We are used to considering engineering ethics largely a critical enterprise. By pointing out ethical issues and by raising concerns about a technology, ethicists usually criticise rather than promote the technology in question. Of course, from a utilitarianist perspective, an ethicist might come to the conclusion that a certain technology is better than another one or than doing without. However, such conclusions are rare in philosophy and would not be considered uncritical promotion. In this essay I argue that engineering ethics, (...) almost unavoidably, turns into the promotion and popularisation of a technology if that technology does not exist yet but is considered to be emerging in the near future. In other words, ethics of emerging technologies is not only prone to but almost destined to play a propaganda role in the public sphere. As engineering ethics moves from established to emerging technologies ethicists need to be aware that they become useful instruments in the struggle for public attention and funding. (shrink)

The manipulation of materials, and to some extent also their systematic classification, form an integral part of the skills and culture of all societies. Yet it took long for proper sciences to develop out of many processing procedures, tapping the accumulated knowledge about specific material characteristics. In the late 20th century an overarching science of workable materials emerged: materials science. This concept and term originated from major boosts in materials research during WWII and the Cold War, first financed by the (...) U.S. Department of Defense and the Advanced Research Project Agency. The COSMAT-Report from 1974, written by the American Presidential Science Advisory Committee’s „Committee on the Survey of Materials Science and Engineering" four years after its inception, and subsequent reports heralded in the second institutionalization phase of materials science in the USA and with some delay also elsewhere. As the field continued to expand, the demand grew from within in the late 1990s for disciplinary status. This article sorts these claims from the various camps and sets them in the context of unfolding institutional change. The developments within the German-speaking realm, thus far unduly neglected in these debates, are added. I close with a systematic discussion of eight indicator arguments for or against a convergence of this complex field of research into a single coherent discipline. Against Bensaude-Vincent’s thesis that materials science still is an “aggregation of fragments of knowledge", I argue that by 2010 materials science did indeed achieve disciplinary status in a historically rare and enduring process of discipline formation through “emergence by integration" rather than by differentiation. (shrink)

This chapter combines rhetorical with conceptual analysis to argue that the concept of convergence of technologies is a teleological concept that does not describe or predict any recent past, present, or future development. Instead it always expresses or attributes political goals of how future technology should be developed. The concept was already fully developed as a flexible rhetorical tool by US science administrators to create nanotechnology (as nano-convergence), before it was broadened to invent the convergence of nano-, bio-, info-, and (...) cogno-research (NBIC-convergence). Analyzing the use of “convergence” in various US reports, such as in convergence did, does, can, will likely, will necessarily, should, and ought to happen, sheds new light on how science policy avoids public debates about goals and values in deliberating the future, which poses new challenges to STS. (shrink)

Based on bibliometric methods, this paper describes the global institutionalization of nanotechnology research from the mid-1980s to 2006. Owing to an extremely strong dynamics, the institutionalization of nanotechnology is likely to surpass those of major disciplines in only a few years. A breakdown of the relative institutionalizations strengths by the main geographical regions, countries, research sectors, disciplines, and institutional types provides a very diverse picture over the time period because of different national science policies. The results allow a critical assessment (...) of the different science policies based on the relative institutionalizations strengths as well as the conclusion that the institutionalization process has run out of control of individual governments who once induced the development. (shrink)

Man ist sie fast schon leid, die Rede vom „Chaos“, mit der wissenschaftspublizistisch versierte Forscher bemüht sind, sich ihren Anteil am hart umkämpften Markt der Forschungsmittel und -reputation zu sichern. Die inflationäre Verkündigung von „wissenschaftlichen Revolutionen“, „Paradigmenwechseln“ und „postmoderner Wissenschaft“ mag manchem Philosophen zwar insgeheim noch schmeicheln wegen der Gebrauchs- und Marktfähigkeit - und Autorität - philosophischer Termini. So recht zu glauben sind solche Botschaften jedoch selten. Aber welcher Philosoph wollte sich da ein sachgerechtes und kritisches Urteil erlauben, ob die (...) Inanspruchnahme philosophischer Begriffe an diversen aktuellen Forschungsfronten überhaupt angemesen ist? Wer könnte es andererseits besser, als jemand, der wie Theodor Leiber sowohl in Physik als auch in Philosophie promoviert ist und dessen überarbeitete Philosophiedisseration hier zur Diskussion steht? (shrink)