Most known technology serves to ingeniously adapt the world to the physical and mental limitations of human beings. Humankind has acquired awesome power with its rather limited means. Nanotechnological capabilities further this power. On some accounts, however, nanotechnological research will contribute to a rather different kind of technological development, namely one that changes human beings so as to remove or reduce their physical and mental limitations. The prospect of this technological development has inspired a fair amount of ethical debate. Here, (...) proponents and opponents of such visions of human enhancement are criticized alike for engaging in speculative ethics. This critique exposes a general pattern that extends to other nano-, bio-, or neuroethical debates. While it does not apply to all discussions of “enhancement technologies” it does apply to all ethical discourse that constructs and validates an incredible future which it only then proceeds to endorse or critique. This discourse violates conditions of intelligibility, squanders the scarce and valuable resource of ethical concern, and misleads by casting remote possibilities or philosophical thought-experiments as foresight about likely technical developments. In effect, it deflects consideration from the transformative technologies of the present. (shrink)
An essential resource for students of Wittgenstein, this collection contains faithful, in some cases expanded and corrected, versions of many important pieces never before available in a single volume, including Notes for the 'Philosophical Lecture', published here for the first time. Fifteen selections, with bi-lingual versions of those originally written in German, span the development of Wittgenstein's thought, his range of interests, and his methods of philosophical investigation. Short introductions, an index, and an updated version of Georg Henrik von Wright's (...) The Wittgenstein Papers situate the selections within the broader context of the Wittgenstein corpus and the history of its publication. (shrink)
This discussion paper proposes that a meaningful distinction between science and technoscience can be found at the level of the objects of research. Both notions intermingle in the attitudes, intentions, programs and projects of researchers and research institutions—that is, on the side of the subjects of research. But the difference between science and technoscience becomes more explicit when research results are presented in particular settings and when the objects of research are exhibited for the specific interest they hold. When an (...) experiment is presented as scientific evidence which confirms or disconfirms a hypothesis, this agrees with traditional conceptions of science. When organic molecules are presented for their capacity to serve individually as electric wires that carry surprisingly large currents, this would be a hallmark of technoscience. Accordingly, we propose research on the ontology of research objects. The focus on the character and significance of research objects makes this a specifically philosophical project. (shrink)
Advancements in computing, instrumentation, robotics, digital imaging, and simulation modeling have changed science into a technology-driven institution. Government, industry, and society increasingly exert their influence over science, raising questions of values and objectivity. These and other profound changes have led many to speculate that we are in the midst of an epochal break in scientific history. -/- This edited volume presents an in-depth examination of these issues from philosophical, historical, social, and cultural perspectives. It offers arguments both for and against (...) the epochal break thesis in light of historical antecedents. Contributors discuss topics such as: science as a continuing epistemological enterprise; the decline of the individual scientist and the rise of communities; the intertwining of scientific and technological needs; links to prior practices and ways of thinking; the alleged divide between mode-1 and mode-2 research methods; the commodification of university science; and the shift from the scientific to a technological enterprise. Additionally, they examine the epochal break thesis using specific examples, including the transition from laboratory to real world experiments; the increased reliance on computer imaging; how analog and digital technologies condition behaviors that shape the object and beholder; the cultural significance of humanoid robots; the erosion of scientific quality in experimentation; and the effect of computers on prediction at the expense of explanation. -/- Whether these events represent a historic break in scientific theory, practice, and methodology is disputed. What they do offer is an important occasion for philosophical analysis of the epistemic, institutional and moral questions affecting current and future scientific pursuits. (shrink)
If one considers the Collingridge dilemma to be a dilemma awaiting a solution, one has implicitly abandoned a genuinely historical conception of the future and adopted instead a notion of the future as an object of technical design, the realisation of technical possibility or as wish-fulfilment. The definition of technology assessment (TA) as a successful response to the Collingridge dilemma renders it a technoscience that shares with all the others the conceit of being able, supposedly, to shape the future. An (...) alternative way of pursuing TA begins with an analysis of our age of technoscience, including its impoverished conception of the future. A critical appreciation of this conception gives rise to a forensics of wishing. (shrink)
One of the aims of the DEEPEN project was to deepen ethical understanding of issues related to emerging nanotechnologies through an interdisciplinary approach utilizing insights from philosophy, ethics, and the social sciences. Accordingly, part of its final report was dedicated to the question of what was accomplished with regards to this aim and what further research is required. It relates two insights: Nanotechnologies intensify the ambivalence of ongoing, long-term developments; and yet, our intuitions and received story-lines fail us as a (...) guide to ethical and political matters concerning nanotechnologies. (shrink)
