Abstract
The modern scientific and industrial revolutions have provided humanity with a hitherto unknown capacity to understand and transform the world.
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Notes
- 1.
Upstream policy rhetoric on competitiveness and the strategic value of innovation is reproduced for instance by the European Special Interest Group (SIG) on Cooperative Robotics ’s white paper, where SIG’s constitution and role are justified in terms of meeting “the tremendously increased interest in cooperative robots of different types for many emerging applications, and to foster Europe’s position as leader in the field” (Saffiotti and Lima 2008, p. 4).
- 2.
There is probably no episode that better illustrates the destructive capacity of science-based technical artifacts than the dropping of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 during the final stages of World War II. In total, more than 300,000 people (most of them civilians) were killed and tens of thousands more were injured as a consequence of the atomic bombings (Cheek 2005).
- 3.
The influence of non-epistemological values on scientific activity has been typically theorized as being limited to factors that are external to the core scientific activity, such as the methodological limits (e.g., ethical limits in experimentation) or the societal and environmental consequences of research (e.g., Rescher 1999, pp. 151–167).
- 4.
EC, CORDIS (2001) Byrne calls for more realistic approach to GMO risk (11/27/2001). http://cordis.europa.eu/news/rcn/17678_en.html (Accessed 29 Nov 2014).
- 5.
This approach has been termed “responsible research and innovation ” (RRI ) (EC 2014b, p. 4).
- 6.
Arguably, those institutional demands for democratizing innovation processes have also been influenced by descriptive and normative scholarly theories such as “post-normal science ” (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993), “mode 2 knowledge production ” (Gibbons et al. 1994), “constructive technology assessment (CTA)” (Schot and Rip 1997), “real-time technology assessment ” (Guston and Sarewitz 2002), or “user innovation ” (von Hippel 2005).
- 7.
It might be noted, though, that the US, for instance, has also promoted responsible R&D —e.g., US National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) claims “responsible development” of nanotechnology through “engagement with universities, industry, government agencies […], nongovernmental organizations, and other communities” (NSTC 2014, p. 6)—without having suffered such a recent fierce controversy—even if it also cannot be ignored that the country has been the scene of harsh public debate concerning other technologies such as nuclear power (mostly in the 1970s and 1980s) (Nelkin 1994) or the more recent fracking technique (Boudet et al. 2014). In any case, it seems prudent to complement instrumental explanations with normative and substantive considerations (both in the EU and the US), which means that there is some belief that more open and reflexive (i.e., more responsible) research is inherently desirable, and that it leads to better decisions and outcomes, respectively (Stirling 2008).
- 8.
That is why inter- or transdisciplinary research like research on sustainability is not fully recognized as a research “discipline.” As already said, methods of evaluation are usually focused on “classical” performance criteria such as the number of published articles in highly ranked journals, but the objectives of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research are more related to the transformative character of problem-solving strategies in public contexts (Grunwald and Schmidt 2005).
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Acknowledgments
Hannot Rodríguez’s contribution is based on research supported by a personal fellowship from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and conducted at the Institute of Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS). It is also based on research supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under grants FFI2011-24414 and FFI2012-33550, the Basque Government’s Department of Education, Language Policy and Culture under grant IT644-13, and the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU under grant EHUA15/13.
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Krings, BJ., Rodríguez, H., Schleisiek, A. (2016). Introduction: Possibilities and Limits of Science-Based Boundary Transgressions. In: Krings, BJ., Rodríguez, H., Schleisiek, A. (eds) Scientific Knowledge and the Transgression of Boundaries. Technikzukünfte, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft / Futures of Technology, Science and Society. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-14449-4_1
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