From Commodification to the Common Good: Reconstructing Science, Technology, and Society

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WRITING A BOOK REQUIRES SUSTAINED WORK AND AN EXTENDED time frame. That is particularly true of this book, because of the complexity of the topics discussed. Furthermore, chapters 5, 6, and 7 address not only complex topics but also, for me, new areas of research. Integrating this work in social theory and political philosophy with the more familiar topics in philosophy of science and technology and those of the patenting of scientific and technological research required an additional effort. Because of this broad scope, the book aims at a readership of students and scholars in the above-mentioned areas of research, and of scientists, engineers, and policy makers interested in the broader philosophical, social, and moral issues surrounding current science and technology.

The resulting monograph is not exclusively my own achievement (even if I am accountable for its final content). In chapter 5 I argue that public justification constitutes a central feature of scientific knowledge claims. This also applies to philosophical claims. The collective process of justifying philosophical ideas and knowledge claims begins at the earliest stages of effort, when one is considering and writing down ideas and claims ultimately for publication. All kinds of discussions and comments help to shape and correct one’s thoughts and words. In a wide-ranging book project like this, many people are involved in many different ways. Some have contributed in a general way through significant and formative intellectual and social interaction. Others have read and commented on substantial parts of earlier versions of the work. Still others have contributed in both ways. For such contributions, I would like to thank Henk van den Belt, Mieke Boon, Mark Brown, Martin Carrier, Andrew Feenberg, Willem Halffman, Peter Kirschenmann, Christian Krijnen, Peter Kroes, Harry Kunneman, Sabina Leonelli, Alfred Nordmann, Henk de Regt, Angela Roothaan, László Ropolyi, and last (because of the W) but not least (for many reasons, both intellectual and personal), Sally Wyatt.

In addition, the separate chapters include a variety of specific ideas and claims concerning specialized areas of research: the philosophies of science and technology, theories and assessments of commodification and patenting, and sociopolitical accounts of common goods and public interests. For helpful discussion and constructive comments concerning these specialized areas, my thanks go to Marcos Barbosa de Oliveira, Julian Cockbain, Maarten Derksen, Han van Diest, Delene Engelbrecht, Maarten Franssen, Steve Fuller, Wybo Houkes, Gürol Irzik, Sicco de Knecht, Edwin Koster, Faik Kurtulmus, David Ludwig, Anthony Meijers, Bert Musschenga, Rik Peels, Arthur Petersen, Ibo van de Poel, David Resnik, Jeroen de Ridder, Federica Russo, Gregor Schiemann, Sigrid Sterckx, Behnam Taebi, Emil Višňovský, Cor van der Weele, and Sjoerd Zwart.

I have also profited from exchanges with the audiences at events where I have presented papers on the topics of this book. In addition, many valuable comments have been provided by anonymous reviewers, especially by the three reviewers for the University of Pittsburgh Press. In this context, it is a pleasure to acknowledge the helpful support of the press staff, in particular Abby Collier, Amy Sherman, and Alex Wolfe. Finally, doing the research for this book has been greatly facilitated by several extended study leaves. One at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Bielefeld, Germany, one at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Wassenaar, and one at the Department of Philosophy of Bielefeld University.

In composing the book, I have drawn on material published in a variety of journals and edited volumes. Some chapters are fully or mostly new. The others are (sometimes lightly, sometimes significantly) revised, updated, and expanded versions of that earlier work. At the beginning of all such chapters or sections of chapters, I acknowledge the provenance of the material on which they draw.

INTRODUCTION:

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETY

FROM COMMODIFICATION TO THE COMMON GOOD

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY IN SOCIETY. IT aims, first, to examine how science, technology, and society are related; second, to analyze and evaluate a major pattern in this relationship, which is the phenomenon of commodification; third, because of the problematic consequences of commodification, it proposes an alternative, namely, science and technology for the common good; and it explores concrete ways in which this ideal may be interpreted, specified, and advanced.