Ludwig Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' is one of the most important books of the twentieth century. It influenced philosophers and artists alike and it continues to fascinate readers today. It offers rigorous arguments but clothes them in enigmatic pronouncements. Wittgenstein himself said that his book is 'strictly philosophical and simultaneously literary, and yet there is no blathering in it'. This introduction, first published in 2005, considers both the philosophical and the literary aspects of the 'Tractatus' and shows how they are related. (...) It also shows how the work fits into Wittgenstein's philosophical development and the tradition of analytic philosophy, arguing strongly for the vigour and significance of that tradition. (shrink)
How can one discover the ethical issues associated with nanotechnologies? One heuristic is to tend closely to the ethical reflections of lay publics and the ways in which these are informed by experience with technological innovation, technology governance, and the (broken) promises of visionary science and technology. A close collaboration between social scientists and philosophers took this heuristic to its limits: On the one hand, it achieved remarkably fine–grained insights into public reflection about nanotechnologies. On the other hand, a philosophical (...) analysis of these reflections makes apparent that there is a profound disconnect between the lay ethics rooted in public talk and the ethical and normative commitments that are embedded in nanotechnological research programs and practices. Accordingly, critical engagement with the ways in which ordinary people try to make sense of nanotechnologies constitutes a novel heuristic for the discovery of ethical issues. This introduction and the subsequent four papers show this heuristic at work. (shrink)
Herbert Gleiter promoted the development of nanostructured materials on a variety of levels. In 1981 already, he formulated research visions and produced experimental as well as theoretical results. Still he is known only to a small community of materials scientists. That this is so is itself a telling feature of the imagined community of nanoscale research. After establishing the plausibility of the claim that Herbert Gleiter provided a major impetus, a second step will show just how deeply Gleiter shaped (and (...) ceased to influence) the vision of the National Nanotechnology Initiative in the US. Finally, then, the apparent invisibility of Gleiter's importance needs to be understood. This leads to the main question of this investigation. Though materials research meets even the more stringent definitions of nanotechnology, there remains a systematic tension between materials science and the device-centered visions of nanotechnology. Though it turned the tables on the scientific prestige of physics, materials science runs up against the engineering prestige of the machine. (shrink)
Discussions of technoscience are bringing to light that scientific journals feature very different knowledge claims. At one end of the spectrum, there is the scientific claim that a hypothesis needs to be reevaluated in light of new evidence. At the other end of the spectrum, there is the technoscientific claim that some new measure of control has been achieved in a laboratory. The latter claim has not received sufficient attention as of yet. In what sense is the achievement of control (...) genuine knowledge in its own right; how is this knowledge acquired; and publicly validated? Notions of tacit or embodied knowledge, of knowledge by acquaintance, of engineering or thing knowledge, and reconstructions of ability or skill take us only part of the way towards answering such questions. The epistemology of technoscience needs to account for the acquisition and demonstration of a public knowledge of control that does not consist in the holding of propositions, even though it is usually communicated in writing: Technoscientific knowledge is, firstly, objective and public insofar as it is exhibited and documented. Secondly, it presupposes a specific context of technology and expertise. Thirdly, it is communicable, even where the achieved capability itself is not. Knowledge of control entails, fourthly, a knowledge of causal relationships, and it sediments itself, fifthly, as a habit of action in the sense proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce. (shrink)
The controversy between Biometricians and Mendelians has been called an inexplicable embarrassment since it revolved around the mistaken identification of Mendelian genetics with non-Darwinian saltationism, a mistake traced back to the non-Darwinian William Bateson, who introduced Mendelian analysis to British science. The following paper beings to unravel this standard account of the controversy by raising a simple question: Given that Bateson embraced evolution by natural selection and that he studied the causes of variation within a broadly Darwinian framework of problems (...) and questions, how are we to understand the claim that he was a non-Darwinian? A brief survey of possible responses to this question is followed by an alternative proposal: the controversy will be considered as a struggle among Darwinians about the future course of Darwinism. On this account, Darwin's own work led to the juncture at which Mendelians and Biometricians parted company, indeed, the Origin itself prepared the divergent methodological stances subsequently adopted by Bateson and his antagonists. The inexplicable embarrassment is dissolved through the parsimonious reconstruction of the profound substantive conflict between Biometricians and Mendelians as a chapter in the articulation and differentiation of the Darwinian research programme. (shrink)
For Wittgenstein, philosophy was an on-going activity. Only in his dialog with the philosophical community and in his private moments does Wittgenstein's philosophical practice fully come to light.
