When does the co-evolution of technology and science overturn into technoscience?

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

The Retroductive Cycle: The Research Process in Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis

In this chapter we suggest that an appeal to retroductive reasoning as a form of explanation distinct from induction and deduction can help frame the strategic and methodological issues of any research that takes seriously an anti-essentialist ontology rooted in poststructuralist discourse theory. Anti-essentialism captures the view that societies and social agents – indeed, history itself – do not contain essences – invariable and fixed properties of an object - that can be rationally extracted and used to characterize social phenomena. At the same time, although prominent in debates over how best to understand the production of theories and hypotheses in the natural sciences, we also argue that the concept of retroduction is relevant to a set of debates in the philosophy of social science. More precisely, it offers theoretical resources to develop a post-positivist picture of the study of social and political phenomena, thus furnishing important elements of a feasible and critical research strategy. We draw on arguments associated with a poststructuralist discourse-theoretical approach to social and political research to justify adopting the idea of a retroductive ‘cycle’. A retroductive understanding of the relationship between key elements of the social science research process offers us a useful way to think about research strategy and methodology from the point of view of post-positivism, including approaches informed by poststructuralist discourse theor

Data Revolutions in Sociology

Following the French Revolution, society becomes the leading dimension of existence, more prominent than the state and government. According to the “hygienic party”, who promoted health and education, statistics can contribute to an understanding not only of the main causes of disease and death, but also of crime and unrest; scientific ground can be provided for social policy. All kinds of social phenomena are classified, measured, and made public, and large-scale statistical recurrences are identified. In the “avalanche of numbers” published, the first sociologists recognized mass regularities in order to identify laws of human behaviour. Nowadays, the availability of Big Data paves the way to new epistemological challenges. Will the new data revolution lead to a new paradigm in Sociology