[bbvnvlt]

Science and engineeing may be intimately intertwined, but technology does not "depend on" science in any straightforward way. People were reliably producing alloys before metallurgy, flight happened well before any meaningful understanding of aerodynamics, and most famously, steam engines led to the development of thermodynamic science, not the other way round.

[joe_the_user]

Science and engineeing may be intimately intertwined, but technology does not "depend on" science in any straightforward way.

Sure, technology does not depend on science in a straightforward way - it's dependency is quite complex but it's there. You can't translate Schroedinger's equation directly into an understand of semiconductors but you certainly need the basics of quantum mechanics for an understanding of modern chips.

[glenstein]

As Joe said, the relation of dependence is complex. You added an extra caveat, of it being "straightforward" which wasn't part of my claim and I would argue is not even a good faith interpretation of the claim.

And all of this seems lateral to the point I was making: can we really trust Kuhn's arguments, which demand we dispense with a notion of scientific progress or independent reality of scientific truths, when we would never take such an argument seriously if made about technology?

[bbvnvlt]

You’re right, sorry, I jumped on your second paragraph a bit too eagerly. Pet peeve against the “technology is applied science” view.

That said, Kuhn definitely does not ask that we dispense with the notion of science making progress. New paradigms are accepted because they’re better, after all.

[glenstein]

You're definitely right that technology isn't merely applied science and your examples illustrate that well. Technological advances sometimes happen with blind trial and error rather than any theory. But my point was that nobody would get away with talk of paradigms and incommensurability in the context of technological progress the way Kuhn gets away with it in talking about scientific progress.

And those aren't the same thing, but they are close enough that we should wonder why the rules are different.

For Kuhn paradigm shifts are shifts of largely faith, and paradigms supposedly aren't "really" better or worse than one another. Any declaration that this is so is, Kuhn insists, an anachronistic re-interpretation from within a preferred paradigm rather than an actual insight into truth.

And as the article says, Kuhn frustratingly thinks the whole question of relativism implied by his philosophy is "beside the point." Which is even more frustrating than if the charge were answered positively or negatively. Having that kind of an attitude toward truth is like a banker saying it's "beside the point" whether you have any money in your bank account.

[bbvnvlt]

> Technological advances sometimes happen with blind trial and error rather than any theory.

Not with blind trials, but technology has historically advanced (way) ahead of theory most of the time.

See, for instance, Clifford D. Connor's "A People's History of Science" or the authoratitive (in philosophy of technology circles) "What Engineers Know and How They Know It" by Walter Vincenti. One of the convincing cases Vincenti describes is the development of wing profiles. Structured, intelligent trial and error (parameter variation) to get to shapes that work, but no theory to speak of (nothing that helps the development, in any case).

The rules can be different because science and engineering are different. Linked, but separate.

And I've never gotten the relativism charge against Kuhn. In my reading, he doesn't claim one paradigm isn't "really" better than another. He claims that when paradigms compete, there is at that time not an objective test to select between them. That's why belief is required. But again, the proponents of a new paradigm believe (and do their best to argue, rationally) that it is better in some sense. More true.

There are many directions in which to move away from ignorance. That competing paradigms take such different routes away from falsity, that they're not both on one dimension, and that one is not incontrovertibly and obviously superior to the other in every way with reference to some imagined objective standard, does not mean that it isn't a step towards a more true and accurate representation of the world.