Can we
apply the science/technology distinction to the Social Sciences? A brief analysis of the question*
¿Podemos aplicar la
distinción entre ciencia y tecnología a las ciencias sociales? Un breve
análisis de la cuestión
Germán HEVIA MARTÍNEZ
Universidad de Oviedo (España)
ghmhevia@gmail.com
Keywords: Social Engineering, Operations Research, Systemic
Materialism, Demarcation Problem.
Resumen: En este artículo, abordo el problema de aplicar la distinción
filosófica entre ciencia y tecnología a las disciplinas que se ocupan de los
fenómenos sociales. Primero, expondré el problema de la demarcación con
respecto a esta distinción. En segundo lugar, expondré los argumentos de
aquellos investigadores que consideran que es posible hablar de disciplinas
tecnológicas en los campos que se ocupan del mundo social. Discutiré luego los
enfoques de la "sociotecnología" (Mario Bunge) y la "tecnología
social" (Olaf Helmer), además de los trabajos contemporáneos
de otros académicos. Finalmente, defenderé porque la distinción
ciencia/tecnología debería aplicarse a las disciplinas sociales.
Palabras clave: ingeniería social, investigación de operaciones, materialismo
sistémico, problema de la demarcación.
“Gentlemen: Without technique man would not
exist and never would have existed”.[1]
These are the words that the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset pronounced at
the opening of his course about the technique in 1933.[2]
Although this statement is nearly one hundred years old, the argument still
holds today. We cannot understand society without technology. The social is
embedded in the technical, and the technical is embedded in the social.
However, not all technical designs are
material ones. Or, in other words, not all techniques and technologies are referred to
the transformation of material objects.[3]
We have other techniques whose aim is to modify human behavior and social
systems. This is the idea that I am going to defend in this paper. My
hypothesis is that we can apply the distinction between scientific and
technological fields to the realm of social studies. And therefore, we can
speak of sociotechnological fields or social technologies. In other words, I
going to defend that some of the knowledge produced by social
disciplines should be considered, from an epistemic point of view, as technical
knowledge.
But before that, I want to make explicit my
philosophical framework. An honest philosopher must make explicit its own
philosophical assumptions and compromises, because, after all, all of us think
about reality from the point of view of a philosophical system –either explicit
or implicit, organized or diffuse-[4] I consider that the task of
philosophy is to analyze the underlying assumptions of theories, models and
frameworks used in science and in technology. From this point of view,
philosophy should discuss problems along with science and technology, using the
knowledge gained by these fields as a starting point. These are the roots of
the systemic materialism or hylorrealism[5] developed by Mario Bunge, whose framework I follow in my research
activities.
Although I use the word sociotechnology or
social technology in this work, in the end we are talking about something that
in most disciplines –and of course, in the public sphere- has a bad
connotation: social engineering, or the ways in which we can take an
engineering approach to the transformation of the social world.[6]
Regarding this topic, we have classical
thinkers that have talked about the use of a technological approach to the
social world. Karl Popper talked about piecemeal social engineering,[7] Jacques Ellul talked about
human techniques,[8] Hebert Simon talked about
the sciences of the artificial,[9] and so on. Even today
we can find researchers addressing the same problem in the field of philosophy
of social sciences.
That is the case of researchers such as Andreas Pickel,
Javier Echeverría, Harald Stelzer or Ivan Ferreira da Cunha.[10]
But there is an unresolved problem. This
philosophical problem has two faces. On one hand, there is the theoretical use of the notion of social technology. On
the other hand, there is the theoretical foundation of the notion of social
technology. Although a lot of researchers have talked about this topic,
they did not develop -at least in an explicit way- epistemological or
ontological arguments to support their views about social technology. They used
this notion in the first sense described: only as a tool to address other issues.[11]
That is why the main references on this paper are quite old: Mario Bunge and
Olaf Helmer are the only ones that have addressed the second part of this
topic. Or to use other words, they are the only ones that used epistemological
arguments to hold this notion.
