The evolution of science and technology From unity to plurality (cultural-historical approach)

The divergent trend of science and technology has begun almost 300 B.C. and continued until the middle of the twentieth century. The gradual separation of science from philosophy and then the creation of academic disciplines are two historical evidences of this claim. The industrial revolution and its consequences, the factory system, the professionalization approach in science and technology, and the analytic thinking, are the most important factors in creation the divergent trend of science and technology. Since the middle of the twentieth century, with the advent of two flows of "interdisciplinaries" and "emergent technologies", the convergence of science and technology has begun. The domination of "systemic thinking" instead of "analytic thinking" and as well as the "deprofessionalization" approach, instead of the "professionalization" approach, are two factors that influence this change of paradigm. In this paper, with a cultural-historical approach and the use of existing documents, we seek to explain the claim that the trend of science and technology has been diverging for several hundred years and gradually, in the mid-twentieth century, evidence of its convergence has been observed.