On Structural Differences between Science and Engineering

Philosophers, in most cases, do not deal with such dirty things as technology. They prefer to discuss the rationality of animal rationale instead of the products of homo faber. Scientists, in most cases, look down on technology as a kind of scienceless application of science; only if they need some sophisticated new measuring instruments do they accept technology as an auxiliary science. All this is not only far from Benjamin Franklin’s insight that to be a tool-making animal belongs to the essence of human beings; it is far from the real conditions of human life today. It is not science at all which brought the participants of our conference to Karlsruhe or Mr. Armstrong to the moon; it is technology. And it is technology, too, to which most of us owe our lives—if, for example, we think of our lunch, not to speak of our last sickness. Sciences, on the other hand, are the coddled child at least of philosophers of science, who, up to now, have developed a paradigm of science depending on their fixation on physics.