Operationalism, Science and Technology

Bridgman’s operationalism incurred serious difficulties, and this fact induced many authors to dismiss operationalism per se. Developed beginning in the late 1960s, Agazzi’s operationalism escaped these difficulties from the beginning, but the persistence in it of a traditional primacy attributed to theory over experiment led him to pose an opposition between science and technique that was inconsistent with the general operationalist framework of his philosophy of science. Later, Agazzi sought to make his operationalism more coherent by moving toward a closer relationship between science and technology, that is, toward an intermediate solution which sees them as interacting with one another. However, in order to coherently defend an intermediate solution, it is not enough to find a certain set of properties that would be peculiar to science but not to technique, or vice versa. Rather, it is necessary to specify two distinct (but also complementary) points of view, from which science and technique can appear, at the same time but without contradiction, both as conceptually distinct and as indistinguishable as historical-empirical realities: in one sense, science is irreducible from technology, but in the other sense, they coincide completely.