To address all these issues, first, I will
expose the demarcation problem and the distinction between science and
technology. Then differences between scientific and technological enterprise
should be highlighted. Second, I am going to exhibit the arguments of those
researchers that have considered the possibility of talking about technological
fields in the realm of social studies. In this case, I will exhibit the
arguments of Olaf Helmer’s social
technology and Mario Bunge’s sociotechnology.
Third, I am going to discuss their ideas and try to link them to modern
discussions. And, finally, I am going to resolve the main question of this
paper and defend why nowadays this topic should be an object of philosophical
inquiry.
2. The demarcation problem: Science and
technology
The demarcation problem is not only related to
the problem of distinguishing between scientific and pseudoscientific knowledge: it is also
related to the problem of distinguishing science from non-science.[12] That is: it is related to
the problem of distinguishing scientific knowledge from other forms of genuine knowledge.[13]
As Martin Mahner have said, the best way of
doing this is focusing on fields of knowledge. In that way we can make explicit
the criteria to differentiate between the different knowledge genera. Roughly
speaking, an epistemic or a research field is a group of people and their
practices, aiming at gaining knowledge of some sort. For the purposes of the
present study, the attention should focus in only two types of research fields:
science and technology.[14]
Is important to consider this characterization
as both descriptive and normative or evaluative. Descriptive because it
includes many elements that should be considered when we analyze science and
technology. Normative because it can be regarded as an ideal that every field
should satisfy to be considered as scientific or technological.[15]
Bunge holds that we cannot characterize
science by a single peculiar trait. That is why in his characterization he uses
a ten-tuple to take into account the different components of the scientific
enterprise.
For a bungean perspective,[16]
an epistemic or a research field is scientific if the elements of the ten-tuple
approximately satisfy a set of twelve conditions regarding each one of the
elements of the ten-tuple plus two additional ones: (1) there is at least one
other contiguous scientific research field and (2) the membership of every one
of the last eight components changes as a result of scientific research (see
Figure 1).
Figure 1. Epistemic fields: science and technology characterization
Source: adaptation from Mario Bunge, Treatise on basic philosophy.[17]
In the same way as he characterizes science,
Bunge uses an eleven-tuple to consider the main elements of technological
research fields. In opposition to science, here we have another element in the
tuple: values.
For him, we should distinguish between internal
and external values in technological research. Or the endoaxiology and exoaxiology
of technology. Bunge holds that the latter has no counterpart in basic science,
and that is one of the main differences between scientific and technological
fields.[18] Of course, as Ernan
McMullin and Hillary Putnam point out, science has values too[19]. But in the case of
technology, the exoaxiology or external values shapes and sets the
technological design, implementation and praxis. Technologist are not free:
they follow orders of what to create and modify from his employer or client[20]. Then, they adopt the
values of the latter. And this is a key question: values limit technological
praxis and what can and should be done.
One of the main differences between these two
types of fields is in their goals. Science relates to cognitive problems, and
its goal is understanding reality. For that, it uses theories as a guide to
understand how things works. By the other hand, technology relates to practical
problems, and its goal is to do things, using for that theories as a guide for
action. It is important to keep in mind that for technology, scientific
knowledge is a means to an end. In this case, a means to modify reality.
That is why the core values of each field are
different. As Miguel Angel Quintanilla points out, the core value of technology
is not truth, but efficiency.[21] Quintanilla has extended
Mario Bunge’s philosophy to the field of philosophy of technology. In his
account, technology has
these main key elements: a) it refers always to a
system of actions, b) its core value is efficiency, and c) its output should be
considered valuable.
So, techniques always refer to systems of
intentional actions whose goal is to do something in an efficient way to gain a
result that is considered valuable. Or, to use other words, technology is the
design of things or processes of possible practical value to some individuals
or groups with the help of knowledge gained in basic or applied research.
It is possible to say that in the field of Philosophy
of Science there is a broad consensus about this distinction between scientific
and technological fields.[22] But this basic ideas about
science and technology are often used only to refer to the disciplines that
deals with the natural world (either those who study it or those who transform
it).[23] Nevertheless, this basics
notions can be used to refer to a broader range of disciplines, beyond the
natural sciences.
