Making Up Mind: The Early Sociology of Invention

摘要

As an aside in a 1988 response to some rather odd attacks by Michael Fores over the emergence of the engineering sciences, Edwin T. Layton offered an unusual defense of a common historical practice. The practice in question was the use of the terms "empiric" and "scientific" to characterize the premodern and modern eras in technology. The thrust of Layton's defense was that these terms had become a "conventional shorthand" for referring to complex change, comparable to the use of the term "neolithic" when referring to the millennia of prehistory. There was no danger in using such terms, according to Layton, because they are only labels and therefore do not necessarily carry the "metaphysical freight" that so worried Fores.