by Over time science, technology, and society have all had different commonly understood definitions. These definitions continue to evolve and there is no one correct way of defining any of them. It’s clear that how society interacts with and defines technology and science, even before the formal creation of these two concepts, is ever changing.
Thomas Khun, a 20th-century philosopher, and physicist studied and taught physics and thought about how society defines different fields of science. Kuhn coined the term “paradigm shift” and used it to frame the evolution of science. Fundamentally, a paradigm shift occurs when many anomalies start to build up and question a previously accepted scientific idea. A paradigm is a distinct set of concepts, theories, research methods, etc. that contribute to a specific field in science. The nature of these paradigm shifts however is more easily applied to hard sciences compared to social sciences. This is because there are more concrete rules that can be applied to hard sciences such as defining elements in chemistry compared to defining the scope of human conditions in social sciences. In this way, Khun’s method of defining science is somewhat narrow and not inclusive to scientific fields with fewer cut and dry definitions that also may change more rapidly.
Karl Popper was also a 20th-century philosopher. Rather than defining science through paradigm shifts, Popper was focused on separating pseudoscience from science through demarcation. Popper wanted to scrutinize how we know what we know as a way of validating scientific findings. Popper’s intentions do not seem much different from how mathematicians work to prove a new theory through proofs. However, Popper’s process was not bulletproof and left many things up to subjective judgments which were counterproductive to his goal. The demarcation process happened through clinical observation and scrutinizing the scientific topic at hand. The core of this process was looking at the falsifiability, refutability, and testability of the given subject. Similar to Kuhn, Popper’s concept was better in the abstract than execution. Popper’s demarcation method is less narrow compared to Khun’s method of defining through paradigm shifts but leaves too many things open to interpretation and ad hoc hypotheses to explain away discrepancies.
David Nye, a professor 21st century, strays away from defining science like Kuhn and Popper and focuses instead on defining the scope of technology. Nye wrote about how technology can cover a vast array of tools, objects, and machinery that in contemporary times are taken for granted. What Nye highlights is how tools from Paleolithic times to the present day are all forms of technology. He talks about how narrow-minded the widely held contemporary definition of technology is. The oxford dictionary defines technology as,” the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry.” In society today it seems that technology is limited to machines and screens like smartphones and computers, however, almost anything from pencils to yarn, and even clothing could arguably fall under the definition of technology. Nye also goes on to talk about how tools are the earliest form of technology and before the idea of science and technology were created storytelling would be used to pass on information. One of the other interesting subjects he touched on was how in the medieval era most forms of technology were created by women and how this starkly contrasts with the masculine taint the whole technology industry has today. This is partly due to the shift in the societal definition of technology. Overall, society comes together to define what does or does not fit into the science and technology categories. We have to be careful not to become too narrow-minded in our definitions and zoom back out to look at where science and technology came from to fully appreciate, understand, and best harness the capabilities of these two fields.