Abstract
Technoscientific research, a kind of scientific research conducted within the decontextualized approach (DA), uses advanced technology to produce instruments, experimental objects, and new objects and structures, that enable us to gain knowledge of states of affairs of novel domains, especially knowledge about new possibilities of what we can do and make, with the horizons of practical, industrial, medical or military innovation, and economic growth and competition, never far removed from view. The legitimacy of technoscientific innovations can be appraised only in the course of considering fully what sorts of objects technoscientific objects are: objects that embody scientific knowledge confirmed within DA; physical/chemical/biological objects, realizations of possibilities discovered in research conducted within DA, brought to realization by means of technical/experimental/instrumental interventions; and components of social/ecological systems, objects that embody the values of technological progress and (most of them) values of capital and the market. What technoscientific objects are - their powers, tendencies, sources of their being, effects on human beings and social/economic systems, how they differ from non technoscientific objects - cannot be grasped from technoscientific inquiry alone; scientific inquiry that is not reducible to that conducted within DA is also needed. The knowledge that underlies and explains the efficacy of technoscientific objects is never sufficient to grasp what sorts of object they are and could become. Science cannot be reduced to technoscience.
Highlights
Research on objects and happenings at the nanoscale exemplifies a widely held image of scientific research
The research is not just to produce technological innovations. Sometimes it aims to gain the fundamental theoretical knowledge that research aiming immediately for practical innovations might depend on; sometimes to create instruments that will enable knowledge to be gained in new areas; and sometimes – according to Nordmann, 2012, characteristically of technoscientific research – to demonstrate that a particular effect can be produced by appropriate manipulation of objects and instruments
It just points to the omnipresence of technology in all aspects of a certain body of scientific research, so much so that sometimes it may appear arbitrary to attempt to distinguish what is the science from what is the technology.[1]
Summary
Research on objects and happenings at the nanoscale exemplifies a widely held image of scientific research. Sometimes the technology creates the objects investigated; and sometimes technological (medical, or agricultural) innovation is the immediate goal of the research This image of scientific research projects that the cutting edge of science is that which exploits the technological contribution to research, and which directly or indirectly furthers human powers to intervene into and control the world. There is a distinction but not a concrete separation between science and technology, between, e.g., coming to know what is possible to observe, make, bring about and control at the nanoscale and the possible consequences of exercising such control at the level of everyday objects, and applying this knowledge to inform practical projects This is not to reduce science to technoscience, or to deny that there is a shifting dynamic interaction between science and technology.
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