“Vague and Artificial”: The Historically Elusive Distinction between Pure and Applied Science (2012)
Gooday, Graeme J. N. (Author)
Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 103, no. 3
Issue: 3
Pages: 546-554
Edition Details: Part of a focus section, “Applied Science”
Language: English
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.
...MoreArticle Bud, Robert (2012) Introduction. Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 515-517).
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