What Do Scientists Do?: Components of Scientific Work

Alexander Styhre
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Alexander Styhre: Chalmers University of Technology

Chapter 3 in Science-Based Innovation, 2008, pp 53-93 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The perhaps most spectacular achievement of modernity is technoscience, the totality of the heterogeneous social, material and symbolic resources engaged in the exploration of natural, social or cultural systems. The concept of technoscience is a complex one, first coined by Jean-François Lyotard (1984) and later used by actor-network theorists like Bruno Latour to grasp the technological constitution of contemporary science. Today, scientific work in disciplines such as physics, biology and chemistry is inconceivable without modern technology. Hence, the neologism technoscience. Even though technoscience is one of the most complicated and complex human endeavours, highly structured around standard operating procedures, regimes of control and evaluation, scientific ideologies, and the influence of advanced technology, technoscience remains what is primarily a standardized methodology or approach to the investigation of (in our case) natural (and more specifically, biological systems) systems. Schopenhauer (1995: 101) declares: “What distinguishes science from ordinary knowledge is merely the form, the systematic, the facilitation of knowledge by the inclusion of all particulars in the universal (by means of the subordination of concepts) and the completeness of knowledge gained this way”.

Keywords: Venture Capital; Modern Science; Conceptual Scheme; Epistemic Object; Narrative Skill (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-58251-4_3

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DOI: 10.1057/9780230582514_3

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