From the Scientific to the Techno-Scientific Mind
A Philosophy of No for the Third Environment
Keywords:
scientific mind, techno-science, epistemological obstacle, vigilance, third environmentAbstract
This article reconstructs Bachelard’s notion of the formation of the scientific mind under techno-scientific conditions. It asks whether epistemological obstacles and vigilance are sufficient to understand practices in which decisive cognitive operations are delegated to simulations, algorithms, and institutional infrastructures. Through a conceptual reconstruction and an immanent critique of Bachelard, contrasted with Echeverría’s praxiological account of technoscience and insights from STS, it identifies three functional shifts: the displacement of obstacles from representations to devices, the opacity of computational chains, and the institutional distribution of responsibility. On this basis, the techno-scientific mind is proposed as a situated and collective normative disposition, together with a heuristic typology of four obstacles: operational opacity, synthetic evidence, temporal compression, and distributed responsibility. Its specific contribution to STS is to connect socio-material description with explicit criteria for formation and vigilance without restoring an autonomous subject or a universal rationality. The article concludes by deriving practices of traceability, contrast, deceleration, and co-responsibility, and by stating the proposal’s limitations and paths for empirical inquiry.
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