We don't even know what we are talking about but people are at greater risk of harm when we confuse the relation between practice and knowing because:

"the power to define is the power to control."

Carroll Pursell, White Heat, p. 121.

Changes in meaning | Argument | Evidence | Eberhart on technology | on science | materials

Science is informed by technology, not the other way around, but by referring to science and technology we alter their relationship by inverting the order in which the words originated."

Does this matter?

Historically, yes it does because this change in meaning implies an important alteration in the 17th century and another profound shift in the 19th century that we must take into account in the history of material culture.

• 17th century mechanization
• 19th century electromagnetic industrialization
• 20th century "scientific revolution" C. P. Snow

Technology is a costly, powerful, and pervasive, representative part of our material culture.

Pursell wants us to know that the club of practitioners predates the club of engineers and these precede the emergence of scientists in the mid-19th century. Technology gave rise to scientific knowledge of both heat (thermodynamics) and the harnessing of electricity for practical means in telegraphs and motors.

Science then became a means to reveal the unseen, as chemistry and physics began to study electromagnetism to standardize, measure, and predict the behavior of electrons. In so doing scientists discovered radiation and the inability (uncertainty principle) to treat electrons like tiny planets orbiting about a nuclear sun. The more evidence that was discovered the unseen world became less and less like the world we experience.

Changes in meaning | Argument | Evidence

"Part of the problem is that words change meaning through time, and even at any one time may have different meanings for different peoples. Definitions cannot be the starting place for historical study, but must be part of that study. The words 'science' and 'technology', for example, fall easily upon our ears in the late twentieth century, but two centuries ago would have had little of their modern meanings."

The Oxford English Dictionary lists for science a 1660 usage referring to 'a craft trade or occupation requiring a trained skill'. The word Technology', on the other hand, , is listed as first occurring in 1615, and meaning ' a discourse or treatise on an art or arts'. Neither word reached its current meaning much before the mid-nineteenth century."

He concludes:

"Before that, 'technology' would probably have been referred to as 'the useful arts', and 'science' as either 'natural history' or 'natural philosophy'."

Carroll Pursell, White Heat: People and Technology, (1994), pp. 121-122.

Changes in meaning | Argument | Evidence

Argument:

Evidence

The Oxford English Dictionary is the source to use for all definitions.

The word 'technology', on the other hand, , is listed as first occurring in 1615, and meaning a 'discourse or treatise on an art or arts'.

lists for 'science' a 1660 usage referring to 'a craft trade or occupation requiring a trained skill'.

Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke

Summation

"Neither word reached its current meaning much before the mid-nineteenth century."

Changes in meaning | Argument | Evidence

Science, current use.

Rhetorically speaking, any argument must be based on evidence.

the evidence must be attributed to some reliable source and confirmed, the summation then guides the listener, reader or audience to the next point.

Changes in meaning | Argument | Evidence

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