If we take a look at the explicit or implicit conceptions of science and technology in the news media and in policy documents, two features stand out. The first is that often hardly any distinction is made between science and technology; they are simply mentioned in the same breath. A second striking characteristic is that the best-known results of this technoscience—technologies—are still seen as socially and morally neutral means to achieve particular ends; only the latter are perceived as value-laden. Therefore, it is only the ends that can and should be normatively assessed from social and moral perspectives. In this book I argue that science and technology are often closely connected but not identical. In particular, I defend the societal value of basic science, which does not have immediate technological utility as its goal. Justifying these claims requires a detailed analysis of the relationship between science and technology. Furthermore, I argue against accounts of technology that are based on a strict contrast between neutral means and social and moral ends. In particular, I present a detailed account of the inherent normativity of technology based on a careful examination of the notions of technology and normativity.

The focus of my investigation of the role of science and technology in society is on their commodification—the increasing impact of economic interpretations, assessments, and policies on scientific and technological practices. During the past decades, many forms of commodification have been thoroughly analyzed and critically assessed from a variety of different philosophical and social perspectives. In this book, I will not review this literature in its entirety. What I will do is explain the notion of commodification and provide some examples of the commodification of science. I assume that, by now, the problematic nature of the commodification of science and technology has been convincingly demonstrated, and so I refer the interested reader to the existing body of literature. There is one form of commodification, however, that has received insufficient attention up to now, especially in the philosophies of science and technology, and that is the patenting of scientific and technological research results. For this reason, I analyze and assess in detail the theory and practices of patenting.

Criticisms of commodification have sometimes been questioned as being merely negative, as lacking substantial insights and offering no policies to improve the situation. Therefore, it is important to offer a positive account by developing an alternative to commodified science (and technology) and then to investigate how science, technology, and the society in which they are embedded may be reconstructed so as to realize this alternative. This is the final challenge I try to meet in this book.

Thus, the book consists of three clusters of chapters. The first group (consisting of chapters 1 and 2) includes an in-depth discussion of the relationship between science and technology and proposes a detailed theory of technology, with a focus on its social and normative dimensions. The second cluster (chapters 3 and 4) illustrates these dimensions by addressing the commodification of (academic) science and technology through a philosophical and social account of their patenting practices. The final cluster (chapters 5, 6, and 7) argues for a move from commodification to the common good. Central concepts of this alternative account are the common good of scientific knowledge, the notion of genuine public interests, and the public interest of science and technology. To these three clusters I have added a brief concluding chapter that summarizes the main results of the book and reflects on their philosophical, moral, and political implications. As usual in philosophy, all chapters include discussion of relevant views of other authors. Overall, I follow the common philosophical practice of presenting both an exposition and a critical assessment of such views.

In this introductory chapter, I first provide some explanation of my usage of the notions of science, technology, society, and philosophy. This explanation is necessarily concise and provisional, and a full understanding can be acquired only on the basis of the subsequent chapters. In the second and final section of this chapter I present brief summaries of the subsequent chapters.

THE NOTIONS OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, SOCIETY, AND PHILOSOPHY

The notion of science used in this book is broadly European in perspective and follows a classification employed in many countries and languages. The general notion of science includes formal, physical, biomedical, engineering, cognitive, social, and human sciences. I prefer the term human sciences over humanities. Since this is somewhat different from most Anglo-American usage, let me add some brief explanation. The human sciences are about humans, their nature, their histories and societies, their limitations and achievements, their ideals, their possible futures. Human sciences address human beings as natural creatures who interpret and understand themselves, their environment, and their behavior and its results in ways that do not apply to stars, cells, lungs, and viruses. Characterized in this way, the human sciences include certain approaches from the social sciences, in particular their interpretative and critical traditions.¹ Classifying these disciplines as sciences acknowledges them as fully legitimate members of the family of the sciences. As in all families, the members display both important similarities and significant differences.

