How not to Distinguish Between Science and Technology

we may distinguish three main arguments in favour of the distinction or even separation between science and technology: 1) the distinction between so-called 'pure' science and its technical applications: the technique would later apply knowledge acquired in the first place and in a completely autonomous way by pure science; 2) the independence, and perhaps superiority, of the technical mastery of certain processes with respect to their theoretical understanding; 3) science and technology are similar in that both are a kind of knowledge, but they are different because they have a life of their own and developed differently in different times and places. The paper tries to show that all the mentioned ways of conceiving the relationship between science and technology, at least in the precise sense in which they have been understood, are untenable. It follows that a coherent and more convincing conception of the relationship between science and technology has yet to be formulated. The third view seems, at least in principle, to be the most promising, but it was not able to provide a satisfactory explanation of the relationship between science and technology, especially because of eclectic solutions, which, as such, end up containing the difficulties of the positions that were to be reconciled. In fact, it should be pointed out that this paper is only intended to be the pars destruens of a broader project to be developed later, which aims to take up the idea, present in the third conception, of a relationship of unity and distinction between science and technology.