3. Olaf Helmer’s social technology
If humanity can use the basic forces of the
physical world and use them through technology to make our lives better, why do
not we do that with the social world?[24]
That is the idea of social technology in Olaf Helmer’s work.[25] A synonym of operations
research.[26] A discipline that seeks to
exercise effective control without the need of a strong theoretical
understanding of all the underlying phenomena[27].
It is a practical field of social science, whose aim is to deal with social
problems. How? By
producing knowledge about the future that can be used
by policymakers and heads of corporations and governments. Knowledge gain using
highly developed mathematical modeling, simulation techniques and the
systematic use of experts (for example, the DEPHI technique).
He considers that decision-making processes in
politics and in corporations should use the knowledge from this new type of
social discipline: a discipline that can forecast the future and then offer
that knowledge to create more efficient ways of transform social systems. For
him, sociotechnologists then are advisors that should help policymakers in
their decisions and warn them about the possible outcomes of their actions.[28] But they do not choose what
patch should be followed regarding the desired future states
of the social system: that is the work of politicians or of the heads of the
corporations.[29] As has been said before,
technologists adopt the values scheme of their employers: they are, practically
speaking, neutral in the sense that
they can create both harmful or harmless artifacts or plans depending of the
values of its employers.
To hold this, Helmer use two arguments or
theoretical foundations: an epistemology of inexact sciences and the ability to
make predictions in social sciences. Helmer argues that social sciences should
not be regarded as inexact disciplines. This is related to the problem of
finding laws in social sciences. For most researchers, even today, social
sciences can only find general trends or quasi-laws.[30]
That is the reason why social sciences can only obtain an inexact knowledge
about their domain: because they cannot obtain those exact laws used in natural
sciences, due to the intrinsic inexactness of its domain. But for Helmer and
Nicholas Rescher, this distinction between exact and inexact disciplines is a
fiction[31]. They argue that only a
small section of natural sciences satisfies this ideal of exactness. In fact,
they hold that when those natural laws are used in technology, they become like
the so-called quasi-laws of social
sciences. For them, there is no clear-cut dichotomy between exact and inexact
sciences. The only difference should be found in the forecasting process.
Then, “the use of experts for prediction does
not constitute a line of demarcation between the social and the physical
sciences, but rather between the exact and the inexact sciences”.[32] In the case of social
sciences, forecasting should rely on the use of these quasi-laws and the systematic use of experts (for example, through
the DELPHI technique).
In his opinion, social sciences should follow
this approach towards the establishment of a social technology as a new type of
discipline. This new field could be used to guide the decision-making process
of key institutions, using forecasting techniques to know the possible future
states of many social systems regarding the implementation of public policies
and other sociotechnical plans.
4. Mario Bunge’s sociotechnology
Sociotechnology is a “discipline that studies
the ways of maintain, repair, improve or replace” existing social systems and
processes. To do that, it “designs or redesigns each other to deal with social
problems”.[33]
For Bunge, sociotechnology is one of the six
branches of technology -along with physiotechnology, chemotechnology,
biotechnology, psychotechnology and general technology[34]-,
on an equal footing with all the others. In his opinion, we should regard
disciplines like management science, normative economy, law, city planning,
military science and public policy studies as sociotechnologies.
This management of society can be society-wide
or restricted to a subsystem of society. We can talk then of two branches of
sociotechnology. The first one, large scale public management or social
engineering; the second one, management science or operations research. These
two types of sociotechnologies deals with different types of problems: as the
scale of social organizations grows, new problems emerge.[35]
The idea of sociotechnology in Mario Bunge is
based in three statements or arguments. One regarding an ontological
characteristic of social systems, and the others regarding a wide use of the
concepts of “artificial” and “technology”.
In his ontology, he considers that management
is part of the concrete holding any social group together.[36]
So, we can find management relations in every social organization. Relations
that do not need to be explicit. In his opinion, without some sort of
management, sociosystems would become anarchical and break down. When we use
some learned knowledge to guide our managerial action, we are then using
sociotechnological knowledge.[37]
Let us now turn to his wide use of the concept
of “artificial”. For him, artificial is “the
totality of concrete things and processes […] made or done by rational beings
or their proxies with the help of knowledge”.[38]
To rate something as an artificial, the object or thing should be the outcome
of a decision to do an activity or work to make it. And that activity or work
should be guided by some learned knowledge. This wide conception of “artificial”
includes things inside the realm of social sciences. For example, for him we
should regard the entire economy, polity and culture of any society as
artificial.[39] That is because these
systems could be different from what they are, and their creation, preservation
or reform requires some learned knowledge.