From a different perspective, one that is very relevant to the plan of this book, scientific practices are sometimes classified as being autonomous, commodified, or in the public interest. In terms of this classification, my main line of argumentation can be concisely stated as follows. First, given the close relations between scientific and technological practices, analyses of commodification and the common good need to address both science and technology. This means, for instance, that my critical account of commodification not only applies to academic science but also addresses issues like the product patenting of scientific and technological inventions. Second, my alternative to commodified science is not autonomous science (since science has never been autonomous). Instead, this alternative is based on the idea of the common good of scientific knowledge and, more broadly, on the notion of the public interest of science. Third, instead of the problematic notion of autonomous science, I speak of basic science. I argue in chapter 7 that basic science may be a form of public interest science (if it meets the relevant criteria). Fourth, there is the notion of applied science, which differs from both basic science and technology (Boon 2006). In line with this, chapter 1 includes a critical analysis of the notion of technology as applied science, one that can still be found in various discourses on the relationship between science and technology. To avoid the undesirable connotations of the term applied science, I will use the phrase application-oriented science.

The notion of technology is explained in a more straightforward sense. Technologies are theoretically characterized (in chapter 2) as artifactual, functional systems with a certain degree of stability and reproducibility. Furthermore, this characterization is complemented with analyses and assessments of the practical feasibility and the normative desirability of materially and socially realizing such technologies. Of course, further specifications may be added to this general characterization of technologies. An example would be by distinguishing different kinds of technologies (for this purpose, useful material can be found in Channell 2009 and Banse and Grunwald 2009).

The relationship between science and technology is discussed in detail in chapter 1. Peter Kroes (2014) has provided an attractive metaphor to characterize this relationship. He sees science and technology as two sides of the same coin. Employing this metaphor implies, first, that science and technology are intimately related but not identical and, second, that the philosophical study of science needs to take technology into account, while the philosophy of technology needs to include an account of the sciences. Taking this position implies keeping a distance from those authors who advocate a strong notion of technoscience. Such strong notions go beyond the same-coin metaphor by positing the identity, or basic similarity, of science and technology and drawing strong (and in my view, untenable) philosophical conclusions from this position. Acknowledging the often intimate relationship between science and technology without assuming their identity may entail a problem of presentation. Do the claims and arguments concerning science and technology made in this book apply equally to both science and technology? Or are they valid for one of them but only mostly, or sometimes, or not at all for the other one? Fortunately, the specific context will often make it clear how the relevant claims and arguments should be interpreted. If that is not case, I will add the sort of qualifications mentioned above.

In this book I discuss the notion of society by addressing the role of science and technology in society. On the one hand, this implies that I do not pretend to offer a comprehensive theory of society. On the other hand, given the great significance of science and technology in society, the discussion is certainly not limited to marginal social issues. In particular, the accounts of the common good (in chapter 5) and of the role of democracy in defining the notion of genuine public interests (in chapter 6) address basic aspects of our current societies.

Explaining the notion of philosophy advocated in this book requires somewhat more space. The broad approach exemplifies what I have called inclusive philosophy (Radder 2015). First, as a philosophy of science, it does not limit itself to ontological, epistemological, or methodological issues but also addresses social and moral questions. Second, the theoretical, empirical, and normative discussions of technology go far beyond what is usual in an engineering approach to the philosophy of technology. Third, when discussing topics of social and political philosophy, I explicitly take into account both science and technology as major forces shaping people’s societies, cultures, and lives.

From the late 1960s to the present, a significant pattern in the approaches to philosophy (in almost all of its subfields) is that philosophy cannot be restricted to the study of the totality, the abstract, the universal, the general. In addition, it has to scrutinize how the general and the particular relate, that is, how the former is articulated and realized through the latter and how the latter shapes, and contributes to, the former. In this spirit, this book includes both in-depth general analyses of science and technology and specific points about the current predicament of scientific and technological practices. For instance, the discussion of the common good of science (in chapters 5 and 7) addresses both the general notion of the nonexhaustibility of scientific knowledge and the financial aspects of the publication of open-access articles. Similarly, the general treatment of a Mertonian ethos of science in chapter 4 includes discussion of recent developments in the context of Dutch science policy. Thus, the sections that some might see as exemplifying the empirical approach of science and technology studies (STS) are complemented by arguments that are explicitly theoretical and openly normative. In sum, this philosophical approach involves presenting a deliberate mixture of theoretical, normative, and reflexive considerations without losing sight of empirical and historical issues (see Radder 1996, chap. 8; see also Fuller 2000; and Pels 2003).

