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  1. Introduction: The coming of the knowledge society and the challenges for the future of europe. [REVIEW]Francesco Coniglione - 2009 - Axiomathes 19 (4):353-372.
    This paper explicates the philosophical and epistemological background of the MIRRORS project, which is the starting point of the various contributions in this issue. Developments in the philosophy of science will be discussed, especially the watershed work of Kuhn, in order to analyze further developments in the sociology of science, particularly starting from the Strong Programme. Finally, it will be shown how a multidisciplinary approach in Science & Technology (S&T) studies, as opposed to an interdisciplinary one, is to be preferred. (...)
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  • Technology as prospective ontology.Arie Rip - 2009 - Synthese 168 (3):405 - 422.
    Starting from common-sense notions of ‘furniture of the world’ a process ontology is developed in which prospective is an integral part. Technology as configurations that work (precariously) embodies expectations which structure further development. Examples (a cloned puppy, hotel keys, DC airplanes, stem cells, and overpasses on Long Island) are used to develop the notion of material narratives that are “written”, not just by engineers and designers/producers, but also by users: “reading” implies some further “writing”. In contrast to prevailing notions of (...)
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  • A disagreement over agreement and consensus in constructionist sociology.Graham Button & Wes Sharrock - 1993 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 23 (1):1–25.
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  • The Collective Construction of Technology: Re-Narrating Bicycle Development in an ANT Atmosphere.Rahman Sharifzadeh - 2022 - Social Epistemology 36 (6):759-772.
    One way to compare different theoretical approaches to the study of technologies is to see what the difference is between their narratives of the construction of a particular technology. In this paper, we re-narrate the bicycle construction from the perspective of actor-network theory (ANT), comparing to SCOT’s first account of the construction. Although SCOT has moved closer to actor-network theory later by paying more attention to co-construction and materliaty, Pinch and Biker have not modified their account of the bicycle development (...)
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  • Philosophy of the Internet. A Discourse on the Nature of the Internet.Laszlo Ropolyi - 2013 - Budapest: Eötvös University.
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  • A Model for Interdisciplinary Work.Véronique Englebert-Lecomte, Philippe Mathy & Gérard Fourez - 1997 - Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society 17 (2-3):95-104.
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  • Operating as Experimenting: Synthesizing Engineering and Scientific Values in Nuclear Power Production.Constance Perin - 1998 - Science, Technology and Human Values 23 (1):98-128.
    Four hundred seventy-six nuclear power plants are in operation or under construction around the world. Are concepts for designing and operating plants safely sufficient? Conventional approaches are premised on expectations of predictability and control of radiation release and on assumptions that plant operations are closed systems. Field observations in the industry find, however, that the periodic necessity to refuel, test safety equipment, and continuously upgrade plant designs introduces challenges to control not originally calculated. The social and cultural contexts of markets, (...)
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  • Alternative Facts and States of Fear: Reality and STS in an Age of Climate Fictions.Joanna Radin - 2019 - Minerva 57 (4):411-431.
    In the decades since the Science Wars of the 1990s, climate science has become a crucible for the negotiation of claims about reality and expertise. This negotiation, which has drawn explicitly on the ideas and techniques of science and technology studies, has taken place in genres of fiction as well as non-fiction, which intersect in surprising ways. In this case study, I focus on two interwoven strands of this history. One follows Michael Crichton’s best-selling 2004 novel, State of Fear and (...)
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  • The Many Faces of Science and Technology Relationships.Ana Cuevas - 2005 - Essays in Philosophy 6 (1):54-75.
    In this paper, the different theories about science and technology relationships are analyzed. All of them have some virtues, but also one main defect: these theories do not take into account other well-founded possible relationships. The origin of this problem is the narrow view about science and technology. In this paper another characterization about technology based on Ronald Giere’s perspective is suggested. In the light of this new description, six different relationships between science and technology arise. Some of these relations (...)
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  • A Manifesto for Messy Philosophy of Technology: The History and Future of an Academic Field.Gregory Morgan Swer & Jean Du Toit - 2020 - Teorie Vědy / Theory of Science 42 (2):231-252.
    Philosophy of technology was not initially considered a consolidated field of inquiry. However, under the influence of sociology and pragmatist philosophy, something resembling a consensus has emerged in a field previously marked by a lack of agreement amongst its practitioners. This has given the field a greater sense of structure and yielded interesting research. However, the loss of the earlier “messy” state has resulted in a limitation of the field’s scope and methodology that precludes an encompassing view of the problematic (...)
