The Science-Technology Relationship: A Model and a Query Author(s): Barry Barnes Source: Social Studies of Science, Vol.

12, No. 1 (Feb., 1982), pp. 166-172 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/284894 Accessed: 11/02/2009 22:55
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Notes and Letters (continued)

* ABSTRACT
This Note draws attention to the emergence of what is generally acknowledged to be a very satisfactory interactive model of the science-technology relationship. It goes on to ask why such a model should not be extended to describe the relationship of science with other sub-cultures, besides that of technology.

The Science-Technology A Model and a Query

Relationship:

Barry Barnes

This very brief Note seeks merely to raise questions and point out some possible analogies and connections; it addresses no issues of substance, nor does it involve any attempts at proof or demonstration. Accordingly, I have felt entitled to proceed in a semi-mythological way, using abstractions rather than actual historicallysituated models and theories, and referring to the literature sparingly and unsystematically.

The Model I start with the major reorientation in our thinking about the science-technology relationship which has occurred in recent years. We are now much less prone to think in terms which subordinate technology to science, and have the former working out the implications of the latter. Instead we recognize science and technology to be on a par with each other. Both sets of practitioners creatively extend and develop their existing culture; but both also take up and exploit some part of the culture of Social Studies of Science (SAGE, London and Beverly Hills), Vol. 12 (1982), 166-72

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TABLE 1 Conceptions of the Relationship Between Science (S) and Technology (T)
THE INSTITUTION COMPARED FORMS OF ACTIVITY 'BAD OLD DAYS' S Discovery Creation of knowledge T Application Use of knowledge S Nature T Science S State of nature T State of science S Creative/constructive T Routine/deductive THEIR RELATIONSHIP S GENERAL IMAGE T T Hierarchical dependence MAIN MEDIATING AGENCIE S OUTCOMES a. For the development of knowledge Words Words S --T Egalitarian interactive People People PRESENT S Invention T Invention

MAJOR RESOURCES MAJOCO TRTS CONSTRAINTS ON RESULTS FORMS OF COGNITION MAJOR

S Existing science T Existing technology S No single major constraint T No single major constraint S Creative/constructive T Creative/constructive

a. Predictable consequences. T deduces the implications of S and gives them physical representation. No feedback from T to S. b. S may make free creative use of T as resource in research.

a. No predictable consequences. T makes occasional creative use of S. S makes occasional creative use of T. Interaction b. Not a separate question. Interaction as above.

b. For the development of competence and technique c. For the evaluation of knowledge and competence

c. S evaluates discoveries in an unchanging context-independent way. T is evaluated according to its ability to infer the implications of S. Success in T is proper use of S; failure in T is incompetent use of S.

c. S and T, both being inventive, both involve evaluation in terms of ends. No a priori reason why activity in T should not be evaluated by reference to ends relevant to agents in S, or vice versa.

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the other - culture which tends to be transferred predominantly by personal mobility. Technology and science could both survive as forms of institutionalized activity independently of the other, but they are in fact enmeshed in a symbiotic relationship - a weak, mutually beneficial interaction, which looks much the same whichever way round it is considered. This reorientation is set out in an extreme form in Table 1. Rather than documenting and justifying the contents of the table, I rely upon the reader to recognize the two models it represents. How far the hierarchical model had credibility, even in the 'bad old days', is a moot point; but I do hope that the interactive model attributed to the present day will be recognized by most readers. Although it corresponds to no specific opinion, it is an abstraction which, I believe, captures much of the basic structure of current thinking. At least two intellectual developments were necessary for the emergence of an interactive model. First, science and technology had both to be recognized as forms of culture: it had to be accepted that new science develops predominantly from old science, new technology from old technology. In the case of science, the tendency to relate new findings solely to nature, and to give little explicit stress to received knowledge, whether existing science or inputs from technology, constituted an obstacle which has only recently been overcome. In the case of technology, undue concern with the role of science in innovation for a long time stifled interest in the far more important role of existing technology. Fortunately, historians of technology are now rapidly redressing the balance: there is no longer any difficulty in perceiving that new machines develop predominantly out of old ones, and analogously with instruments, materials, patterns and procedures.2 The second necessary development was more subtle and far-reaching. It had to be accepted that knowledge does not have inherent implications. So long as theories and discoveries were thought to have such implications, technology could be seen as a routine activity wherein those implications were deduced and realized. Any technological innovation could be traced backwards, and made out as a logical consequence of the newest scientific theory or discovery encountered in the line of its development; and the period between theory and innovation, the so-called 'lag' between fundamental research and its application, could be used as a measure of technological inefficiency. But again, historians of technology helped to reorientate our thinking: they insisted that we recognize what was surely never hard to see; that quantum theories of the solid state did not evoke transistors as a rational intuition; that Marconi did not follow from Maxwell; that, in general, scientific theories do not arrive, like calculators or quartz-watches, with instruction books attached. As Joseph Ben-David has rightly stressed, 'nothing is "implied" in a discovery beyond the questions answered by it, and those to which it is related by the traditions and mental habits of the people who are its prime consumers.'3 Scientific 'discoveries' have no logical implications. Nor can technologists rely upon their 'traditions and mental habits' to arrive at what may be taken to be 'implications': technologists are not 'prime consumers'. Accordingly, we must expect technologists actively and imaginatively to exploit scientific work, just as they frequently exploit the resources of their own technological culture.4 Cognitively, there is no fundamental distinction to be drawn between the creation of a scientific theory and its subsequent application. Just as the one is the imaginative development and purposive reordering of existing knowledge, so too is the other. And so also, in just