More specifically, I propose to call the kind of philosophy practiced in this book synthetic. It synthesizes a variety of subjects, so it is a form of general philosophy (Radder 2012b). In this respect, I fully agree with Susan Haack’s (2016) criticism of the fragmentation of current philosophy and her plea for a reintegration of the many specialist approaches. As already mentioned, synthetic philosophy encompasses a variety of philosophical subfields. It includes philosophy of science (e.g., the account of scientific knowledge, in chapter 5); philosophy of technology (e.g., the theory of technology, in chapter 2); social and political philosophy (e.g., the interpretation and vindication of genuine public interests, in chapter 6); research ethics (the proposal of a deflationary, neo-Mertonian ethos, in chapter 4); general ethics (e.g., several aspects of the analysis of the theory and practice of patenting, in chapter 3); science and technology studies (e.g., the discussion of STS interpretations of the science-technology relationship, in chapter 1, and of the notion of a public good, in chapter 5). Finally, the book is also synthesizing in the more personal sense that it brings together a number of studies I have done in the past.

Explaining what it is not may further clarify the idea of a synthetic philosophy. First, it is not analytic, in the sense of contemporary analytic philosophy (but neither is it continental, whatever that may mean). Furthermore, synthetic philosophy belongs to the human sciences and is therefore not natural or naturalistic in the sense of being part of the natural sciences. Like synthetic biology, it is human made. Synthetic philosophy critically engages with society, but it is not a form of applied philosophy, which would use ready-made philosophical concepts and theories to help in solving the problems of basically unphilosophical people and practices (see Frodeman and Briggle 2016, chap. 3). Finally, synthetic philosophy is not (merely or primarily) empirical, as several authors in the STS tradition advocate.

In sum, the synthetic philosophy presented in this book includes philosophy of science and technology, in a broad sense, as well as substantial excursions into science and technology studies, social and political philosophy, and research ethics. After encountering all these different characterizations of the notions of philosophy, science, technology, and society, it will be clear that synthetic philosophy does not fit in a nutshell, which is as it should be according to this book’s epigraph, a statement that I borrowed from Hilary Putnam.

This complexity of the problems will make quick-and-easy solutions impossible. As I argue in chapter 8, bringing about a shift toward the common good can surely not be accomplished by philosophy alone. It does require pertinent empirical, theoretical, and evaluative accounts of the current predicaments and the future possibilities of science, technology, and society. But these accounts need to be brought forward in democratic debates and decision-making processes in order to acquire the more solid support that is needed for a real and significant reconstruction of science, technology, and society.

OVERVIEW OF THE CHAPTERS

As explained in the previous section, the main chapters of this book can be divided into three clusters. In presenting a brief overview of their content, I focus on the general lines of argumentation. The chapters themselves also include a variety of concrete specifications and illustrations. The first cluster starts with a detailed discussion of the relationship between science and technology. The first section of chapter 1 addresses some important methodological issues that naturally present themselves to a reflexive philosophical approach. Since any account of the science-technology relationship presupposes some characterization of both science and technology, the question is how to acquire a plausible characterization. As to the relationship between science and technology, we face the associated methodological question of how to study this relationship. The sections that follow then review four important views of the epistemic and social dimensions of science and technology: the idea of technology as applied science, the conception of the social and technological finalization of science, the claim that experimentation constitutes the central link between science and technology, and the accounts of technoscience and science-as-technology.

