M. ROSARIA DI NUCCI PEARCIE AND DAVID PEARCE TECHNOLOGY VS. SCIENCE: THE COGNITIVE FALLACY ABSTRACT. There are fundamental differences between the explanation of scientific change and the explanation of technologicalchange. The differences arise from funda- mental differencesbetween scientificand technologicalknowledge and basic disanalogies between technologicaladvance and scientificprogress. Given the influence of economic markets and industrial and institutional structures on the development of technology, it is more plausible to regard technologicalchange as a continuousand incremental process, rather than as a process of Kuhnian crises and revolutions. In many respects, science and technology display striking differences - in their forms of inquiry, in their objects of knowledge, in their values and goals. One aspect of this difference has been observed by many writers on technology. It is neatly summed up by Skolimowski's dictum that "science concerns itself with what is, technology with what is to be". 1 In the search for a theoretical understanding of technology and technological change, however, many scholars have looked towards science and its methodology for clues and guidelines. Despite the fea- tures that distinguish technology from science, there are several mature accounts of the growth of science that seem to offer rich and tantalising materials for the study of technology. Recently, not only philosophers but also social scientists, especially economists, have succumbed to this temptation. They have borrowed diverse models of science and tried to remold them to fit the contours of technology. Though these attempts have not been devoid of interest, they tend to suffer from a rather basic flaw. The chief fallacy they commit comes in two variants: in a few cases scientific and technological forms of knowledge are simply conflated; in many other cases, theoret- ical scientific knowledge is correctly distinguished from practical techno- logical knowledge, but essential properties peculiar to the former are wrongly transferred to the sphere of the latter. Particularly vulnerable to misuse are properties that relate to the evolution and growth of knowledge. The problem stems in large measure from the fact that cognitive models governing the 'internal' development of scientific knowledge are brought to bear on issues concerning technological pro- Synthese 81: 405-419, 1989. © 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.