At last, his comprehensive notion of
technology makes room to broaden the scope of traditional accounts of
technological fields. As has been said before, Bunge regards technology as the
design of things or processes of possible practical value with the help of
scientific knowledge
gained in basic or applied research. The key element of
this idea of technology is that it makes room to consider some action-oriented
fields that in most of the discussion about technological fields are excluded.
And that is what Bunge does when he considers sociotechnology as one of the branches of
technology.
There is an important question that, however,
has not been addressed in this section for being beyond the scope of this research,
although it is an important component of the way Bunge understands -from a
normative point of view- his sociotechnology. He considers that this technical
approach to the social cannot lead to a technocratic management style,
specifically when we are talking about social engineering. That is why he uses
in his latter discussion about sociotechnology the notion of technoholodemocracy,[40]
to highlighted not only the need of sociotechnical plans if we want to make
effective changes in our societies, but also the need to legitimize those
proposals through citizen participation.[41]
The bungean notion of sociotechnology has been
further develop by Miguel A. Quintanilla and Dan Alexander Seni. In the first
case, he included this notion into his own development of the bungean
philosophy of technology.[42] And in the second case,
Seni developed the idea of sociotechnology and the concept of “plan”.
Seni stated that “the idea of plan ought to
have a central role in the philosophy of technology”,[43]
and be the equivalent of the idea of theory in the philosophy of science. For
him, a plan is a “construct describing the future state of an object along with
the trajectory resulting from its action”,[44]
whose conceptual structure can be summarized in Theoretical backing + Ends and
Desiderata = Conclusion or Instruction set.[45]
In the case of sociotechnical plans, a further distinction must be made: in
this case, the target of the plan is both agent and subject. The agents of
sociotechnologies are, for Seni, sociotechnical systems (for example, an
entrepreneurial firm): those are who decided to take action and made a plan
which goal is to transform themselves as organizations.
Following the distinction made by Bunge
between management science and social engineering,
Seni considers that sociotechnology should refer to “technology employed by
sociosystems which are agents themselves”,[46]
that can manage other objects, sociosystems or themselves. This is an important
clarification: only sociotechnical systems -or active social systems in his
words- can deployed sociotechnological plans. If their aim is the
transformation of an object, other organization or themselves we are talking
then of management science. If its
aim is to resolve social problems of a broader sociosystem (a large region
or State), then we are talking about social
engineering, because in this case the subject of transformation cannot act
as agents of change; rather like patients.[47]
Regarding social engineering, its plans for
repair and transform social systems have a strong ideological and moral
component. This is a shared characteristic between sociotechnology and all
other technologies. As Seni states, “all technology is in a sense
sociotechnology”,[48] because when engineers
design a technical system that is going to provide a new service or to made new
artifacts they create it from a value scheme that is embedded in a broader
ideological framework.[49]
We must keep in mind that there is always an
alternative technical plan to resolve any problem, and that ideology and values
shape the development and realization of any plan. This is the same for
sociotechnical plans. Think for example of any public policy using this idea of
sociotechnology. There is not only one way to deal with a social problem. There
is always an alternative policy proposal, but its development depends on our
values and ideological roots. In the case of social engineering these plans
“calls for consensus, coordination, and contract between components of a larger
system”.[50]
5. Towards a Philosophy of Social Technology: old and new
approaches
Although there are some differences between
Helmer’s and Bunge’s accounts, their approaches are highly compatible between themselves.[51] As
has been said before, they are the only ones that have proposed philosophical
arguments to hold and justify their notion of social technology: others only
make use of superficial arguments or takes for granted the adequacy of the
translation of the distinction from the natural disciplines to the social ones.
But their goals are different.