The discussion in chapter 2 addresses the role of (inherent and contingent) normativity in technological practice. The chapter first provides detailed characterizations of the notions of technology and normativity. On that basis, it introduces the distinction between contingently and inherently normative technologies, and it argues for the claim that technologies are always inherently normative and, in addition, often contingently normative. This argument is developed by addressing central aspects of the inherent normativity of technologies on the basis of four different approaches: the account of the political nature of technological artifacts, the analysis of the material and social control needed to realize stable and reproducible technological systems, the script theory of technological design, and analysis of the role of use plans in designing and realizing technological artifacts. The merits and problems of these approaches are assessed and their implications for the main question of this chapter examined.

The first part of the second cluster, chapter 3, starts with an explanation of the notion of commodification, both in general terms and in reference to scientific and technological practices. The subsequent sections then focus on patenting as a major example of the commodification of scientific and technological research. Thus far, the philosophical study of patenting has primarily addressed sociopolitical, legal, and ethical issues, such as the moral justifiability of patenting living organisms or the nature of (intellectual) property. In addition, however, the theory and practice of patenting entails many important problems that can be fruitfully studied from the perspective of the philosophy of science and technology.

Chapter 3 first provides a concise review of seven central features of the theory and practice of the patenting of scientific and technological inventions. On this basis, it describes, analyzes, and evaluates the philosophical, legal, social, or moral issues implied by these features. The seven central features are: (1) patents as commercial monopolies on scientific and technological inventions; (2) the contrast between natural and non-natural subject matter; (3) the distinction between inventions and discoveries; (4) the reproducibility of inventions; (5) the question of the sameness of two inventions; (6) the discrepancy between the invented and the protected object; and (7) the (non)patentability of concepts and theories. The chapter concludes with some observations on the problems and prospects of the philosophical study of the theory and practice of patenting scientific and technological inventions and asks which contributions to the clarification, or resolution, of the above-mentioned issues may be expected from the philosophy of science and technology.

Chapter 4 examines one of the issues from the previous chapter in much more detail: the question of whether academic patenting can be compatible with a Mertonian ethos of science. It first sets out Robert Merton’s views on this subject and includes a detailed review and evaluation of the criticism of these views by sociologists of scientific knowledge. On this basis, it explains in which sense and to what extent a Mertonian approach is still valuable, and even badly needed, in the current context of strongly commodified academic research. The claim is that Merton’s notions of universalism, communism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism are best interpreted as overarching values that may be realized by following more specific scientific norms. The chapter then focuses on the issue of patenting the results of academic research and concludes that such patenting practices are incompatible with a Mertonian ethos of science (an ethos that is explicitly endorsed by many universities and other scientific institutes). An important proviso is that a Mertonian approach can be effective only if it is not limited to an after-the-event assessment of the behavior of individual scientists but is also constructively employed in crafting and implementing more structural science policies. The chapter concludes by addressing several questions regarding the scope, presuppositions, and implications of what I call a deflationary, neo-Mertonian critique of commodified science.

The third cluster, discussing the common good and public interest of science and technology, starts in chapter 5, which deals with the question of whether scientific knowledge can and should be seen as a common good. For this purpose, it first focuses on the notion of (scientific) knowledge. I analyze and assess the core view of analytic epistemology, which claims that knowledge is, primarily, justified true belief. On the basis of this analysis, I develop an alternative, multidimensional theory of the nature of (scientific) knowledge. The next section reviews and evaluates several answers to the question of how to understand the notion of a common (or public) good. It discusses both economic and sociopolitical interpretations of this notion. Finally, the chapter offers an alternative account of the common good of scientific knowledge. This knowledge constitutes a common good if and only if it is both nonexhaustible and in the public interest. Some implications of this approach for the politics of science are examined by returning to the patenting topic. The main conclusion is a fundamental critique of privatizing nonexhaustible scientific concepts by patenting the products of scientific research.

Chapter 6 examines the second central notion of this cluster: the notion of public interests. It proceeds in two steps. First, it demonstrates the existence and importance of supraindividual interests by refuting the individualist doctrine that all interests are, or can be reduced to, individual interests. The basic claim is that the best argument for the existence of genuine public interests derives from the nature and role of large technological systems. Next, the chapter argues for the view that supraindividual interests should be understood as public interests. It provides a detailed discussion of the notion of public interests. In particular, the role of democracy proves to be crucial in answering the important questions of who constitutes the public, what may count as public interests, and how particular public interests should and could be advanced.

