Research objects in their technological setting /
What kind of stuff is the world made of? What is the nature or substance of things? These are ontological questions, and they are usually answered with respect to the objects of science. The objects of technoscience tell a different story that concerns the power, promise and potential of things - no...
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| Format: | Electronic eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY :
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa Business,
[2017]
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| Series: | History and philosophy of technoscience
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: |
Full text (Emmanuel users only) |
| Summary: | What kind of stuff is the world made of? What is the nature or substance of things? These are ontological questions, and they are usually answered with respect to the objects of science. The objects of technoscience tell a different story that concerns the power, promise and potential of things - not what they are but what they can be. Seventeen scholars from history and philosophy of science, epistemology, social anthropology, cultural studies and ethics each explore a research object in its technological setting, ranging from carbon to cardboard, from arctic ice cores to nuclear waste, from wetlands to GMO seeds, from fuel cells to the great Pacific garbage patch. Together they offer fascinating stories and novel analytic concepts, all the while opening up a space for reflecting the specific character of techno scientific objects. With their promise of sustainable innovation and a technologically transformed future, these objects are highly charged with values and design expectations. By clarifying their mode of existence, we are learning to come to terms more generally with the furniture of the techno scientific world - where, for example, the 'dead matter' of classical physics is becoming the smart material' of emerging and converging technologies. Even though technoscientific research is as old as alchemy and pharmacy agricultural research and synthetic chemistry, philosophers of science had little to say about it until recently. This book serie:. is the first to explicitly accept the challenge to study not just technical aspects of theory development and hypothesis testing but the specific ways in which knowledge is produced in a technological setting. When one seeks to achieve basic capabilities of manipulation, visualization, or predictive control, how are problems defined and research fields established, what kinds of explanations are sought, how are findings validated, what are the contributions of different kinds of expertise, how do epistemic and social values enter into the research process? And most importantly for civic observers of contemporary research: how is robustness and reliability achieved even in the absence of complete scientific understanding? Book jacket. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781351966382 1351966383 9781781448397 1781448396 9781351966375 1351966375 9781351966368 1351966367 |
| Source of Description, Etc. Note: | Print version record. |