Bunge's main goal is to achieve a general characterization of science and technology
that can be used to describe the wider range of disciplines. That is why in his
characterization of social technology he uses examples of current disciplines
(such law, management, forestry, etc.). The case of Helmer is quite different.
His goal is not the understanding and classification of the type of knowledge
created by well-established disciplines, but the creation of a new and distinct
discipline. It is important to remember that the first one is a philosopher, an
academic working at the University; the second one is a mathematician working
for a think-tank involved mostly with practical problems. Helmer, truth be told, uses philosophical arguments to justify his position, but only to
create the theoretical foundation of his proposal of a new discipline.
And he does that in a quite unique way. In
fact, his discussion -with Nicholas Rescher- about the distinction between
exact and inexact sciences relates to the demarcation problem, although
nowadays it is hard to find explicit discussions on this distinction. They even
give some tips for a new way of understanding the problem of the classification
of the sciences and the differences between natural and social disciplines.[52]
Nevertheless, they are the exception in what
refers to be the philosophical insights about social technology. In general,
you should expect that before talking about this issue is mandatory to talk
about the epistemological and ontological foundations of these notions of
technological fields in the realm of social studies. Something like what Olaf
Helmer, Mario Bunge and his
followers did with their proposals. But contemporary
discussions on this topic goes the other way around. They talk about social
technology assuming that is possible to translate the distinction between
scientific and technological fields from the natural sciences to the social
sciences. And they do not give explicit arguments regarding the philosophical
roots of their claims. We shall remember what has been said at the beginning.
This topic has two sides: the theoretical use of the notion of social technology and the
theoretical foundation of the notion of social technology. And contemporary
research only addresses the first one. That is the case of classical authors
such as Karl Popper or Jacques Ellul, as noted in the introduction. And that is also the
case of other contemporary approaches to this problem.
For example, Andreas Pickel uses the concept
of social technology in the field of Post-Communist Transformation Studies,
following the works of Karl Popper and Mario Bunge. For him, the relationship
between social science and social technology should be studied to understand
the role of the latter in systemic change, paying attention to the influence of
ideology in the design and deployment of the reform proposals in the framework
of the post-Cold War transitions from planned to market economies.[53]
By the other hand, Benjamin K. Sovacool
propose that corporations should be considered as a type of technology -in
fact, as failed technology-[54] and Maarten Derksen and
Anne Beaulieu dedicated an issue of the journal Theory and Psychology[55] and a chapter in the SAGE
handbook of philosophy of social science to the notion of social technology.[56]
Joseph Agassi has discussed the need of
scientific foundations for public policies and its public debate in a
commentary about the work of Bunge.[57]
He also discussed the problem of expertise knowledge in the framework of
democratic regimes.
Also,[58] Javier
Echeverría had considered that innovation studies should be regarded as a social
technoscience[59]. Harald Stelzer has
defended Popper’s conception of piecemeal
social engineering to address philosophical problems of public policies.[60] Ivan Ferreira da Cunha discussed
the need to develop a philosophy of social technology using the works of Otto
Neurath and Nancy Cartwright.[61] And Elkin Pineda-Henao and
Carlos Tello-Castrillón have analyzed the epistemological status of
administration studies and its possible consideration as a technological
discipline.[62]
Together, these studies indicate that this
topic must be studied in a deeper way. In fact, some of them highlight the
need for more epistemological and ontological analysis regarding this issue.
6. Conclusions: Why demarcate?
Science and technology are different research
fields, and they produce different knowledge. Thus, we cannot evaluate their
cognitive product in the same way. For science, truth is all that matters. And
for technology, efficiency is the core value.
We have a lot of social sciences and
humanistic disciplines. Sociology, social work, human resources, management
studies, law, anthropology, economics, and so on. And although they are
different, we consider them to be on the same page. Think for example of the
distribution of fields into different disciplines, degrees and Faculties at our
Universities. It is not hard to find the degrees of Social Work, Sociology,
Audiovisual Communication or Work Relations being taught under the same
Faculty of Social Sciences.[63] Or even Faculties labeled
with the strange name of “Faculty of Law Sciences”.[64]
My point is that nowadays, in social sciences
and other related fields, we are mixing up socio-scientific fields with
socio-technological fields. And there lies the issue. The cognitive outputs of
these fields are very different and should not be confused. We cannot use the
same criteria to evaluate social sciences and social technologies, in the same
way that we do not use the same criteria to evaluate scientific and
technological outputs.
