The How and the Why of Technology as Applied Science
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): RND4Impact (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020
Any technological advance can be dangerous. Fire was dangerous from the start, and so (even more so) was speech – and both are still dangerous to this day – but human beings would not be human without them.
-Isaac Asimov
Science has made our lives enormously more comfortable with the applications in technology. Technology feeds off the discoveries of science. Our world of cell phones, supercomputers, cars, even common household appliances, come from them. Our modern world is scientific.
Science can be considered discovery. Technology can be considered application. Science is the way to know the world. Technology is the application from this knowing of the world. One gives operational truths about reality. The other applies those in the world.
Fundamentally, as Carl Sagan noted, science is more than a method. It’s an attitude. It’s a way of thinking. Its method is the empirical method. Its attitude is skeptical. In this sense, the way of thinking can be considered scientific skepticism.
Scientific skepticism amounts to a pragmatic position on the questions of epistemology. It’s about functionality, operations. Do these things work? Do these explain things in the terms of functions and operations? Do these make predictions? Do these make testable predictions?
Are these falsifiable claims? Are these claims verifiable? Are the verified claims repeatedly verified by independence observers in similar conditions? Are these accounting for human fallibility? And so on, these are some of the hallmarks of epistemological rigour.
Scientific skepticism enforces standards of evidence and a proportioning of evidence to the claims. If the conditions are met, and if the mass of evidence or the preponderance of the evidence stacks to the claims, then the claims seem worth considering within the category: “True,” or factual.
Science can be seen, in this manner, as a process. It’s engaged intelligent operators enacting particular principles of applied reasoning to comprehend and probe phenomena in the world. These become a basis for discovering trends over time.
Sometimes, these can be encapsulated into precise mathematical equations or principles. These, sometimes, seem so rock solid as to be consider laws rather than principles, Laws of Nature. These mathematical equations, principles, and laws, set the boundaries of technology.
Technology, in my opinion, looks as if applied science. In that, science can incorporate technology, but technology is downstream, at first, from science, while used to improve scientific investigation.
It’s a mutually honing process. Both become basic in advanced, modern industrial economies. Look around at the technology in most people’s homes, it is a representation of the power and ubiquity of technology and scientific thinking.
However, with technology as applied science, the operationalism of science leads to the application for functions in the world. If the functions of the universe are known, then these can become domains of mastery.
The mastery of science applied on the world to manipulate it. At base, that’s technology. Technology represents applied scientific mastery of the natural world. Scientific skepticism is a process to attain it. Technology is a manner in which to manifest it.
In this simple presentation, science seems like the basic operation of epistemology to some account of the natural world while technology becomes the technical application of the discoveries of science.
From this, science becomes a philosophy of discovery. Technology becomes a philosophy of application. Where the furtherance of applications can enhance the discoveries in science as a cycle, to me, science and technology seem inextricably linked as a fundamental engine for the modern world.
Reality is a natural system. Discoveries about its operations provides the fundamental structure answers to the “how” questions. How does this work? Many times, “why” questions boil down to “how” or function questions. Why is biological life here? It is asking, “How is biological life here?”, in some sense.
It provides a framework for comprehension of the principles of evolution leading to the world. Now, we use these principles to work on technologies to combat threats to human health with technological solutions. And so forth, this is a modern world.
It is a techno-scientific modern world. We’re better for it. Indeed, we gather real answers to the pressing operational questions around us. In turn, we can begin to ask legitimate “why” queries while sipping a delicious cup of coffee.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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