Science and Technology Controversy: A Rationale for Inquiry

Controversy study is still in its nascent stage, even while there are no shortages of engaged, extended argumentation. Election seasons are rife with episodic disagreements that erupt across news cycles, each a ripple in a larger ideological exchange. In democratic politics, controversy plays a crucial role in the peaceful transference of power. Sometimes its configurations change and become much more deadly, as domestic disputes change, and rush outwards with international consequences. Thus, with the scope of vast weather systems and disturbances, macro-disputes swirl and eddy across the globe. As important as electoral debates and politics may be, the controversies of science and technology supercede localizing disagreements by bringing into contention the vulnerabilities of culture to its own tenuous interface with the natural world and by opening up new horizons of conceptual and material change. On the negative side, science and technology controversies generally alert society and its institutions to the loss of degrees of freedom in maintaining a sustainable culture. On the positive side, they open up promises of overcoming nature's limits or offsetting technology's bi-products in the short and long term. Since science cannot escape its openness to probabilities and since technologies are inherently risky, contemporary controversies gather into themselves tensions between approach and avoidance, fear and hope, risk and security. Indeed, as the projects of modernity multiply and spread over space and time, the domain of controversy itself widens, and with these epistemic, cultural, social, technical and political phenomena the practices of communicative reasoning are ever more greatly challenged. "Today, there is no doubt that controversies about scientific and science-related questions are becoming increasingly frequent and consequential upon policymaking as well as general public consciousness," writes Thomas Brante, who concludes that "the sheer quantity of science-based controversies in modern society makes them interesting phenomena per se" (188). In fact, the area of science and technology is so very rich in controversy that one is tempted to resist Gerald Markle and James Petersen, Ronald Gier and others who establish protocols and modes of analysis. Instead, let us not theorize the spaces of contention, but leave the field of controversy study open, and not a little unorganized-without decisive categories, unreduced to predictive processes (initiation, development, resolution, and revision), and free from genre constraints. It indeed may be the case that each science/ technology controversy is itself a singularity, drawing into the vortex of disagreement procedural methods, substantive claims, intersubjectively shared assumptions, personal and political risk configurations, legal authorizations, social presumptions, and institutional prerogatives. Our studies should resist the reduction of controversy to an epiphenomenon, an intrusion of ethnocentrism, a problem with identifiable patterns and predictable strategies of advocacy, with each instance awaiting proper resolution; rather let us hold that controversies persist as an ineradicable feature of all exchange. If all controversies are singularities, then what can be learned from a given controversy about aspects of the tenuous hold of the human projects of communication itself, in this case from inquiry into the "natural" world? The generative power of science and technology controversies may be appraised as a contest between modernity and traditional culture. The conflicts between community and society, between lifeworld and systems-world, engender over and over again the story of the fall from enthrallment to disenchantment. For the nineteenth century, for instance, the guarantee of progress allowed society to write off the stunning waste created by industrialization as a step toward progress; yet, in the efficient slaughter of the first world war and the technologically abetted savagery of the second, the equation between the self-correcting prospects of scientized excess and the price of progress in war-making threw the promise into disrepute. …