Making Up Mind: The Early Sociology of Invention

Abstract

As an aside in a 1988 response to some rather odd attacks by Michael Fores over the emergence of the engineering sciences, Edwin T. Layton offered an unusual defense of a common historical practice. The practice in question was the use of the terms empiric and scientific to characterize the premodern and modern eras in technology. The thrust of Layton's defense was that these terms had become a conventional shorthand for referring to complex change, comparable to the use of the term neolithic when referring to the millennia of prehistory. There was no danger in using such terms, according to Layton, because they are only labels and therefore do not necessarily carry the metaphysical freight that so worried Fores.' Layton is probably correct in saying that the terms empiric and scientific have become little more than labels. Nevertheless, labels have a history, and it is one troublesome episode in that history that I examine in this article. Inquiry shows that much of our current usage of these two terms has its origins in an extremely problematic sociology of invention-to use the phrase of S. C. Gilfillan-which first emerged during the 1920s and 1930s and then enjoyed a revival in the 1950s and 1960s.2 The most prominent member of this school was sociologist William Fielding Ogburn, most famous for his theory

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 24 citations exist upstream.