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  • Reflexivity.Dick Pels - 2000 - Theory, Culture and Society 17 (3):1-25.
    Reflexivity, or the systematic attempt to include the spokesperson in accounts of the social world, is a magnetic signature and inherent riddle of all modern thinking about knowledge and science. Turning the narrative back upon the narrator may sharpen our critical wits about the `inescapable perspectivity' of human knowledge; but self-referential accounts may also trigger endless loops of meta-theorizing and lose track of the object itself. Negotiating the twin pitfalls of spiralling meta-reflexivity and flat naturalistic accounts, I argue for a (...)
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  • Beyond the Triple Helix: Framing STS in the Developmental Context.Yanuar Nugroho & Sulfikar Amir - 2013 - Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society 33 (3-4):115-126.
    For the past three decades or so, the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) has shed light on the interrelationship between modern science and technology, on one side, and contemporary society, on the other. A majority of this knowledge and insights are situated in the context of Western societies, or more precisely, in economically and technologically advanced societies in Western Europe and North America. However, STS has much to offer to the discourse of science and technology in the Global (...)
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  • Ethics in Technological Culture: A Programmatic Proposal for a Pragmatist Approach.Tsjalling Swierstra, Michiel Korthals, Maartje Schermer & Jozef Keulartz - 2004 - Science, Technology and Human Values 29 (1):3-29.
    Neither traditional philosophy nor current applied ethics seem able to cope adequately with the highly dynamic character of our modern technological culture. This is because they have insufficient insight into the moral significance of technological artifacts and systems. Here, much can be learned from recent science and technology studies. They have opened up the black box of technological developments and have revealed the intimate intertwinement of technology and society in minute detail. However, while applied ethics is characterized by a certain (...)
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  • Technology Theory and Deliberative Democracy.Patrick W. Hamlett - 2003 - Science, Technology, and Human Values 28 (1):112-140.
    This article examines the debate about the normative relevance of social constructivism, arguing that the criticisms of Winner, Radder, and others are fundamentally accurate. The article argues that a combination of Radder's notion of nonlocal values and Martin's concern for deliberative interventions may offer a theoretical exit from the normative irrelevance that marks constructivism. The article goes on to suggest that theoretical and praxeological developments in two other literatures, participatory public policy analysis and deliberative democracy, may provide fruitful initiatives for (...)
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  • Technological Dramas.Bryan Pfaffenberger - 1992 - Science, Technology and Human Values 17 (3):282-312.
    This article examines the technological construction of political power, as well as resistance to political power, by means of an "ideal-typical" model called a technolog ical drama. In technological regularization, a design constituency creates artifacts whose features reveal an intention to shape the distribution of wealth, power, or status in society. The design constituency also creates myths, social contexts, and rituals to legitimate its intention and constitute the artifact's political impact. In reply, the people adversely affected by regularization engage in (...)
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  • Mediating Science and Society in the EU and UK: From Information-Transmission to Deliberative Democracy?Anwar Tlili & Emily Dawson - 2010 - Minerva 48 (4):429-461.
    In this paper we critically review recent developments in policies, practices and philosophies pertaining to the mediation between science and the public within the EU and the UK, focusing in particular on the current paradigm of Public Understanding of Science and Technology (PEST) which seeks to depart from the science information-transmission associated with previous paradigms, and enact a deliberative democracy model. We first outline the features of the current crisis in democracy and discuss deliberative democracy as a response to this (...)
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  • Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding It Full: Exploring the Ethics in Design Practices.Marc Steen - 2015 - Science, Technology, and Human Values 40 (3):389-420.
    Contemporary design practices, such as participatory design, human-centered design, and codesign, have inherent ethical qualities, which often remain implicit and unexamined. Three design projects in the high-tech industry were studied using three ethical traditions as lenses. Virtue ethics helped to understand cooperation, curiosity, creativity, and empowerment as virtues that people in PD need to cultivate, so that they can engage, for example, in mutual learning and collaborative prototyping. Ethics of alterity helped to understand human-centered design as a fragile encounter between (...)
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  • Chemical Sunset: Technological Inflexibility and Designing an Intelligent Precautionary “Polluter Pays” Principle.Eun-Sung Kim - 2008 - Science, Technology, and Human Values 33 (4):459-479.
    This article provides a theoretical policy-making model of chemical sunset that gradually substitutes green alternatives for persistent toxic substances within a finite timeframe. The technological inflexibility of these substances is a tough obstacle to a chemical sunset, because a chemical sunset seeks to ultimately stop, within a short period of time, the risky businesses of these substances that are highly entrenched into our society. In wrestling with this obstacle, the intelligent precautionary “polluter pays” principle integrates three policy tools: a “precautionary (...)
