When does the co-evolution of technology and science overturn into technoscience?

Abstract

In this paper, the relations between science and technology, intervention and representation, the natural and the artificial are analysed on the background of the formation of modern science in the sixteenth century. Due to the fact that technique has been essential for modern science from its early beginning, modern science is characterised by a hybridisation of knowledge and intervention. The manipulation of nature in order to measure its properties has steadily increased until artificial things have been produced, such as laser beams, chemical compounds, elementary particles. Furthermore, the structural bracing of natural science, technological development, and industrial exploitation of nature go also back to the foundation of modern science. In order to strengthen the debate on technoscience against this background, the specific characteristics of technoscientific objects have to be clarified as have the specific characteristics of the social organisation of technoscience and its performance.

Advances in technology commercialization models

“…A leading example is the scanning tunnelling microscope, which observes by interventionally "groping" a surface ( Nordmann 2005( Nordmann : 7, 2006) . Dissenters to the technoscientific concept counter that technology (technique) has been an indispensible part of modern science since its inception (Hacking 1983, BensaudeVincent et al 2011, Fiedeler 2011, and that the issue is more nuanced and that this was recognized as early as the sixteenth century. Frances Bacon, for example, noted that experimental measuring (observing) entails intervention because it involves the artificial separation of a natural phenomenon or it involves the creation of an artificial environment (Fiedeler 2011: 89 The implicit mentality behind technoscience comports with Heidegger's (1977) view of technology.…”

“…Though Bachelard had used the term "science technique" in Le nouvel esprit scientifique (Bachelard 1968(Bachelard [1934), the term technoscience first appeared in the late 1970s when it was first introduced by Hottois (Hottois 1984). By the mid1980's, technoscience had morphed into two distinct perspectives (Weber 2010, Fiedeler 2011, Kastenhofer and Allhutter 2010, Kastenholer and Schwarz 2011: an epistemological perspective itself comprising two branches (Weber 2010), namely one derived from the traditional philosophy (epistemology) of sciences (Popper 2005(Popper [1934, Carnap 1934), and another within the Edinburgh School (Barnes 1974, Bloor 1991[1976, MacKenzie 1981, Shapin 1982); and a social science perspective (Haraway 1985, Latour 1987, Anderson 2002. (BensaudeVincent et al 2011).…”