Editorial

Abstract

EditorialThis Special Issue marks Scientiae zudia's tenth year. It consists, for the most part, of articles that resulted from the XX International Seminar of Philosophy and History of Science, "Technoscience, culture and society", held during the week, 23-27 August 2010, in the Department of Philosophy of the University of São Paulo. This Seminar was one of the international activities of the Thematic Project (TP), Fapesp 07/53867-0, "Origins and significance of technoscience", and it involved collaboration with three principal investigators (BensaudeVincent, Nordmann, Schwarz) of the project GOTO ("Genesis and ontology of technoscientific research objects''), funded by the French and German Research Councils, ANR and DFG. Exceptionally, this issue of Scientiae zudia is published in English. The articles (and the seminar presentations on which most of them are based) were prepared in English by seven international contributors, so that it was not feasible to publish them otherwise. Moreover, since together they serve as a kind of état de lieu of the reflection about technoscience that has been carried out in connection with the TP and regularly published in Scientiae zudia, the Special Issue provides an opportunity to bring the work of the TP to a wider audience.Different perspectives on technoscience, and consequently different evaluations of its place in society and culture, are expressed in the articles published in this issue. They range from strongly holding that technoscience is an accomplished fact (or on the way to being so), an inevitability or necessity of our times, passing through intermediate positions that consi der technoscience as leading to consequences and risks that should be discussed, taking alterna tives into account, in the context of democratic decision-making, to the position that strictly speaking there is no such thing as technoscience but only what is in large measure an "invention" of the proponents of particular scientific and technological policies. The three reviews are critical studies prepared by scholars from the University of São Paulo who attended the Seminar and who, building on the diverse materials encountered there, contribute to the discussion about how to characterize technoscience and its relationship with social and democratic values.The first article is by Alfred Nordmann. He argues that "technoscientific knowledge claims" broadly refer to "some new measure of control [that] has been achieved in a laboratory", as opposed to "scientific knowledge claims", which traditionally result from testing hypotheses for their evidential support. For him, the function of epistemology is neither (at the level of discourse) to reconstruct a theory or the evidence that supports a hypothesis, nor (at the practical level) to describe capacities or skills, but to give an account of "the acquisition and demonstration of a public knowledge of control". Nordmann proposes five epistemological features that characterize technoscience; and he endorses the idea that there is a type of activ...