Abstract
The term “technoscience” gained philosophical significance in the 1970s but it aroused ambivalent views. On the one hand, several scholars have used it to shed light on specific features of recent scientific research, especially with regard to emerging technologies that blur boundaries (such as natural/artificial, machine/living being, knowing/making and so on); on the other hand, as a matter of fact “technoscience” did not prompt great interest among philosophers. In the French area, a depreciative meaning prevails: “technoscience” means the contamination of science by management and capitalism. Some even argue that “technoscience” is not a concept at all, just a buzzword. In this chapter, on the contrary, we make the case for the constitution of a philosophical concept of technoscience based on the characterization of its objects in order to scrutinize their epistemological, ontological, political and ethical dimensions.
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Notes
- 1.
One may notice that this use of “technoscience” makes of the label STS (“Science and Technology Studies”) a misnomer!
- 2.
- 3.
Recently a comprehensive and epistemologically informed history of technoscience has been published by David F. Channel (2017). He argues that the roots of technoscience can be traced to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in chemical industry, electrical lighting, and telephone and radio research.
- 4.
The GOTO program, funded jointly by ANR (France) and DFG (Germany), gathered Bernadette Bensaude Vincent and Sacha Loeve in France together with Alfred Nordmann and Astrid Schwarz in Germany.
- 5.
Of course, from the epistemological perspective of instrumentalism, scientific representation does not reach an unobservable mind-independent reality, but it makes it observable if one carries out certain actions.
- 6.
“Design” is such a fashionable term that is also prevails in STS. Significantly, design was the thematic topic of the 2012 joint meeting of the 4S and the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) with 1600 papers.
- 7.
The phrase “kludging” coined in information technology refers to an inelegant but successful solution to a problem in computer hardware or software. It is said to be an acronym made of three terms: klumsy, ugly and dumb.
- 8.
More materialistic than Latour, Baird criticizes both the semantic model of scientific knowledge as “justified true belief” and the semiologic model of the actor-network theory, with its text-producing black-boxes. Baird argues that scientific instruments do embed objective knowledge not so much because they are theory-laden (often they first function without a theory), but rather because of the analogy they draw between their technical functionning and the functional properties of truth. By studying the technicalities of instruments, Baird insists on “what truth does for us,” assuming that the technical creation and stabilization of a new phenomenon is objective knowledge, even without theory or propositional knowledge. However, Baird’s account of instrumental knowledge concerns science and matters of truth and falsehood, and not technoscience, on which he takes a critical sociological stance (i.e. technoscience means the contamination of the gift economy characteristic of scientific exchanges by the values of market economy). Accordingly, Baird does not go as far as considering a distinctively technoscientific “thing knowledge.” Baird’s thing knowledge is always about objective knowledge with a pretension to universality, not about local model/objects fittings in which a lot of technoscientific knowledge consists. Similarly Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (1997) defines “experimental systems” as the smallest integral working unit of research where the division between “epistemic thing” and “technical conditions” is relevant. “Epistemic things” are the material entities manipulated in experiments and they embody what researchers do not now or hope to know. When epistemic things become known, they are turned into standard techniques, tools for mundane mapping or commercial applications. They become “technical objects” embodying what has been known during the dialogue between the technical conditions and the epistemic thing. Talking about “technoscientific knowledge” would bypass the distinction between epistemic things and technological conditions that Rheinberger regards as the driver of experimental science. For Rheinberger, it would be talking about industrial development, not about research.
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Bensaude Vincent, B., Loeve, S. (2018). Toward a Philosophy of Technosciences. In: Loeve, S., Guchet, X., Bensaude Vincent, B. (eds) French Philosophy of Technology. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 29. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89518-5_11
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