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  • Against Reflexivity as an Academic Virtue and Source of Privileged Knowledge.Michael Lynch - 2000 - Theory, Culture and Society 17 (3):26-54.
    Reflexivity is a well-established theoretical and methodological concept in the human sciences, and yet it is used in a confusing variety of ways. The meaning of `reflexivity' and the virtues ascribed to the concept are relative to particular theoretical and methodological commitments. This article examines several versions of the concept, and critically focuses on treatments of reflexivity as a mark of distinction or source of methodological advantage. Although reflexivity often is associated with radical epistemologies, social scientists with more conventional leanings (...)
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  • Three Decades of Social Construction of Technology: Dynamic Yet Fuzzy? The Methodological Conundrum.Sumitran Basu - 2023 - Social Epistemology 37 (3):259-275.
    Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) formed a key component of the ‘new sociology of technology’, which emerged in mid-1980s and heralded the entry of social constructivist theory into the domain of technology from science. A large number of empirical case studies were generated using SCOT methodology in the following three decades, encompassing a wide range of technological artefacts or systems. This essay reviews the trajectory of SCOT as a distinct intellectual tradition in technology studies. First, an attempt is made to (...)
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  • Where Are the Politics? Perspectives on Democracy and Technology.Harro van Lente & Roel Nahuis - 2008 - Science, Technology, and Human Values 33 (5):559-581.
    The politics of innovation involves displacements between various interrelated settings ranging from the context of design to the context of use. This variety of settings and their particular qualities raise questions about the democratic implications of displacements, which have been addressed within science and technology studies for decades from different perspectives and along various theoretical strands. This article distinguishes five different traditions of conceptualizing the relation between technological innovation and democracy: an intentionalist, a proceduralist, an actor—network, an interpretivist, and a (...)
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  • Accounting for the social: Investigating commensuration and Big Data practices at Facebook.Fernando N. van der Vlist - 2016 - Big Data and Society 3 (1).
    This study explores Big Data practices at Facebook through an investigation of the role of commensuration or ‘the transformation of different qualities into a common metric’ in the structuration of analysis and interaction with a major online social media platform. It proposes a conceptual framework and demonstrates the empirical potential of a pragmatic approach based on reading published materials and available documentation. Facebook’s Data Warehousing and Analytics Infrastructure serves as an illustrative example to begin tracing out and describe data assemblages (...)
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  • A Science and Technology Studies Challenge to Trustworthiness Criteria: Toward a More Naturalistic Approach.Rahman Sharifzadeh - 2024 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 54 (6):490-515.
    Lincoln and Guba provided some principles and four evaluative criteria called “trustworthiness” to guide social science research naturalistically. However, drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) literature, a field engaged with methods and practices of science for several decades, one can argue that this approach is not still fully naturalistic. In this paper, we review Lincoln and Guba’s four criteria of trustworthiness from an STS perspective. We argue that the STS literature can challenge these criteria, but at the same time (...)
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  • Death and Furniture: the rhetoric, politics and theology of bottom line arguments against relativism.Derek Edwards, Malcolm Ashmore & Jonathan Potter - 1995 - History of the Human Sciences 8 (2):25-49.
    ’Death’ and ’Furniture’ are emblems for two very common (predictable, even) objections to relativism. When relativists talk about the social construction of reality, truth, cognition, scientific knowledge, technical capacity, social structure and so on, their realist opponents sooner or later start hitting the furniture, invoking the Holocaust, talking about rocks, guns, killings, human misery, tables and chairs. The force of these objections is to introduce a bottom line, a bedrock of reality that places limits on what may be treated as (...)
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  • AI and representation: A study of a rhetorical context for legitimacy. [REVIEW]Lynette A. C. Hunter - 1993 - AI and Society 7 (3):185-207.
    Theoretical commentaries on AI often operate as a metadiscourse on the way in which science represents itself to a wider public. The sciences and humanities do the same kind of work but in different fields that encourage them to talk about their work differently: science refers to a natural world that does not talk back, and the humanities refer continually to a world with communicative people in it. This paper suggests that much AI commentary is misconceived because it models itself (...)
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  • Introduction: Science and Technology as a Global System.Richard Worthington - 1993 - Science, Technology and Human Values 18 (2):176-185.
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  • Potency in All the Right Places: Viagra as a Technology of the Gendered Body.Laura Mamo & Jennifer R. Fishman - 2001 - Body and Society 7 (4):13-35.
