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Concept
Technoscience
Summary
In common usage, technoscience refers to the entire long-standing global human activity of technology combined with the relatively recent scientific method that occurred primarily in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries. Technoscience is the study of how humans interact with technology using the scientific method.
Technoscience thus comprises the history of human application of technology and modern scientific methods, ranging from the early development of basic technologies for hunting, agriculture, or husbandry (e.g. the well, the bow, the plow, the harness) and all the way through atomic applications, biotechnology, robotics, and computer sciences. This more common and comprehensive usage of the term technoscience can be found in general textbooks and lectures concerning the history of science.
The relationship with the history of science is important in this subject and also underestimated, for example, by more modern sociologists of science. Instead, it is worth emphasising the links that exist between books on the history of science and technology and the study of the relationship between science and technology within a framework of social developments. We must always consider the generational leap between historical periods and scientific discoveries, the construction of machines, the creation of tools in relation to the technological changes that occurs in very specific situations ( Cfr. Guglielmo Rinzivillo, Raccontare la tecnoscienza. Storia di macchine, strumenti, idee per fare funzionare il mondo, Roma, Edizioni Nuova Cultura, 2020, p.7, ; ISSN 2284-0567).
An alternate, more narrow usage occurs in some philosophic science and technology studies. In this usage, technoscience refers specifically to the technological and social context of science. Technoscience recognises that scientific knowledge is not only socially coded and historically situated but sustained and made durable by material (non-human) networks.
Official source
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