A response to Rueylin Chen, ‘The STS challenge to PS in Taiwan’, by Francesca Bray


 

 

 
 

 

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A response to "The STS challenge to philosophy of science in
Taiwan"

Citation for published version:
Bray, F 2011, 'A response to "The STS challenge to philosophy of science in Taiwan"', East Asian Science,
Technology and Society: An International Journal, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 53-55.
https://doi.org/10.1215/18752160-1256986

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10.1215/18752160-1256986

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A response to Rueylin Chen, ‘The STS challenge to PS in Taiwan’, by Francesca Bray. 

 

Lamenting the absence of fruitful dialogue between philosophers of science and STS 

scholars in Taiwan, Rueylin Chen argues that each field can and should help the other to 

improve. In particular, if I have understood Chen’s arguments correctly, philosophers of 

science could learn from STS to pay closer attention to the social aspects of scientific 

activity, to social understandings of what science is, and to the political or ethical 

implications of scientific practice in a modern technoscientific society like Taiwan. STS, 

meanwhile, could benefit both reflexively and methodologically from the philosophy of 

science, by paying more rigorous analytical attention to its own theoretical lineages, 

internal contradictions and truth claims, by attending more closely to the validity of the 

scientific arguments at the core of most STS case-studies, and by developing its capacity 

as a discipline to proceed from the level of specific case-study to generalisation.  

 

Chen’s arguments for what STS has to gain from a dialogue with the philosophy of 

science are based on the proposition that STS is, fundamentally, a science, albeit a social 

science. Greater philosophical rigour, reflexive and interpretive, would thus contribute 

positively to its ‘normal development’. Certainly any scholarly field benefits from a 

rigorous critical attention to its epistemological practices; it would be hard to disagree 

with Chen on that point. But is STS in fact construed by its practitioners as a ‘science’, 

and what might the tradition of Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy which Chen identifies 

as the forte of Taiwanese philosophy of science have to contribute to it? 

 

In my opinion one can make a strong case that STS (like SSK before it) is a project rather 

than a discipline or a science, and freely recognised as such by its practitioners. It is a 

shared goal, namely the unpacking and challenging of technocratic authority, that gives 

coherence to the field of STS, rather than any aspirations to a unified theory, or any 

agreed bounding or framing of the object of analysis. STS is essentially political, a 

spectrum of exercises in demystification ranging from the gendering of electric shavers to 

the transnational governance of nuclear power to claims about the separation of the social 

and the natural. All these exercises address at different levels how power in contemporary 

society is accrued and materialised through representations (science) and modifications 

(technology) of the ‘natural world’. Typically, STS research looks at complex 

technoscientific issues where many different interests are at stake, and where a range of 

competing scientific or technical justifications are available for mobilisation by different 

stakeholders. Where alternative scientific truth-claims, often equally valid, are mobilised 

by politically opposed groups (as for instance in the arguments for or against approving 

genetically-modified corn), it is as likely to be rhetorical skill, or the number of human 

and non-human allies one has enrolled, or how much it rained in Russia last summer, that 

decides the outcome as any formal logic. Since STS views scientific research as 

invariably shaped by interest, it is concerned in part with the logic of its design and the 

accuracy or its results, but equally, or perhaps even more, with whose agendas (explicitly 

or implicitly) the research is designed to promote.  

 

Most STS research, furthermore, has an activist dimension, aiming not simply to 

demystify technocratic truth-claims but to develop platforms for more inclusive, 



democratic decision-making or design. In other words, it is both rooted in and focused 

upon ideology and values. This is one reason why I suggested to Rueylin Chen at the 

conclusion of the 2009 EASTS conference panel on Philosophy of Science and STS in 

East Asia that philosophers of technology might prove better interlocutors of STS 

scholars than philosophers of science, or more specifically, than analytical philosophers 

of science.  

 

It is notable, if one traces trends in the philosophy of technology over the last twenty or 

thirty years, that a number of leading senior figures in the field began as analytical 

philosophers focusing on the dynamics of technological thought and practice, but then 

felt compelled to broaden their approach. As Friedrich Rapp noted in 1995: 

 

I myself have moved from the Analytical Philosophy of Technology (1978), which was 

written with a view to engineering and technological innovations, to a more traditional 

philosophical interpretation of technology. My colleague Günter Ropohl criticizes this 

shift as treason against the realist turn. … In my recent book, Die Dynamik der 

modernen Welt (1994), I argue that today the philosophy of technology must above all 

deal with two problems. First, it must explain the dynamics of technological change, 

thus indicating ways in which we might interfere in "technological determinism." 