May main statement then is that some of the
knowledge produce by social disciplines today should be considered as technical
knowledge. The notion
of sociotechnology can be used as a powerful tool to clarify some aspects of
the research in the social sciences that had not been address properly.
Philosophy started to study technology last
century. That helped us to understand in a deeper way how technology works. And
that helped us to uncover the ideological roots of some technological
developments, the role played by experts and some authoritarian use of
technological products. Although this topic should be studied in a deeper way,
I tried to show that there are good arguments to consider that is possible to
apply this philosophical distinction between scientific and technological
fields to social studies and to talk then about social technologies.
If we do that, we are going to be able to
uncover the sociotechnological knowledge that nowadays is disguised and
accepted as social science. And we are going to be able to evaluate it with the
right tools.
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Press, 2002.
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Miguel A. Tecnología: un enfoque filosófico y otros ensayos de filosofía de la
tecnología. México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005.
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Esteban. Scientific
Philosophy. Springer International Publishing,
2018.
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Sociotechnical Systems: Elements of a Theory of Plans”. In Studies on Mario Bunge’s Treatise, edited by Paul Weingartner and
Georg J. W. Dorn, 431-452. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990.
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Tamošiūnaitė, Rūta. “Integrated
Social Technologies For Citizen Participation In Modern Public Governance
Decision Making” In The 5th European
Interdisciplinary Forum 2017 (EIF 2017). Drivers for Progress in the Global
Society, edited by Agota Giedrė Raišienė and Yuriy Bilan, 27-34. Vilnius: Editografica, 2018.
El autor es graduado
en Sociología por la Universidad de Salamanca y Máster en Lógica y Filosofía de
la Ciencia por la misma universidad. Ha participado como ponente en diversos
congresos nacionales e internacionales. Es investigador predoctoral en la
Universidad de Oviedo. Sus áreas de interés son la filosofía de la tecnología y
el ámbito CTS.
Recibido: 19 de marzo de 2019.
* This research
has been supported by the Office of the Vice President for Research of the
University of Oviedo, through the Research Support and Promotion Plan for 2019
[16.01.541A.481.22]
1) José Ortega y Gasset, Meditaciones de la técnica y otros ensayos
sobre ciencia y filosofía (Madrid: Alianza, 2000), 13.
2) He is
considered as one of the pioneers of the philosophy of technology, being the
first professional philosopher to approach the question of technology in his
work Meditaciones de la técnica.
Carl Mitcham, Thinking through
technology: the path between engineering and philosophy (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1994), 45.
3) I am using
this notion of “material objects” in a general sense, to refer to those
concrete objects or raw objects whose transformation is part of the objectives of common technical systems. It should
not be inferred from this statement a distinction between a class of “material
objects” and “immaterial or non-material” ones: all the objects, including cultural
objects such theories or social norms, are material. Mario Bunge, Scientific materialism (Dordrecht:
Reidel, 1981), 109-160.
4) I thank
professor David Alvargonzález Rodríguez, from the University of Oviedo, for
this idea, that he usually repeats in his classes.
5) Mario Bunge, Chasing reality: Strife over Realism (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2006), 279-280
6) For an
overview of the development of the different ideas of sociotechnology, the work
of Rūta Tamošiūnaitė is a good point to start. Rūta Tamošiūnaitė, “Integrated
Social Technologies for Citizen Participation in Modern Public Governance
Decision Making”, in The 5th European Interdisciplinary
Forum 2017 (EIF 2017). Drivers for Progress in the Global Society, eds. Agota
Giedrė Raišienė and Yuriy Bilan (Vilnius: Editografica, 2018), 27-29.
7) Karl R. Popper
Alan Ryan, and E. H. Gombrich, The
open society and its enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2013); Karl R. Popper, The poverty of
historicism (New York: Harper & Row, 1961).
