Toward a Philosophy of Technosciences

Abstract

The term “technoscience” gained philosophical significance in the 1970s but it aroused ambivalent views. On the one hand, several scholars have used it to shed light on specific features of recent scientific research, especially with regard to emerging technologies that blur boundaries (such as natural/artificial, machine/living being, knowing/making and so on); on the other hand, as a matter of fact “technoscience” did not prompt great interest among philosophers. In the French area, a depreciative meaning prevails: “technoscience” means the contamination of science by management and capitalism. Some even argue that “technoscience” is not a concept at all, just a buzzword. In this chapter, on the contrary, we make the case for the constitution of a philosophical concept of technoscience based on the characterization of its objects in order to scrutinize their epistemological, ontological, political and ethical dimensions.