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the same way, is the exploitation of technological innovation in the context of science. Thus, the current interactive model of the science-technology relationship has emerged. And a very satisfactory model it is, given that no such construct, however sophisticated, can cope perfectly with the complexities of real relationships, or allow for the negotiable and essentially contested character of the two concepts, 'science' and 'technology'.5 The utility of the model in empirical studies is already widely recognized, and its wider heuristic value is beginning to be apparent. For example, once we think in terms of the interaction of two contexts of inventive activity - activity which of its nature demands evaluation in relation to human objectives - it is easy to understand how judgement in one context may readily become conditioned by objectives, and hence criteria, from the other. This overlap, or even total interpenetration, of the objectives and judgements of technologists and scientists, everywhere apparent in the history of either activity, presents much greater difficulties of conceptualization when the alternative hierarchical model is employed.

The Query For present purposes, however, my assessment of the merits of the interactive model is irrelevant. I need only describe it, in the hope that the reader will recognize it and concede the high regard in which it is widely held. This opens the path to the query which is the crux of my Note. Why should an interactive model of this kind not be used as a way of conceptualizing the relationship of science with other sub-cultures? Why, for example, should the relationship between science and political subcultures, to the extent that there is such a relationship, not be conceptualized in this way, or the relationship between science and our everyday commonsense culture? It is certainly easy to speculate upon why, as a matter of fact, this move is rarely made. A plausible hypothesis is that our willingness to describe a sub-culture as in symmetrical interaction with science, and our willingness to evaluate it as epistemologically comparable with science are intimately connected. Technology, obviously and impressively efficacious and thereby in a sense valid, is possibly the only form of culture which can interact with science, and hence affect science, without danger to the standing of the latter. To say this, however, is only to say why an interactive conception is not used; I ask why it should not be used. At present, when a relationship is perceived between science and (say) politics, the tendency is to presume that science is used by political sub-cultures but that science is itself untouched by this use, or by its general relationship to the political context at that point. An hierarchical model is employed, and the possibility of interaction, and hence of inputs into science, is not considered. I suggest that an interactive model should always be used in such cases, that the possibility of feedback into science should always be investigated as a matter of routine, and that zero feedback should be treated merely as a possible empirical finding. Consider how much can be said in favour of such a policy. First, there is the generally acknowledged merit of the interactive model as a representation of the science-technology relationship. Secondly, there is the character of the arguments which support the adoption of the model in that context. These arguments do not require the existence of any special or distinctive features in the sub-cultures of science