This article offers a contrast between European and US-American approaches to the convergence of enabling technologies and to associated issues. It identifies an apparently paradoxical situation in which regional differences produce conflicting claims to universality, each telling us what can and will happen to the benefit of humanity. Those who might mediate and negotiate these competing claims are themselves entangled in the various positions. A possible solution is offered, namely a universalizable strategy that aims to disentangle premature claims to unity (...) and universality as in the case of the greater "efficiency" of nanomedicine. This is the strategy by which Science and Technologies Studies (STS) can analytically tease apart what it has helped produce and sustain in the first place. The virtues and limits of this strategy are briefly presented, deliberation and decision-making under conditions of productive disillusionment recommended. (shrink)
Susan Mills and John Beatty's propensity interpretation of fitness encountered very different philosophical criticisms by Alexander Rosenberg and Kenneth Waters. These criticisms and the rejoinders to them are both predictable and important. They are predictable as raisingkinds of issues typically associated with disposition concepts (this is established through a systematic review of the problems generated by Carnap's dispositional interpretation of all scientific terms). They are important as referring the resolution of these issues to the development of evolutionary biology. This historical (...) approach to the propensity interpretation of fitness draws attention to the precarious relation between philosophical clarification of scientific concepts and any given state of the empirical arts. (shrink)
Images from the nanoworld are not at all disorienting or bewildering, as one might expect from contemplating the strange and surprising features that arise where classical physics comes to an end and quantum effects begin to appear. Instead, we see the traces of explorers in a world that appears to be infinitely malleable. The paper shows that the capability to visualize processes and phenomena at the nanoscale is a matter not only of research technologies and the advancement of observational techniques, (...) but also a matter of developing a visual setting that exhibits knowledge and practice, surprise and control. The surface is such a stage and so is the landscape: they invite us to become immersed and move around like someone who goes for a walk. In order to appreciate this pictorial, as well as discursive, setting we turn to “strollology” as a method of reconstructing the world that is experienced in the manner of walking. With the notion of imagescape this method is applied to the modes of partaking in the nanoworld and its specific features. Rather than articulate theoretical or metaphysical presuppositions these nanoscapes serve to validate the very idea of nanotechnology. (shrink)
: In the face of disunification and incommensurability, how can the scientific community maintain itself and establish commensurability? According to Peter Galison's investigations of twentieth-century microphysics, commensurability is achieved through local coordination even in the absence of global meaning: The "strength and coherence" of science is due to diverse, yet coordinated action in trading zones between theorists and experimenters, experimenters and instrument builders, etc. Galison's claim is confronted with Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's establishment of commensurability between unitarians and dualists in the (...) eighteenth century dispute about electrical fluids. The contrast of cases suggests an alternative account: Commensurability may be established through the global coordination of local meaning. And where Galison reifies the disunification of science, this account suggests a dynamic interplay between de facto disunification and an intended unity. This interplay is manifested in the pervasive and ongoing practical concern for the conditions of successful communication in a science that is constantly in-the-making. (shrink)
In this paper we elucidate a particular type of instrument. Striking-phenomenon instruments assume their striking profile against the shifting backdrop of theoretical uncertainties. While technologically stable, the phenomena produced by these instruments are linguistically fuzzy, subject to a variety of conceptual representations. But in virtue of their technological stability alone, they can provide a foundation for further technological as well as conceptual development. Sometimes, as in the case of the pulse glass, the phenomenon is taken to confirm conflicting theoretical views; (...) sometimes, as in the case of the Lichtenberg-figures, it holds out the false promise of crucial theoretical importance; sometimes, as in the case of the airpump in the 18th century, it emphatically short-circuits theory and human ingenuity, giving a voice to nature herself; and sometimes, finally, as in the case of the quincunx, the phenomenon stands in for theoretical accounts. We propose and develop the salient features of these instruments demonstrating their importance to our understanding of science. (shrink)
