Gooday Graeme
Centre for History and Philosophy of Science, School of Philosophy, Religion, and History of Science, Michael Sadler Building, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom.
Isis. 2012 Sep;103(3):546-54. doi: 10.1086/667978.
This essay argues for the historicity of applied science as a contested category within laissez-faire Victorian British science. This distinctively pre-twentieth-century notion of applied science as a self-sustaining, autonomous enterprise was thrown into relief from the 1880s by a campaign on the part of T. H. Huxley and his followers to promote instead the primacy of "pure" science. Their attempt to relegate applied science to secondary status involved radically reconfiguring it as the mere application of pre-existing pure science. This new notion of extrinsically funded pure science that would produce only contingently future social benefits as a mere by-product came under pressure during World War I, when military priorities focused attention once again on science for immediate utility. This threatened the Cambridge-based promoters of self-referential pure science who collectively published Science and the Nation in 1917. Yet most contributors to this work discussed forms of "applied" science that had no prior "pure" form. Even the U.K.'s leading government scientist, Lord Moulton, dismissed the book's provocative distinction between pure and applied science as unhelpfully "vague and artificial."
本文论证了应用科学作为自由放任的维多利亚时代英国科学界一个有争议类别的历史真实性。这种独特的20世纪前的应用科学概念，即作为一个自我维持、自主的事业，从19世纪80年代起，因T. H. 赫胥黎及其追随者发起的一场运动而凸显出来，这场运动旨在宣扬“纯”科学的首要地位。他们试图将应用科学贬低到次要地位，为此将其彻底重新定义为仅仅是对已有的纯科学的应用。这种新的、由外部资助的纯科学概念，即只会偶然地产生未来社会效益且只是作为副产品，在第一次世界大战期间受到了压力，当时军事优先事项再次将注意力集中在具有直接实用性的科学上。这对1917年集体出版《科学与国家》的、以剑桥为基地的自我参照纯科学的推动者们构成了威胁。然而，这部著作的大多数撰稿人讨论的“应用”科学形式并没有先前的“纯”形式。甚至英国首席政府科学家莫尔顿勋爵也驳斥了该书对纯科学和应用科学所作的具有挑衅性的区分，认为其“模糊且人为”，毫无益处。
