How Related Science and Technology in Japanese Thought and Society in the 1940-1950s?

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 15K20824
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Sociology/History of science and technology; History of thought
• Research Institution: Tokai University (2016-2017); Hokkaido University (2015)
• Principal Investigator: KANAYAMA Koji 東海大学, 現代教養センター, 講師 (90713181)
• Project Period (FY): 2015-04-01 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: 武谷三男 / 技術論論争 / 意識的適用説

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The dispute of the nature of technology, brought among Japanese intellectuals or technocrats in the inter-war period, shaped the understanding of relationship between science and technology. After the defeat of Japan, physicist TAKETANI Mitsuo (1911-2000), reacting against representative views on technology in the wartime era, put the famous statement that technology is an conscious application of objective law. TAKETANI's view came to be very popular in part because of its simpleness, but it also paved a way for valgar scienticism. I analysed the root of TAKETANI's thinking way of scienticism from the philosophical and historical viewpoint. My study figured out that it was the simple epistemological view that there is no particular medium between subjective and objective and that could lead to the TKAETANI's difficult attitude to various problems.

Free Research Field

科学技術史