In chapter 7 these questions are examined in detail for the case of science and technology. The chapter focuses on six concrete topics and analyzes and evaluates their possible public interest. The topics are environmental research, basic science, diversity in science, public funding of science, open access of scientific publications, and the Dutch National Research Agenda (presented as a form of citizen science). The basic questions to be answered are whether these specific types and features of science can be assigned a public interest status in the sense defined in chapter 6. Do they contribute to realizing and maintaining positive (or to preventing or removing negative) states of affairs of basic significance that (1) affect (or will probably come to affect) either a specific part of the public or all members of the public and that (2) are democratically judged to be of public import? Applying these two criteria to the six aforementioned topics provides an answer to the question of whether they are in the public interest and, if so, to what extent. The concluding section reflects on the results achieved by briefly addressing the nature of criticism and normativity in the arguments of this chapter.

The short concluding chapter provides a summary of the main results of the book. It includes some further explanation of the prospects and challenges of a synthetic approach to philosophy. In particular, it discusses the important questions of how the evaluative and normative claims made in the book should be interpreted and what they imply for concrete moral and political practice.

1. See Delanty and Strydom 2003. The fact that the human sciences include only a part of the social sciences implies that it still makes sense to speak of human and social sciences, as I will do in this book.

1

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE SCIENCE-TECHNOLOGY RELATIONSHIP

A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE COMMODIFICATION AND THE COMmon good of science needs to include a detailed account of how science relates to technology. Therefore, this chapter discusses and assesses a range of philosophical accounts of the science-technology relationship.¹ The discussion is meant to cover a variety of scientific disciplines, even if the examples show some emphasis on the natural sciences.² In discussing how these disciplines relate to technology, we need to take into account the technological sciences. These include several application-oriented disciplines in addition to the engineering sciences, such as the information, medical, and agricultural sciences. Making such a direct link between technologies (in the stricter sense defined and discussed in chapter 2) and the technological sciences makes sense because these sciences focus on realizing incipient or future technologies. Accordingly, this chapter addresses a broad range of technological activities, such as research, design, production, use, and maintenance.

That science and technology have been, still are, and can be expected to remain related hardly needs to be argued. Rather, the important questions concern, first, the empirical features of this relationship (including its historical development) and, second, its theoretical conceptualization in relation to our philosophical understanding of both science and technology. As we will see, different authors offer quite different answers to these two questions. The chapter begins by discussing some critical methodological issues of how to interpret and study our subject. Subsequent sections review several important views of science, technology, and their relationship: the idea of technology as applied science; the conception of the social and technological finalization of science; the claim that experimentation constitutes the central link between science and technology; and the account of science-as-technology, including the related notion of technoscience. The final section sums up the main conclusions about the science-technology relationship, especially those about the uses of science in technology.

PRELIMINARY METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES

A reflexive philosophical study of the relationship between science and technology needs to confront some preliminary methodological issues. Since making claims about the nature of this relationship presupposes some characterization of both science and technology, we must ask how one should acquire a plausible definition of these notions. Closely related is the question of how to investigate the science-technology relationship itself and how to obtain a fitting account of it.

The question of how to characterize science and technology is often addressed through a specification of the aims of each. Many authors claim that the aim of science is epistemic, that it is in particular the acquisition of knowledge. The aim of technology, in contrast, is said to be the construction of things or processes with some socially useful function. Many other authors, however, claim that such a conceptual-theoretical notion of science and technology does not do justice to the richness and variety of actual scientific and technological practices. Alternatively, they advocate a nominalistic-empirical approach: go and see, and define science (and technology) as the practical activity that is called science (and technology). These two points of departure—either a conceptual-theoretical definition or a nominalistic-empirical account of science and technology—differ greatly. Both lead to several further questions.

