Science and Technology in the Public sphere from the philosophical and political perspectives

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Our focus point is to analyze a subtle and complicated relation between techno-science as a cognitive and material power, and as a political power. The former is characterized as providing cognitive "justification" within scientific communities, and the latter is as providing political "legitimacy". This relation long ignored and still being ignored, produces so many failures and controversies about techno-science issues such as BSE, GMOs, and nuclear power plants. The result of analysis was published in KOBAYASHI (2002). "Further, we tackled the problem of how to govern techno-science in advanced countries. The first step was to explicate the function of cognitive "justification". We could show that cognitive "justification" in scientific communities is understood as an expression of scientific rationality, but this rationality is applicable just within these communities. On the other hand, when a knowledge claim justified within a scientific community is brought to the social decisio … More n making as a legitimized knowledge, the difference of contexts in which these knowledge claims are embedded. This analysis was showed in FUJIGAKI (2003). The second step was to explore the possibility that experts and general public notice the difference of context and move toward to construct a common context each other. We direct our attention to participatory technology assessments, because these assessments showed a new style of deliberative discussion by many kinds of stakeholders including experts, policy makers, NPOs, and general public. The review of these assessments and theoretical analysis of a concrete example, that is, the consensus conference on GMOs held in 2000 in Japan was published in KOBAYASHI (2004).In 2004, we organized a workshop to make together examples of participatory technology assessments in Japan, to share their experience and to explore the future tasks. At the same time, we tried to analyze "Monju trial" which is on the safety of a Fast Breeder Reactor. In this analysis we could show that techno-science issues in the present days are quite hard for the legal system to deal with, because the court has no rational criteria for judging confrontation between scientific experts which is usual in this type of trials. Less