This is a paper, on the face of it, about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and its contribution to the philosophy of technology. As such, it advances a three-fold claim: Especially the early Wittgenstein was not a philosopher of technology. Though he does not recognize philosophical problems of technology—for example, of engineering knowledge—he is keenly aware of the limits of philosophy. Thus, he inadvertently opens up a perspective for the philosophy of technology, after all. By drawing out the implications of this perspective for (...) a conception of ‘working knowledge’ and thus of working orders of things, this paper ends up promoting a research program for the philosophy of technology. (shrink)
It requires objectivity to acquire scientific knowledge of facts, it requires Sachlichkeit or a feeling for the mechanism to acquire technical knowledge of how things work together in a system or device. Each of these epistemic ideals is normatively charged but only the notion of scientific objectivity considers knowledge production as a historical process. And while scientific objectivity served as an ideal for communicative rationality in an open and democratic society, Sachlichkeit underwrites the search for innovative solutions in contemporary knowledge (...) societies. This article draws on the work of Alexander Kluge and Ludwig Wittgenstein to delineate the normative dimensions and claim to validity of Sachlichkeit. (shrink)
Au cours des dernières décennies, la philosophie des sciences est devenue la philosophie des sciences particulières. En conséquence, certaines des questions majeures de la philosophie des sciences sont adressées à la recherche en nanosciences et technologie. C’est le cas notamment des questions concernant la nature de la connaissance, le rôle de la théorie, les pratiques expérimentales et observationnelles. Ces questions habituelles suscitent des réponses inattendues, suggérant que la nanotechnoscience est un exemple non pas d’une science mais d’une technoscience.
In his review (Inquiry 32 [1989], pp. 343?69) of Paul Feyerabend's Farewell to Reason, Harvey Siegel makes a fairly simple point: Feyerabend provides a bad argument for a good cause. In particular, Siegel maintains that the argument suffers, first, from self?inflicted depreciation: having been rendered impotent by Feyerabend's views of objectivity and rationality, what claim to persuasion can his argument possibly hold? And second, the argument is said to be incoherent: instead of respecting and leaving alone diverse cultures and traditions (...) as required by his views, Feyerabend fails to honor the right of people in several ways by formulating from afar abstract principles of cultural autonomy. Having debunked the argument, what remains is at least a semblance of agreement when Siegel identifies a shared concern with the value of cultural diversity on a world?wide scale. In response to Siegel this paper argues: yes, in an important sense, Feyerabend's argument is admittedly impotent and admission of that is a mere matter of acuity and intellectual honesty; but no, the argument is not incoherent, nor is there even a shared concern with the preservation of traditions in non?Western cultures. In other words, misunderstanding runs deep: a rationalist's objective misapprehension of Feyerabend's rhetorical devices. From this criticism of Siegel's criticism an alternative account emerges. Farewell to Reason poses a simple, but deeply troubling question: do the success and the benefits of science and technology warrant or require a social arrangement which privileges the highly specialized development of certain human faculties at the expense of others? The response to Siegel concludes with a survey of more creative ways in which philosophy can and should take up Feyerabend's challenge. (shrink)
Changing Perspectives – From the Experimental to the Technological Turn in History and Philosophy of Science. In the 1960s the philosophy of science was transformed through the encounter with the history of science, resulting in a collaborative venture by the name of “History and Philosophy of Science” . Philosophy of science adopted ever more regularly the format of the case study to reconstruct certain episodes from the history of science, and historians were mostly interested in the production of scientific knowledge. (...) The so-called “experimental turn” of the 1980s owed to this interaction between philosophy and history. Its guiding question remained quite traditional, however, namely “How do the sciences achieve an agreement between representation and reality?” Only the answers to this question broke with tradition by focusing not on theory but on the role of instruments and experiments. – Roughly 30 years after the experimental turn, another transformative encounter appears to be taking place. HPS is being transformed in the encounter with philosophy of technology. From the point of view of philosophy of technology, the question does not arise whether and how the agreement of mind and world, representation and reality can be achieved. When things are constructed, built or made, human thinking and physical materiality are inseparably intertwined. Instead of seeking to describe a mind-independent reality, technoscientific researchers are working to acquire and demonstrate capabilities of experimental or predictive control. When science is regarded as a kind of technology, a program of study opens up for epistemology and so do avenues for the historiography of science. History of science might now show how the problems and procedures of the sciences arise from and impinge back upon a world that is itself a product of science and technology. It thereby abandons its traditional HPS niche existence and joins forces with environmental history, history of technology, social, labor, and consumer history. (shrink)
