Volume 39, Issue 1, 2014
Ilya Kasavin
Pages 5-17
STS: Anticipatory Naturalization or Catching up Modernization?
Science and Technology Studies (STS) is one of the world’s leading trends in philosophical and interdisciplinary research that reveals the obvious parallels with the Russian tradition of the philosophy of science and the science of science. Analysis of this subject area shows that STS faces today at least two challenges: to avoid theoretical stagnation and to make a practical contribution to the relationship between science and society. The first one is principally solvable through interdisciplinary collaboration between philosophy and other disciplines studying science. The second challenge needs to maintain a balance between the cultural autonomy of scientific research, on the one hand, and the actual existence of science as a social institution, on the other. Both of these tasks are already inherently imply an emphasis on philosophical point of view and some decrease of technocratism characteristic to STS. The understanding of empirical existence of science has to be put in dependence on the initial task of philosophical reflection: to adjust the diversity of reality to the cultural and historical diversity of the mind.