The article focuses on the crucial changes that science as an established social institution and an epistemological enterprise is undergoing, the key one is the loss of its monopoly on the production of socially useful knowledge and gradual transformation into something new, which, due to institutional and cultural reasons, we continue to call ‘science’. We suppose that the most appropriate conceptualization of the new phenomenon, which is replacing science as an institution, is “technoscience”, since the technical component in scientific practices (...) has now taken a dominant position and technology production has become more important than fundamental knowledge. Technoscience has at least two sources: 1) capitalization of scientific activity that has led to classical science has been replaced with technoscience developing on first-priority funded applied research; 2) theorization and autonomy of the techno sphere, which have resulted in instrumentalization of all levels of knowledge production as well as in technological / symbolic construction of reality and tangled ontology of technoscientific objects. We discuss both of these sources, with particular attention being paid to such trends as epistemic strategies transformation, modified reality, social sciences and humanities conformation to technoscience norms, and knowledge bearers egalitarianization. A crucial transformation of both science itself and its position in society breaks inevitably a demarcation line that separates scientific knowledge from other types of knowledge while promotes the replacement of scientific theory with discourses. Apparently, in “technoscience” an ethos of its own is being formed, where interaction with the “external environment” (with other social spheres) is crucial. In this context, scientific activity is becoming more and more transepistemic, transinstitutional practice, and accordingly ceases to be guided by the classical scientific ethos determined by the goals and objectives of academic community itself. (shrink)

The main claim of the study is that technocratic public administration based on knowledge as a key element of power, significantly affects the idea of what is objective and what is objectivity. I explore how scientific objectivity as part of a scientific ethos has been evolving on the example of economic knowledge. A key institutional feature of economic knowledge is that it includes in fact two relatively autonomous epistemic cultures: academic one, connected to the production of knowledge in academia and (...) expert-administrative one developing in public and corporate governance systems. The peculiarity of knowledge demanded and functioning in public administration is instrumentality (a possibility to be transformed into technology) and an exeptional focus on quantification. As a result ‘governing by number’ becomes a key social technology and at the same time numbers seem to embody objectivity. I show that economic knowledge in public administration involves an inevitable and deepening ontological gap with ‘objective reality’. The state needs not true but effective knowledge: the task of administrating does not presuppose a realistic representation of the administrated object, but rather seeks to simplify it, to plan it, or even to construct. Thus, unlike scientific knowledge, the objectivity of knowledge in administrative practices has almost nothing to do with the object (in sense of truthfulness, representation). Meanwhile, ongoing need for academic economic knowledge to be used into the state administration and its further development in a fundamentally alien sphere leads to a significant deformation of scientific ethos, which is a crucial regulatory element in the scientific knowledge production. Erosion affects both aspects of objectivity as an ontological principle and as an ‘epistemic virtue’. Against this background, objectivity as an ‘epistemic virtue’ has been transformed into the ‘technique of distancing’ and the principle of technical impersonality, which imply eventually the replacement of the ‘knowledge self’ by a technical system. (shrink)

This paper summarizes the discussion on technoscience and its key question whether the phenomenon indicated by this term means a radical transformation of science and its replacement with some new social objectification. Based on the remarks of the discussion participants, we raise questions on mathematical rationality contribution in technoscience development, technical (magical) domination on nature (environment) and man as the leitmotif of the New European culture and the connection of techno-science, financial capital and liberal capitalism.