Increasingly Complex Techno-Digital Realities in the Dynamics of Scientific Discourse

Abstract

The article analyzes how factors of accelerating and complicating development of science and technology lead to changes in people's living conditions and, consequently, scientific discourse. The stage of industrial modernization was dominated by monodisciplinary knowledge with pronounced boundaries, which was rather functional for analyzing the realities of specific spheres of human life under the conditions of relatively slow development of the social and natural worlds. Scientists sought to identify solid technological, social, and economic correlations, to substantiate universal laws of socium and nature in the context of the mechanical picture of the world. However, the acceleration and increasing complexity of the development of science and technology have contributed to start the transition from monodisciplinary to interdisciplinary knowledge. The state of affairs changed significantly in the period of 'reflexive modernization' (Beck, Giddens, Lash), which was expressed in scientific 'turns' – qualitative changes in the production of knowledge in the form of permanently complicating scientific discourse. The ‘turns’ implied a different methodology of cognition, the rejection of solid correlations and universal laws, the transition to the interpretation of liquid realities (Bauman), the reflexion concerning the runaway world (Giddens). The post-modernization, the becoming of 'digital society' mark a radically different trend in the systems of knowledge production and the transition to a post-disciplinary scientific discourse.