Science as a Form of Action: The Role of the Engineering Sciences EDWIN T. LAYTON Near the outset Michael Fores tells us that his “Transformations and the Myth of ‘Engineering Science’ ” is a philosophical paper (p. 64). Though it is a strange philosophy, there is method in his animad versions. The most fundamental assumption of Fores’s philosophy is that there is only one valid form of cognition, empiricism. He be lieves that “human activity is constrained to be continuingly empiri cal” (p. 81). This leads him to see the world in terms of a division between “empiricism” versus “science.” But at the heart of Fores’s “empirical” philosophy there is a glaring contradiction. His own methodology is not, in fact, empirical at all. He totally rejects the idea that science can influence the way engineers do technology, ask ing “How can anyone recognize a ‘scientific’ form of technical work?” (p. 67). I and the historians of technology Fores associates with me have discussed numerous examples of precisely this.1 Fores dismisses all this scholarship without recourse to empirical facts; his procedure is to label such works as “myth” or “magic.” He does not in a single case show that we have got our facts wrong or that the data are contradicted by better-established facts. Indeed, his entire ar ticle is cast on a very abstract “philosophical” level that ignores or is vague concerning the empirical realities it purportedly deals with. The most striking example of Fores’s rejection of empirical meth ods is his arbitrary classification of much (possibly all) scientific the ory as magic. Humans, he claims, find uncertainty difficult to bear. He asserts that “magic is indeed invoked whenever there is thought to be a good deal of risk involved” (p. 80). He provides no evidence for this but relies on Bronislaw Malinowski’s famous ob servations of the magical practices of the Trobriand Islanders. Dr. Layton is professor of the history of technology in the Department of Mechani cal Engineering at the University of Minnesota. 'See the list in Fores, n. 4. Elsewhere he extends the list to others, including Donald Cardwell, David Channell, Carlo Cipolla, Edward Constant, Eda Kranakis, A. E. Musson, Eric Robinson, Abbott P. Usher, and Walter Vincenti. I feel honored to be placed in such company.© 1988 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/88/2901-0007$01.00 82 The Role of the Engineering Sciences 83 Malinowski concluded that magic employs theory and has certain sim ilarities to science.2 Fores then makes a great conceptual leap: he turns Malinowski on his head and concludes that the use of such con cepts as “science,” “theory,” or “law” in a technological context amounts to magic—a totemistic worship of science (p. 81). Indeed, he comes close to repudiating science both as a form of action and as a form of cognition. He denies that there can ever be such a thing as a “scientific activity” (p. 78). He reduces the concept of “law of nature” to the weakest sort of metaphor. In dealing with New ton, he asserts: “Take Newton’s laws of motion. The last thing that inert bodies in motion need, to help them decide how to act, is the panoply of articulated ‘law,’ with its parliaments, law schools, andjur ies” (p. 78). Fores misrepresents Malinowski’s position. Malinowski concluded that magic is a pseudoscience, that magic and science may be easily distinguished because “the spurious character of this pseudo-science is not hard to detect.” The difference, according to Malinowski, was that “The theories of knowledge are dictated by logic, those of magic by the association of ideas under the influence of desire.”3 I believe that Fores’s own philosophy will not pass Malinowski’s test. His identification of scientific and technological theory with magic is based on his wish to discredit science and his association of it with magic. But wish and association are not proof except in magic. Fores rejects many works of scholarship without even a token effort to base his dismissals on empirical facts. He never cites a specific scientific theory or law whose use constitutes magic...