9) Herbert
Alexander Simon, The Sciences of the
Artificial (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996)
11)
That is the case of Andreas Pickel, who used this notion in the field of
Post-Communist Transformation Studies to highlight the embedded ideology of the
plans used in some countries in their transition from communist economical
system to capitalist ones. For the reference, see note 53.
12)
Martin Mahner, “Science and Pseudoscience. How to Demarcate after the (Alleged)
Demise of the Demarcation Problem”, in Philosophy
of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem, eds. Massimo
Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 31. Angelo
Fasce, “What do we mean when we speak of pseudoscience? The development of a
demarcation criterion based on the analysis of twenty-one previous attempts”, Disputatio. Philosophical Research Bulletin
6:7 (2017), 461.
13)
That is, knowledge that is at least partially true. Mario Bunge, Treatise on Basic Philosophy. Volume 6:
Epistemology and Methodology II: Understanding the World, (Dordrecht:
Reidel, 1983), 195.
14)
It must be noted that a further distinction should be made between basic
science/applied science/technology, and even between applied science and the
application of science following the work of Niiniluoto. But that is way beyond
the scope of this paper. Ilkka Niiniluoto, “The aim and structure of applied
research”, Erkenntnis 38:1 (1993).
15)
I borrowed this distinction between “descriptive” and “normative” from Miguel
A. Quintanilla, who regards these elements as constitutive parts of philosophy.
Miguel A. Quintanilla, Tecnología: un enfoque filosófico y otros ensayos de filosofía de la
tecnología (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005), 40.
16)
Martin Mahner and Gustavo Esteban Romero have been working in the development
of the bungean characterisation of science and technology. In this occasion I am
going to use the original proposal from Bunge, although the other new revisions
from Mahner and Romero should be taken into account for anyone interested in
the study of this topic in a deeper way. Gustavo Esteban Romero, Scientific Philosophy (Springer
International Publishing, 2018). Martin Mahner, “Demarcating Science from
Non-Science”, in Handbook of the Philosophy of Science: General Philosophy of
Science – Focal Issues, ed. Theo Kuipers (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007).
17)
Mario Bunge, Treatise on basic
philosophy. Volume 6,
202-203. Mario Bunge, Treatise on
basic philosophy. Volume 7:
Epistemology and Methodology III: Philosophy of Science and Technology. Part
II. Life Science, Social Science and Technology (Dordrecht: Reidel,
1985), 231-232.
19)
Ernan McMullin, “Values in science”, PSA:
Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Volume
Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1982 (1982). Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and
other essays (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002).
22)
It must be noted, nevertheless, that despite this general and tacit agreement
we do not have yet a consensus about the demarcation problem. In fact, we are
far from reaching it nowadays, as has been noted in a comparative study done by
Angelo Fasce: there has not been any progress in the past decades. Angelo
Fasce, What do we mean when we speak
of pseudoscience?, 474.
23)
In general, in the discussion about the demarcation between different knowledge
genera, philosophers use an implicit classification of the scheme of science. Specifically,
a scheme that separates the natural sciences from the social sciences, focusing
on the first when generating its characterization of scientific knowledge. It
is difficult to find demarcation proposals that address this problem
considering all types of scientific disciplines (natural and social). This is
one of the issues that philosophy and epistemology should resolve in the next
years.
24)
P. D. Aligica y Herritt, R., “Epistemology, social technology, and expert
judgement: Olaf Helmer’s contribution to futures research”, Futures, 41:5 (2009), 257.
25)
Olaf Helmer was a German-American philosopher and mathematician, who worked as
researcher at the RAND Corporation in its early days. He was also a
futurologist, who founded the Institute for the Future. Among other things, is
considered the father of the famous DELPHI technique, developed at the RAND
Corp.
27)
Olaf Helmer, Bernice Brown and Theodore Gordon, Social Technology (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 5.