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and technology. On the contrary, it was precisely the imputation of such features to scientific culture which sustained the earlier, unsatisfactory, hierarchical model of the science-technology relationship, and the abandonment of that imputation which allowed the interactive model to be justified. The interactive model treats science and technology as much more closely analogous to other forms of culture than did its predecessor. And this in turn suggests that the science-technology relationship is likely to be relevantly analogous to other relationships between sub-cultures. Finally, there is the fact that the science-technology interaction is understood in a considerable degree of detail, and that many of its principal features are now common currency among us. These are precisely the two characteristics which endow representations with heuristic value, which make them potent metaphors, versatile tools of thought. At present the study of science and technology is but weakly conne.ted to the study of the general social and political context of science: although there is some overlap of personnel between the fields, there does not appear to be a ready interchange of methods and models. Recent work in the latter field, however, indicates that it may now independently be recapitulating the development of the former. It has for a long time been standard practice for historians to speak of the social or political uses of science: one way traffic has been assumed from science to 'society', with the role of the latter being solely to use, or to misuse, the knowledge derived from the former, to deduce its real 'implications' or to attach false 'implications' to it. The profane culture of 'society' has been set below science, and their relationship has been conceptualized hierarchically - precisely as was done with technology in the 'bad old days' when it too was reckoned a possible source of defilement. But the current trend is to call into question this asymmetrical treatment, and the associated assumption that where science is used in a general social context what is involved is mere use, and not interaction. For example, a great range of materials on the 'social uses' of eighteenth-century science has recently been gathered together by Shapin, who has tellingly demonstrated how the 'uses' are relevant to an understanding of the conception, development and evaluation of the science itself.6 Shapin notes how theories of matter were deployed as strategies to further interests throughout the period of the Enlightenment. Theories asserting the primacy of spirit over matter were favoured by spiritual elites and supporters of clerical hierarchies; theories locating powers in matter itself and denying the primacy, or even the existence, of spirit were deployed by opponents of those elites and hierarchies. Thus the matter theories of, among others, Boyle, Newton and Priestley all had important social and political uses. It is both arbitrary and, as it happens, incorrect, to assume that the matter theories of these men of science originated in ways quite unconnected with the social and political uses. Boyle's a priori conviction, so important in his technical scientific work, that matter was inert and lacking in inherent powers, was no mere individual idiosyncracy or expedient technical assumption; nor was Newton's view of the universe as rich in spirit and poor in matter; nor was Priestley's materialism and consequent affection for the phlogiston theory. If Boyle, Newton and Priestley were men of science, then their science was a sub-culture which interacted with the wider culture in a way well adumbrated by the right hand column of Table 1. This example is genuinely representative of emerging trends in the social history of science, and of parallel movements in sociology and political science.7 Yet it is clear from its structure, its vocabulary, and the work it does in reinterpreting the very re-

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cent primary materials upon which it relies, that it represents an attempt at persuasion on behalf of a framework both cognitively alien and evaluatively suspect to much of its audience. Within the context of the social and intellectual history of science it is natural, and indeed desirable, that there should be such suspicion. But to the extent that the framework produces problems of intelligibility, or stimulates conceptual questions, it is surely relevant to note that it already exists in a well developed form as the accepted model of the science-technology relationship.

* NOTES
1. In lieu of documentation, I cite W. Gruber and G. Marquis (eds), Factors in the Transfer of Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969), as one marker of the point at which the interactive conception and its merits achieved clear visibility. The contribution of D. J. de S. Price to this volume remains one of the best general presentations of current thinking about the science-technology relation. A good source for further developments is the excellent bibliographical essay by E. Layton, 'Conditions of Technological Development', in I. Spiegel-Rosing and D. J. de S. Price (eds), Science, Technology and Society (London and Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1977), 197-222. 2. Diffuse long-term trends are being referred to here, which cannot be associated with specific contributions. No doubt, Kuhn's work on research traditions and Price's upon research literatures have special significances as far as science is concerned. With regard to technology, one has to consider the overall tendency in such concrete historical studies as those of Cardwell, Hughes or Layton (cf. Layton, op. cit. note 1). 3. J. Ben-David, Fundamental Research and the Universities (Paris: OECD, 1968), 50. This perceptive insight into 'implication' as a matter of habit and custom is suggestive in many other ways. 4. For a general account along these lines see D. Schon, Technology and Change (Oxford: Pergamon, 1967); for a very brief concrete illustration, M. Gibbons and C. Johnson, 'Relationship between Science and Technology', Nature, Vol. 227 (11 July 1970), 125-27. 5. Cf. O. Mayr, 'The Science-Technology Relationship as a Historiographic Problem', Technology and Culture, Vol. 17 (1979), 663-73. 6. S. Shapin, 'Social Uses of Science', in G. S. Rousseau and R. Porter (eds), The Ferment of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 93-139. Shapin himself notes that 'A proper perspective of the uses of science might reveal that the sociology of knowledge and the history of technology have more in common than is usually thought' (ibid., 132). 7. Cf. the many references in Porter and Rousseau, op. cit. note 6; B. Barnes and S. Shapin (eds), Natural Order (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979); R. Wallis (ed.), On the Margins of Science: The Social Construction of Rejected Knowledge (Keele, Staffs.: University of Keele, Sociological Review Monograph No. 27, 1979); and G. Lemaine et. al. (eds), Perspectives on the Emergence of Scientific Disciplines (The Hague: Mouton, 1976).

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Author's address: Science Studies Unit, Edinburgh University, 34 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9JT, Scotland, UK.