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. (shrink)

The emerging epistemic community of ecosemioticians and the multidisciplinary field of inquiry known as ecosemiotics offer a radical and relevant approach to so-called global environmental crisis. There are no environmental fixes within the dominant code, since that code overdetermines the future, thereby perpetuating ecologically untenable cultural forms. The possibility of a sustainability transition (the attempt to overcome destitution and avoid ecocatastrophe) becomes real when mediated by and through ecosemiotics. In short, reflexive awareness of humankind's linguisticality is a necessary condition for (...) transforming ecologically maladaptive cultural forms. As a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary research program integrating the human and natural sciences, ecosemiotic inquiry closes the gap between biophysical ecology and human ecology. A provisional outline of a pragmatic theory of ecoserniotics attempts to describe the processes by which adaptive cultural changes might be facilitated and points toward substantive content areas that constitute sites for further research. Ecosemiotic inquiry frames cultural codes as these shape and reproduce the ongoing stream of individual and societal choices that shape distinctively human existence in a larger context of biophysical realities that drive natural selection. However, while ecosemiotics is a necessary condition for the sustainability transition, it is not a sufficient condition. (shrink)