EDITORIAL Probing technoscience

Ó The Author(s) 2011. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com In the last three decades, the attention of sociologists, historians and philosophers of science was more and more attracted by the concept ‘‘technoscience.’ ’ It emphasizes an entanglement of science and technology and it was mainly raised to distinguish a ‘‘new’ ’ type of scientific activities from ‘‘traditional’ ’ ones with a different epistemic interest producing different objects with a different ontological status. There is some agreement that it was the Belgian philosopher Hottois (1984) who introduced the term ‘‘technoscience.’ ’ He used it to refer to a type of science that is done in a technological milieu and that is technology-driven. About a decade later, the philosopher and anthropologist of science, Latour, deployed the term in his seminal work on ‘‘science in action’ ’ (Latour 1987) to characterize the entangling and disentangling of practices, people, objects and methodologies in scientific activities. The cultural theorist Haraway made technoscience one of her central concepts (e.g. Haraway 1990, 1997), albeit again taking a different direction. In her analysis of the relationship between nature, technology and culture within a technoscience era, she emphasizes the hybrid