Science and Technology 247ics and chemistry. By agreeing on this meaning scientists and engineers
could preserve the epistemological hierarchy between their fi elds, while
carving out autonomous areas of research in a mutually benefi cial type of
boundary work.
The settlement reached by scientists and engineers over these terms
from 1880 to 1960 has lasted, to a great extent, to the present. Although
“basic science” has largely replaced the term “pure science,” the hierarchi-
cal meanings of “basic and applied science” are not that much different
than the older “pure and applied science.”^78 Many engineering research-
ers, if not practicing engineers, still refer to their fi eld as an “applied sci-
ence,” an autonomous area of research. The term “engineering science,”
however, died out as the movement of bringing science into engineering
education ran into complaints from accrediting agencies in the 1970s and
1980s that engineers were too scientifi c and no longer knew how to design.
Then the requirement to teach a common core of engineering, called the
engineering sciences, was gradually dropped at American universities.
The phrase “science and technology” has taken on broader meanings
outside of science and engineering to the extent that it is no longer a
marker of debates about the relationship between the referents of its indi-
vidual terms. Unlike our other two phrases, “science and technology” has
become a cultural keyword on a par with those studied by Raymond Wil-
liams. What most speakers do not realize, however, is that “science and
technology” still carries vestiges of the contestations over its key terms.
Using the phrase thus unwittingly reinforces a naive belief that technol-
ogy is simply a result of applying science to the useful arts.
NOTES
Earlier versions of this chapter appeared as “Construing ‘Technology’ as ‘Applied Sci-
ence’: Public Rhetoric of Scientists and Engineers in the United States, 1880–1945,” Isis
86 (1995): 194–221 (University of Chicago Press, 1995); and “The Paradox of ‘Engineer-
ing Science’: A Cold War Debate about Education in the U. S.,” IEEE Technology and
Society Magazine, Fall 2000, 19–25.
- Thomas H. Huxley, “Science and Culture,” in Collected Essays, 9 vols. (1898; New
York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 3:155. - On boundary work, see Thomas F. Gieryn, “Boundaries of Science,” in Hand-
book of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Sheila Jasanoff et al. (London: Sage, 1995),
393–443. - Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (Lon-
don: Oxford University Press, 1983), 22, 92.