Without an understanding of the origins of technological change, we can hardly expect 

our ethical postulates to have any practical application. Second, the philosophical 

interpretation of technology must draw on and strive to be integrated into the 

philosophical tradition. … These approaches, then, should be supplemented by a 

metaphysical interpretation, be it in terms of the will to power, the history of being, or 

technology as the myth (and fate) of our time.
1
 

 

This turn represents not a retreat to Heideggerian nostalgia, but the recognition that we 

inhabit technological cultures in which the resistance to dissociation of complex 

sociotechnical systems, from the CERN Hadron Collider to a can of tomatoes, inevitably 

intertwines hard science, politics, symbolism and material functionality. None of these 

dimensions can be analytically isolated. The interdisciplinary imperative is so strong that 

the boundary between ‘philosopher of technology’ or ‘philosopher of technology studies’ 

and ‘STS practitioner’ is often impossible to draw.  Of the twenty-three people 

interviewed as leading philosophers of technology in Philosophy of Technology: 5 

Questions (Olsen & Selinger 2007), at least half (including Harry Collins, Joan Fujimura, 

Bruno Latour, Susan Leigh Star and Lucy Suchman) will be equally familiar to us as 

prominent figures in empirical STS research. 

 

If one examines the list of contributions to the most recent publications on philosophy of 

technology, whether journals like Techne or works like Olsen, Pedersen & Hendricks’ 

Companion to the Philosophy of Technology, we see that it is clearly a field in 

movement, hesitant to claim an exclusive territory (indeed often the practitioners prefer 

                                                 
1
 Rapp 1995. Altogether three of the five philosophers of technology who contributed to 

this symposium began as analytical philosophers but went on to broaden their perspective 

to include ethical and ontological considerations. 



to speak of ‘philosophy and technology’ rather than ‘philosophy of technology’), eager to 

explore how local contexts generate distinctive research questions and what this might 

imply for an interrogation of presuppositions within the field. So what does the 

philosopher see as specific to biotechnology, computing, agriculture or engineering and 

what does she see as more generally applicable to ‘technology’? What schools of 

philosophy of technology, or of technoscience, have arisen in Germany, Scandinavia, the 

Netherlands, or Spain and the Spanish-speaking world, and why (Durbin 2006; Mitcham 

& Bengoetxea 2006)? The attention of philosophers of technology to these particularities, 

institutional and regional, seems to offer particularly fertile ground for dialogue with STS 

scholars in Taiwan, whether they be philosophers or researchers in any other discipline. 

 

I do not wish for a moment to suggest that the philosophy of science has nothing to offer 

STS, whether in Taiwan, Japan, the Netherlands or the Philippines. But I should myself 

instinctively turn to other schools of philosophy of science than the Anglo-Saxon 

analytical tradition for inspiration, for instance Canguilhem, Foucault, Serres, Prigogine 

or Atlan in France and Belgium, or Habermas in Germany. Somehow their breadth of 

vision and their concern with how societies deploy symbolic, social and material 

resources in the pursuit of power seem more commensurate with the intrinsically 

emancipatory goals of STS scholarship, and with the complexity of the issues and 

systems that STS addresses.  

 

 

References cited 

 

Durbin, Paul (ed) (2006) Philosophy of Technology: In Search of Discourse Synthesis, 

special issue of Techne: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 10.2 (Winter 

2006). 

Mitcham, Carl and Juan Buatista Bengoetxea (2006) ‘Culture and technology in Spain, 

from philosophical analysis to STS’, Technology & Culture 47 (July 2006): 607-

22. 

Olsen, Jan-Kyrre Berg and Evan Selinger (eds) (2007) Philosophy of Technology: 5 

Questions. Copenhagen: Automatic Press / VIP. 

Olsen, Jan-Kyrre Berg, Stig Andur Pedersen and Vincent F. Hendricks (eds) (2009) A 

Companion to the Philosophy of Technology. London: WileyBlackwell. 

Rapp, Friedrich (1995) ‘Philosophy of technology after twenty years: a German 

perspective’, in Paul T. Durbin (ed), Philosophy of Technology after Twenty 

Years, special issue of Techne: Research in Philosophy and Technology, Fall 

1995, issues 1-2; consulted online at 

http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SPT/v1n1n2/ , 22 February 2010. 

 

 

 

http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SPT/v1n1n2/