Science as a Form of Action: The Role of the Engineering Sciences

Abstract

and the Myth of 'Engineering Science' is a paper (p. 64). Though it is a strange philosophy, there is method in his animadversions. The most fundamental assumption of Fores's philosophy is that there is only one valid form of cognition, empiricism. He believes that human activity is constrained to be continuingly (p. 81). This leads him to see the world in terms of a division between empiricism versus science. But at the heart of Fores's philosophy there is a glaring contradiction. His own methodology is not, in fact, empirical at all. He totally rejects the idea that science can influence the way engineers do technology, asking How can anyone recognize a 'scientific' form of technical work? (p. 67). I and the historians of technology Fores associates with me have discussed numerous examples of precisely this.' Fores dismisses all this scholarship without recourse to empirical facts; his procedure is to label such works as myth or He does not in a single case show that we have got our facts wrong or that the data are contradicted by better-established facts. Indeed, his entire article is cast on a very abstract philosophical level that ignores or is vague concerning the empirical realities it purportedly deals with. The most striking example of Fores's rejection of empirical methods is his arbitrary classification of much (possibly all) scientific theory as magic. Humans, he claims, find uncertainty difficult to bear. He asserts that magic is indeed invoked whenever there is thought to be a good deal of risk involved (p. 80). He provides no evidence for this but relies on Bronislaw Malinowski's famous observations of the magical practices of the Trobriand Islanders.