    New pharmacological therapies, often dubbed `lifestyle drugs', demonstrate the enactment of yet another interface between technologies and bodies that promises a re-fashioning of the body with transformative, life-enhancing results. This article analyzes the emergence of one lifestyle drug, Viagra, from a technoscience studies perspective, conceptualizing Viagra as a new medical technology of the body. Through an analysis of promotional materials for Viagra, we argue that this pharmaceutical device performs ideological work through its discursive scripts that serves to reinforce and augment (...)
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  • Mead has never been modern: Using Meadian theory to extend the constructionist study of technology.Antony J. Puddephatt - 2005 - Social Epistemology 19 (4):357 – 380.
    This article makes use of the theoretical framework of George Herbert Mead to extend the parameters of the constructionist study of technology, which is shown to suffer from two major weaknesses. First, the perspective is based upon a dualist ontology, which tends toward a solipsistic position. Second, the constructionist approach is sociologically deterministic, and fails to fully capture innovation and creativity in the technological process. Mead's ontology can serve to remedy these issues, as his theory of meaning rests on a (...)
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  • Developing Information Infrastructure: The Tension Between Standardization and Flexibility.Morten Hatling, Eric Monteiro & Ole Hanseth - 1996 - Science, Technology and Human Values 21 (4):407-426.
    This article explores the tension between standardization and flexibility in information infrastructure. Just like other large technical systems, the geographically dispersed yet highly interconnected II becomes increasingly resistant to change. Still, II design must anticipate and prepare for changes, even substantial ones, if infrastructure is to survive. An II contains a huge number of components that alternate between standardization and change throughout their lifetimes. These components are interdependent: when one is changed, others have to remain stable, and vice versa. The (...)
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  • The social construction of technological stasis: The stagnating data structure in OpenStreetMap.Matthias Plennert - 2018 - Big Data and Society 5 (2).
    The article aims for examining the ‘technological stasis’ of the data structure in OpenStreetMap – the successful global collaborative geodata project devoted to ‘create and distribute free geographic data for the world’. Digital structures are strongly influenced by continuing stagnation. This technological stasis – the lack of change in technology – influences data in various ways, as demonstrated by the intensive discussion of the issue by computer scientists and software engineers. However, existing research describing stagnating software is often technic centred (...)
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  • Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding It Empty: Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology.Langdon Winner - 1993 - Science, Technology and Human Values 18 (3):362-378.
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  • Tacit Networks, Heterogeneous Engineers, and Embodied Technology.Nora Levold & Knut H. Sorensen - 1992 - Science, Technology and Human Values 17 (1):13-35.
    Social studies of science and technology are dominated by action and macro approaches. This has led to a neglect of institutions and institutional arrangements at the meso level, which are important, in particular to the student of technology. The transfer of concepts and methods from social studies of science to technology studies has conserved this lack of concern with the meso level. This article suggests a more critical evaluation of this transfer, along with a review of the now popular assumption (...)
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  • The very idea of social epistemology: What prospects for a truly radical 'radically naturalized epistemology'?Steve Woolgar - 1991 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 34 (3-4):377 – 389.
    Steve Fuller's social epistemology aims to integrate the philosophy of science and sociology of science, and to enhance the ability of these disciplines to contribute to science policy. While applauding the re?vitalizing energy of the enterprise, a sociological perspective requires attention to four key aspects of the programme. First, the character of interdisciplinarity requires careful specification, lest the critical dynamic of social studies of science be compromised by calls to pluralism. Second, social epistemology can and should transcend the traditional epistemological (...)
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  • Audiences, Narratives, and Human Values in Social Studies of Technology.Rob Kling - 1992 - Science, Technology and Human Values 17 (3):349-365.
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  • Unfaithful offspring? Technologies and their trajectories.Sungook Hong - 1998 - Perspectives on Science 6 (3):259-287.
    : Several recent studies in science and technology studies (STS), and in the history of science and technology, have highlighted the stochastic and uncontrollable nature of technological trajectory. In this paper I will examine three technologies--the Triode, the numerically controlled (NC) machine tool, and the Internet--each of which reflects a different aspect of technological uncertainty. I will argue that the Triode's seemingly unpredictable evolution is partly caused by limitations in our present historical knowledge about it. The NC machine's mysteriously unpredictable (...)
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  • Anti Anticonstructivism or Laying the Fears of a Langdon Winner to Rest.Mark Elam - 1994 - Science, Technology and Human Values 19 (1):101-106.
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