Diálogo para el avance científico y tecnológico a la nanoescala

Abstract

Current way in which disciplines acquire prestige depends on their utility in real world (their practical application). This has produced, among other issues, hierarchic epistemic systems that generate, at least, a relative exclusion of world visions. Therefore, such marginalization tends to be an aspect that characterizes current way of innovating and commercializing goods and services (or the mechanism in which those technological advances are socialized). Even if there has been important contributions on the study and analysis of the logic, stimulus, uncertainty and societal, ethical and environmental implications of scientific and technological development, the exclusion of certain visions and values is a feature still anchored within the decision making process, at the political and other levels. Considering the above, it is proposed the need of promoting and reinventing (social) dialogue as key instrument for confronting uncertainty and the increasing technoscientific complexity, but also for opening more robust interdisciplinary paths for strengthening the exercise of evaluating technoscience’s purposes. As science and technology advances and becomes more complex —as it happens in the case of converging technologies at the nanoscale—, all within a context in which social basic needs are still unsolved for most of world population, we conclude that it is necessary to bet on a social and responsible management of science and technology based on a wide and genuine social dialogue and consensus.