What Are Science And Technology?
Written by trusted specialists for researchers at each degree, entries are complemented by illustrative line drawings, equations, and charts wherever helpful. The enchancment of human tradition and society depends on more diffuse structural and practical patterns. In the case of science, its diffusion to most people is usually called the popularisation of science and might involve scientists themselves, somewhat than journalists and different communicators. Scientists–especially these working in public establishments–ought to make a larger effort to communicate to society what science is and what’s not; how is it carried out; what are its primary results; and what are they useful for. This can be the easiest way of demystifying science and scientists and upgrading society’s scientific literacy.
Some authors have criticized the focus on dangers in the ethics of technology. One strand of criticism argues that we frequently lack the knowledge to reliably assess the risks of a new know-how before it has come into use.
This is shown by the construction of complex calendars, methods for making toxic vegetation edible, public works at national scale, similar to those which harnessed the floodplain of the Yangtse with reservoirs, dams, and dikes, and buildings such because the Pyramids. However, no constant acutely aware distinction was made between information of such things, which are true in every neighborhood, and different types of communal data, corresponding to mythologies and legal techniques.
Mitcham calls this sort of philosophy of know-how “humanities philosophy of know-how” as a result of it accepts “the primacy of the humanities over applied sciences” and is steady with the overall perspective of the humanities (and a few of the social sciences). Only recently a branch of the philosophy of technology has developed that’s concerned with expertise itself and that aims to understand both the follow of designing and creating artifacts (in a wide sense, together with synthetic processes and systems) and the character of the issues so created. This latter branch of the philosophy of expertise seeks continuity with the philosophy of science and with several different fields in the analytic custom in trendy philosophy, such as the philosophy of action and determination-making, somewhat than with the humanities and social science.
To look in this method at technological design as a decision-making process is to view it normatively from the perspective of sensible or instrumental rationality. At the same time it is descriptive in that it is a description of how engineering methodology usually presents the problem how to solve design problems. Design is an activity that is subject to rational scrutiny however by which creativity is taken into account to play an important function as properly. Since design is a type of action, a structured series of selections to proceed in a method somewhat than one other, the form of rationality that is relevant to it’s practical rationality, the rationality incorporating the standards on how to act, given specific circumstances. This suggests a transparent division of labor between the part to be performed by rational scrutiny and the half to be played by creativity.