Consider first the view of science as the search for knowledge. Since there is also nonscientific knowledge, some authors add that science is the activity that systematically strives for theoretical and explanatory knowledge. However, a strict application of this definition would exclude many activities that are usually, and rightly, seen as part of science. Quite a few scientists aim at observational or experimental knowledge, and scientific knowledge can also be nonexplanatory, as in the case of taxonomical knowledge (see, e.g., Kwa 2011, chap. 8). A possible solution might be to distinguish between primary and subsidiary aims. Accordingly, the search for theoretical, explanatory knowledge would be the primary aim of science, while other types of knowledge are always subsidiary to this aim. This solution is rather questionable, however. It is, for instance, difficult to reconcile with the many studies that have convincingly shown that experimental practice has an extensive and worthwhile life of its own.³

Furthermore, defining science as the search for theoretical, explanatory knowledge presupposes a specific philosophical interpretation of science, which is not universally accepted. Bas van Fraassen (1980) argues that explanation is merely a pragmatic aspect of science, and he defines the aim of science as the development of theories that are empirically adequate (rather than true). Patrick Heelan (1983) also emphasizes the primacy of perception, although his notion of perception differs significantly from Van Fraassen’s account. For these philosophers and their followers, a plausible characterization of science, and a fortiori of the contrast between science and technology, cannot be based on the explanatory nature of theoretical science.

What about the definition of the aim of technology as the construction of things or processes having some socially useful function? Although this definition seems to be intuitively plausible, two qualifications are in order. First, many authors claim that it is too narrow because technology is not limited to the making of useful material things or processes. Technology, as the etymology of this term suggests, also involves the generation and utilization of knowledge (see Layton 1974; and Houkes 2009). Specifically, it is design knowledge that is claimed to have a prominent place in technology. In the technological sciences, this design knowledge is often of a general nature (Kroes 2009).

However, this definition of technology (with or without the addition of design knowledge) does not give us a strict demarcation between science and technology. This is because designing and constructing material things or processes, including the generation and utilization of design knowledge, is an ordinary feature of observational and experimental science.⁴ Both the overall observational or experimental setup and their component devices, apparatus, or instruments often require an extensive process of design and construction (see, e.g., Rothbart 2007). These observational and experimental practices constitute a significant aspect of scientific disciplines. Thus, in contrast to what Edwin Layton (1974), Peter Kroes (1992), and many others claim, design (knowledge) and construction do not demarcate technology and engineering from science. The same conclusion applies to the attempt to base a demarcation argument on the contrast between prescription and description. Along these lines, Wybo Houkes (2009, 342) suggests that the recommendations and requirements that can be found in the use plans for technological artifacts may be specific to technology.⁵ However, this argument overlooks the fact that similar prescriptive recommendations and requirements can be found in the many scientific practices aimed at realizing stable and reproducible observational or experimental processes.

What can we conclude from this discussion of the conceptual-theoretical approach? The only tenable intuitive distinction seems to be the relation to social usefulness. In contrast to science, technology would be oriented toward its potential usefulness for society at large. Even this suggestion needs to be qualified, however. First, should this social usefulness be explicit and obvious even at the start of a technological project? If so, some of the research done in industrial laboratories may not qualify as technological. For instance, research done between 1947 and 1972 at the Philips electronics laboratories did not always aim at immediate technological applications (De Vries 2005). But if social usefulness may also emerge in the course of a project, then quite a few projects in prima facie scientific research will also count as technological. Scientific research is often supported by funding agencies because of its contribution to the knowledge base of a society, and thus this research can be seen as practical and useful in the long run.⁶ For this reason, present-day funding applications for scientific research projects have to be routinely justified also in terms of their possible technological and societal payoff.

Let us now take a closer look at the nominalistic-empirical strategy. This involves the empirical investigation of whichever activities present themselves as scientific or technological. As will be clear from the preceding comments on the conceptual-theoretical approach, this nominalistic-empirical strategy certainly has its place. In particular, it constitutes a healthy antidote against those philosophers who simply proclaim a specific aim for science or technology, without offering any evidence or reflection. But