The world as it is versus how it should be: epistemological differences and convergences between science and design

The purpose of this essay was to critically discuss whether there are and what are the epistemological differences between scientists and designers. These two characters are worked out in the form of extreme stereotypes. The scientist is the ultimate representative of a traditional and positivist view of science, which seeks to explain in a value-free way how the world is. While the designer represents all those who act guided by proposals of value to transform the world, not just explain it. In these two different ways of acting and creating knowledge, Peirce's three types of logical inference would play a fundamental role, induction and deduction being the central tools for the scientist and abduction of the designer's own thinking. Throughout the work, we present a critique about this split, demonstrating that this is an artificial and inadequate division, since both characters work with the three types of inference. In this way, both would be, contrary to what the literature defends, epistemologically very similar.