Gabriel Benniedict P.

Vergara - BSCE-2A

History of Science, Technology, and Society

STS emerged from the confluence of a variety of disciplines and disciplinary subfields, all
of which had developed an interest—typically, during the 1960s or 1970s—in viewing science and
technology as socially embedded enterprises. The key disciplinary components of STS took shape
independently, beginning in the 1960s, and developed in isolation from each other well into the
1980s. In the 1970s Elting E. Morison founded the STS program at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), which served as a model. By 2011, 111 STS research centres and academic
programs were counted worldwide.
There are key themes during the development of STS. They are the following:
History of technology (1960s) – examines technology in its social and historical context.
- Some historians questioned technological determinism, a doctrine that
can induce public passivity to technologic and scientific development.
At the same time, some historians began to develop similarly contextual
approaches to the history of medicine.
History and philosophy of science (1962)
- Publication of Thomas Kuhn's well-known The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (1962), which attributed changes in scientific theories to
changes in underlying intellectual paradigms, programs were founded
at the University of California, Berkeley and elsewhere that
brought historians of science and philosophers together in unified
programs.
Science, technology, and society (Mid to Late 1960s)
- Student and faculty social movements in the U.S., UK, and European
universities helped to launch a range of new interdisciplinary fields
(such as women's studies) that were seen to address relevant topics that
the traditional curriculum ignored. One such development was the rise
of "science, technology, and society" programs
Science, engineering, and public policy studies (1970s)
- Emerged from the same concerns that motivated the founders of the
science, technology, and society movement.
A decisive moment in the development of STS (mid-1980s )
- The addition of technology studies to the range of interests reflected in
science. During that decade, two works appeared en seriatim that
signaled what Steve Woolgar was to call the "turn to technology".
- The "turn to technology" helped to cement an already growing awareness
of underlying unity among the various emerging STS program.