ABSTRACT
The general relationship between science and technology is difficult to subject to satisfying testing techniques—methodologically as well as practically. We cannot assume that just simple or direct links govern the relationships between diffuse and complex phenomena like scientific knowledge and technical innovations. So many variables potentially come into the equation, with complex and subtle inter-relationships, direct and indirect, involved. The sprawl of data is enormous. Many individual instances can be assembled to support directly opposing generalizations. In many ways a quantitative answer to the question would prove the most intellectually satisfying—as for so many unresolved debates in economic history—in order to test the degree of representativeness of individual instances and piecemeal evidence. Following a statistical imperative, could we not take a defined ‘population’ of innovations (if not the total flow of innovations over a period) and seek to determine the percentage governed by the advance of scientific knowledge or dependent in different degrees upon scientific linkages? But there are grave problems. Apart from the numbers of possible variables, all subject to mutual cross-influences, and some unquantifiable; what do we include in (or exclude from) the concept ‘innovation’? This has important consequences. The wider the specification is—including, say, advances in financial or legal 73techniques—then the lower the ‘scientific’ percentage is likely to be. And in a golden age of amateurs, cranks, quacks, and crazy theorizing, what do we specify as ‘science’ or ‘scientific’? How can we measure on a quantitative scale ‘degrees of commitment’ to applied science, apart from some arbitary classification according to the discretionary judgement of the classifier, which is likely to give a misleading sense of measurement to rather spurious quantifying. Adopting such a procedure is to re-admit all the fallible, subjective criteria, disguised by numbers, into the property through the back door when the main purpose of the exercise was to push them out by the front door.
