Epistemic and Technical Things: The Phenomenological Boundaries of STS

Abstract

We will introduce the words of Sharon Traweek presented in the book Beamtimes and lifetimes: the world of high energy physicists, affirming that in the field of high energy physics a “detector” (an instrument) that works perfectly will be considered worthless from the point of view of research. Our intentions are to make a contribution to the study of the nature of broken technologies and their relation to knowledge. To our help we will comment also a text of Cyrus C.M. Mody and Michael Lynch titled “Test objects and other epistemic things: a history of a nanoscale object”. Professors Mody and Lynch studied an object named silicon “(111) 7 X 7” that they describe as a “test object”. This object behaves as both a “technical object” and as an “epistemic thing”. In our terms, the silicon “(111) 7 X 7”-object, behaves as a prototype, that is as a “broken technology” that we do not really know how to describe and we do not really know how to use. In fact, the only way to answer to these interrogatives is manipulating the artifact and testing it in different epistemic and pragmatic situations. Our approach is phenomenological and that means that for us, every technology must be correlated to the human body. For phenomenology, the everyday world –included the exceptional case of the laboratory-world- is the expression of embodied intentionality.