Epistemology of Nanotechnology

Epistemology and Technology

Science and Technology are standardly judged paradig-matically methodical ways for accessing truth, and are thus considered prime vehicles of assured and elevated claims to genuine knowledge of the physical world. What constitutes knowledge, its scope, range of objects, limits, sources and conditions of justification, composes traditionally the province of Epistemology, the branch of philosophy that studies belief formation that is to count as knowledge (from the Greek noun epistémé, meaning knowledge and the verb epistamai, meaning to know). Epistemology customarily ranges over claims to knowledge both in the ordinary sense of the word, whereby what is analyzed is the type of knowing gained in our everyday contact with the world outside us or with internal states of feeling, and as epistemology of a certain discipline, for example, mathematics, as well as in the case of claims to knowledge advanced in a canonical manner aiming at something beyond our everyday dealings with the familiar world of ordinary objects of perceptual experience, that is, a physical reality supposedly beyond the reach of our senses. The latter endeavor constitutes science proper together with, although allegedly historically and conceptually distinct, technology, too.

The issue of the intricate relation between science and technology, both in terms of actual history and conceptual definition, demarcating the role of each as knowledge vehicles and showing their exact yet constantly changing contours and their (inter)relationship, is itself a controversial issue that advanced technologies have put into relief. The thesis that there was never really a thorough separation between science and technique is in the ascendant. Philosophical questioning focused on modern technologies like nanotechnology—a branch such as the philosophy of technology increasingly separated and growing in its own right—has placed erstwhile simplistic distinctions between so-called “pure science” versus “applied science” as epistemically unrelated compartments of theoretical knowledge versus practical knowledge, on the shelf of mistaken and outdated notions.

This has been aided by the social studies of science and technology (STS), a recent disciplinary development, which has revealed more sophisticated interrelationships between contemporary science and state-of-the-art technologies. It further showed that, epistemologically, the simplistic assumption of self-sufficient compartments of knowledge is, even in most cases of the past, historically misconceived or naive. In addition, nonpositivistic schools of thought stress the thesis that the technology prominent in a certain age colors our ideas of the corresponding type of scientific knowledge and how we conceive physical nature. This position found expression in recent views about nanotechnology construed as uniquely placed in offering impeccable credentials to a view of physical nature radically “technologized,” that is, as “artificializing or instru-mentalizing nature.”

This state of affairs, in which epistemological probing into scientific-cum-technological knowledge gets enriched by new philosophical subbranches, novel currents or disciplines meticulously searching for the [Page 211]idiolectic profile of technologized science as well as by positing alternative, more sophisticated, multi- and interdisciplinary questions, is to a certain extent the beneficial effect of nanotechnology's distinctive character. Thanks to philosophical questioning inspired by epistemic and societal concerns about nanotechnology, the simplistic distinction driving a wedge between “theoretical reason” and “practical reason” is shown to bear no relation any longer to modern science-cum-technology. In fact the term technology has over the past decades shaded into that of “technoscience,” signaling the abolition of the old-fashioned distinction. In this way, nanotechnology plays an important role in developing new directions in epistemology.

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