The inverse approach to technologies

EDUARDO R. SCARANO

Metascience

Éditions Matériologiques

Lugar: Montreal; Año: 2019; p. 121 - 136

Mario Bunge began as a scientist, continued as a philosopher of science and culminated as a scientific philosopher. He developed a comprehensive philosophy (scientific) system, explicitly displayed a semantics, an ontology, an epistemology, an ethics; in short, all branches of philosophy. The philosophy of technology is one of the most innovative and one of the first to do so. We will focus on this contribution.On the one hand, he differentiates technique from mere technology and also from science. On the other hand, technology can be described as such only if it uses science and its method as supplies for the artifacts it creates. The connection of technology with science is an essential aspect, although it does not reduce it to science. This is the reason why he searched different paths for the links with science through concepts, components and methods.But he did not exhaustively investigate the non-scientific aspects that characterize technology. We call emphasizing these aspects the inverse approach, and building on Bunge?s foundations, we try to specify this other class of cognitive and non-cognitive components that collaborate to identify technologies.