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Alliances between Styles
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106 • Alliances between Styles A New Model for the Interaction between Science and Technology CHUNGLIN KWA 9 9 Biotechnology and nanotechnology have acquired, or almost acquired, a paradigm status of what science is today. Science is technoscience now, and philosophers of science are catching up with the recent status of technology vis-à-vis science. For better or for worse, the university is no longer the home of pure science. “If pure science ever existed,” many would assert. But as Paul Forman (2007) reminded us, before 1980 neither scientists nor engineers, neither philosophers nor historians of science, and politicians the least of all, doubted the cultural primacy of science over technology. If the cultural primacy of science was a myth, it was a myth with real consequences , not just in the twentieth century but in the early seventeenth century as well. At the very least, it contributed to forging a social relationship between science and technology, when Baconian science rallied with technology to improve upon human earthly existence. For this, it was enough that science should be useful, and this idea is older than the idea that science should lead to technological innovation. The very existence of a relationship between science and technology is of more importance than the question to which belongs primacy, every answer to which is always a reflection of the cultural standards of the age. Primacy has been taken to mean priority in discovery, but this it is alliances between styles • 107 not. The latter is an empirical, historical question to which no generalizable answer can be given. The once popular “linear model” of pure science leading to applied science leading to technology has justly been exposed not just as a myth but as wrong. It has never been true, but neither is or was its opposite. It is an extraordinary social fact that technology now enjoys cultural primacy over science. While this may have sensitized us to generally accepted examples of science developing out of a reflection on technology, and led us to the acknowledgment of the primacy of technology in several cases, this model is not generalizable either. There is also a “model” of the science-technology relationship which simply denies that there is one. The idea of the autonomy of technology vis-à-vis science has been defended by a number of historians of technology, most recently by Thomas Misa (2004). The mere fact that a good history of technology can be written without reference to science is telling. Yet it could not say more than that the autonomy is relative and that there are analytical distinctions to be made between science and technology. A subtle yet pervasive mutual influence of science and technology in the seventeenth and eighteenth century has recently been demonstrated in The Mindful Hand, an edited collection (Roberts, Schaffer, and Dear 2007). The historians in this edited volume acknowledge a social distinction between natural philosophers and artisans, yet they also identify intermediaries, through whom skills and concepts were exchanged. Rich as their historical treatment is, from a systematic point of view the authors seem to do little more than vindicating Edgar Zilsel, who argued in 1942 that natural philosophers received their experimental skills from artisans and artistsengineers . What natural philosophers did with their newly acquired skills remains open for investigation. But we could also read The Mindful Hand as saying that in concrete historical cases, alliances are forged between the various forms of thinking and practice of science and technology. The model I propose in this article is also a model of alliances, in which science and technology remain analytically distinct . But in addition, it breaks up science into six forms, six styles of science, in the way they were first proposed by Alistair Crombie in his 1994 grand overview of the history of science, Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition (Crombie 1994; see also Kwa 2011). In a nutshell, Crombie’s idea is as follows. In classical Greece an idea of science was developed that inaugurated a search for first principles. Ultimately, known phenomena should be derived with certainty from the first principles, hence deductive science. During the Renaissance several new styles of science developed: the experimental, the taxonomical, and a new form of theoretical [54.144.233.198] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:30 GMT) 108 • chunglin kwa science that deduced from hypotheses rather than from first principles: the analogical-hypothetical style. The deductive style, while remaining in place as an ideal...