Science and technology

I found aspects of the article by Pinch and Bijker quite interesting this week. Written in 1987, its ideal for doing your own mental comparison study using contemporary thoughts. The part of the article that I became particularily engrossed with was their brief and admittedly partial discussion of the science-technology relationship. I feel like it could have been a contemporary piece. Nowadays, Science and Technology are still grouped together and people are still trying to define the distinction between the two, even though they are inextricably intermixed. Perhaps this is because technology has evolved at such an exponential rate. Pinch and Bijker dismiss some prominent philosopher thoughts that "science is about the discovery of truth whereas technology is about the application of truth" as overidealized and simplified. When I googled "what is the difference between science and technology" an answer that popped up alot was, "Science is knowing and technology is doing". One of the same prevailing thoughts as 23 years ago!
Pinch and Bijker take a social constructivist view of science and technology. "Scientists and technologists can be regarded as constructing their respective bodies of knowledge and techniques with each drawing on the resources of the other". All this time, well the last two months, I've been under the impression that the meshing of disciplines and blurring of classification lines was a new phenomenon. Obviously, it started long ago. The category of science and the category of technology are socially constructed, only now we have started to take down the barriers that we ourselves erected, or have we actually? Two decades later we are still wrestling with the same issues.

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