30)
Helmer and Rescher called quasi-laws
the restricted or limited generalizations used by sciences (natural and
social). In the same sense, Bunge uses the term to refer to empirical
generalizations that cannot be considered as scientific laws for not being
precise and part of a broader theory. Olaf Helmer and Nicholas Rescher, “On the
Epistemology of the Inexact Sciences”, Management
Science 6:1 (1959), 30. Mario Bunge, Las Ciencias Sociales en Discusión: una perspectiva filosófica (Buenos
Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1999), 136 [Translation from the original, Social Science under Debate: A Philosophical
Perspective (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998)]
36)
Mario Bunge, Treatise on basic philosophy. Volume 4: Ontology II: A world of systems
(Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979) 201-202.
37)
Think for example of any organization with a strong bureaucracy, such as
Universities. In them we can find people that acts as plumbers: professionals that, apart from its highly specialized
knowledge and jobs as teachers and researchers, know how to move themselves in the organizational framework
around them and how convince others to make changes. They do not need to be the
ones that are in charge, in the position of President or Vice Chancellor of the
University: but a University (or other type of organization) without them would
collapse. It needs plumbers to
keep things running according to the sociotechnological plans approved by the
University Council. A similar idea has been proposed by Esther Duflo, when she
refers to economists acting as plumbers.
Esther Duflo, "Richard T. Ely Lecture: The Economist as Plumber.", American
Economic Review 107:5 (2017)
41)
This topic of public participation and the challenges of using scientific and
technical knowledge in society has been addressed in the field of Science,
Technology and Society studies, but only in reference to disciplines that
belongs to the so-called natural sciences (see the works of José A. Cerezo for
a concise introduction). José A. López Cerezo,
"Democracia en la frontera", Revista CTS 3:8 (2007). José A. López Cerezo, "Gobernabilidad en
la sociedad del conocimiento", EIDOS 6 (2007).
43)
Dan A. Seni, “The Sociotechnology of Sociotechnical Systems: Elements of a
Theory of Plans”, in Studies on Mario
Bunge’s Treatise, eds. Paul Weingartner and Georg J. W. Dorn (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 1990), 438.
45)
It must be noted that, along with Bunge and Quintanilla, Seni considers
technology as an action-oriented field in which knowledge always refers to
actions.
49)
For example, computer programs: if you consider that your piece of software is
valuable for the market, it is going to have characteristic that a non-market
version would not have (code to protect the intellectual property, the need of
a key or license to run the program, etc.)
51)
Although Bunge does not cite the work of Helmer, he considers the field of
operations research -aka social technology in Helmer’s work- as a
sociotechnological field (along with law, normative economy or social work). Bunge,
Treatise on basic philosophy. Volume 7.
Part II, Chapter 5.
52)
To see a good account of different classification proposals, see David
Alvargonzález, “La clasificación de las ciencias desde la filosofía del cierre
categorial”, Revista de humanidades 37
(2019).
53)
Andreas Pickel, “Between Social Science and Social Technology: Toward a
Philosophical Foundation for Post-Communist Transformation Studies”, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 31:4
(2001).
54)
Benjamin K. Sovacool, “Broken by Design: The Corporation as a Failed Technology.”,
Science, Technology and Society
15:1 (2010).
55)
Maarten Derksen, Signe Vikkelsø, and Anne Beaulieu, “Social Technologies:
Cross-Disciplinary Reflections on Technologies in and from the Social
Sciences.” Theory & Psychology
22:2 (2012).
56)
Maarten Derksen, and
Anne Beaulieu, “Social Technology”, in The
SAGE Handbook of the Philosophy of Social Sciences, eds. Ian C. Jarvie
and Jesus Zamora-Bonilla (London: SAGE Publications, 2011).
58)
Joseph Agassi, “Experts within Democracy: The Turner Version”, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 45:3
(2015).
59)
Javier Echeverría, Innovation and
Values. A European Perspective (Center for Basque Studies: University of
Nevada, Reno, 2014), 103.
60)
Harald Stelzer, “Principles and Policies: What Can We Learn from Popper’s
‘Piecemeal Social Engineering’ for Ideal and Nonideal Theory?”, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 46:4
(2016).
61)
Ivan Ferreira da Cunha, “Constructing dystopian experience: A Neurath-Cartwrightian
approach to the philosophy of social technology”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 72 (2018).