence, favors a distinctive technological design, including components and operational
principles that may not be favored by competing groups. In a process called stabilization, one
social group prevails over the others, so that group's design prevails and the others are
forgotten (Pinch and Bijker, 1984), or two or more groups negotiate a compromise (Bijker,
1996). In sum, SCOT argues that technological innovation is not the result of mythical men
who introduce new ‘technologies’ and release them into ‘society,’ starting a series of
(un)expected impacts; rather, technological innovation is a complex process of co-
construction in which technology and society, to the degree that they could even be
conceived separately of one another, negotiate the meaning of new technological artifacts,
alter technology through resistance, and construct social and technological frames-of-thought,
practices and action. Leading adherents of SCOT include Wiebe Bijker and Trevor Pinch.

Societal concerns have been, and continue to be, important forces shaping technology
systems. The bicycle is an example of the adaption and the extent of initial technological
designs driven by social fashion. Today bicycle, with front and rear wheels of equal size, is
derived from the safety bicycle design that emerged at the end of the 19th century. Its design
is radically different from earlier bicycles, particularly the famous Penny-farthing.

Why was the Penny-farthing design successful in the 19th century, whereas the safety bicycle
only emerged at the end of the century? The answer lies in the changing expectations that
people projected onto the technology. The Penny-farthing’s main appeal was “to young men
of means and nerve”. Such an athletic image conveyed by customers and producers alike
neglected women with their cumbersome 19th dress code. It took many unsuccessful design
innovations, several confluent technology developments (Dunlop pneumatic tires and the rear
chain drive), and 20 years, before the alternative design and social image of the bicycle that
we know today stabilized: a bicycle, as safe and comfortable transport device, that anybody
could ride.

Theories and concepts

However SCOT is not only a theory, but also a methodology: it formalizes the steps and
principles to follow when one wants to analyze the causes of technological failures or
successes. In discussing how technology emerges from social interactions, the SCOT
framework utilises a number of interrelated concepts. These concepts are summarised below,
in Table 1.

SCOT concepts summarized http://www.socresonline.org.uk/14/2/4.html

Scot’s main phases

A technology takes many forms according to a process reducible in three main phases:

 a) Interpretative flexibility decreases when the meanings attributed to an artefact

become less ambiguous and more stable. The interpretation of a relevant social group
finally becomes dominant, and closure occurs.–society has come to a consensus on the
meaning of an artefact.
 b) Relevant Social Groups The most basic relevant groups are the users and the
producers of the technological artifact, but most often many subgroups can be delineated
– users with different socioeconomic status, competing producers, etc. Sometimes there
are relevant groups who are neither users, nor producers of the technology – journalists,
politicians, civil groups, etc. The groups can be distinguished based on their shared or
diverging interpretations of the technology in question.
 c) Closure in technology involves the stabilization of an artefact and the “disappearance”
of problems, so that the “final” technological product emerges as the culmination of the
entire process of technological change. Pinch and Bijker identify two types of closure: the
first is rethorical closure. In this case it’s not necessary to solve the problem in the
common sense way of a technical problem-solving activity. The idea is to convince the
concerned social group(s) that there exists no critical problem. The second type is closure
by redefinition of the problem: closure and acceptance of the technology is achieved by
redefining the original problem and finding a solution to another related problem. The
success of the closure depends upon the particular sociological and cultural uniqueness of
the social groups concerned about the technological problem.