History and Philosophy of Technoscience

Even though technoscientific research is as old as alchemy and pharmacy, agricultural research and synthetic chemistry, philosophers of science and technology had little to say about it until recently. This book series 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 construction, manipulation, visualization, or predictive control, how are problems defined and research fields established, what kinds of explanations are sought, how are findings validated? Also, what are the contributions of different kinds of expertise, does technoscientific knowledge link up with indigenous traditions, tinkering, and ecological practices? How do epistemic, social and moral values shape the research process? Which ontologies does it evoke, which images  of reality, of the future and the past? And most importantly for civic observers of contemporary research: how is robustness and reliability achieved even in the absence of intellectual understanding?

Direct inquiries to Marco Tamborini marco.tamborini@unipegaso.it or Max Novick max.novick@taylorandfrancis.com.