It should not be altogether surprising, David began, that the coach of the debate team is interested in science studies. After all, debate topics have moved from narrower confines of politics to such questions as the merits and risks of ocean-development or information-technology. David's interests go beyond the concerns of debating, however, in that he studies how scientific claims 'play out' in public life. For example, he is interested in the discourse on risk: what is the relationship between public outrage and worry to the probability and severity of damage from some chemical, technology, or behavior? He finds this relation to be rather tenuous -- if outrage and worry cannot be explained in terms of 'objective' risk, the explanation rests perhaps with the ways in which risk-claims are communicated to the audience of consumers and citizens (all this is the subject of David's current book-project on Risk Communication). And if the success of a type of nanotechnology cannot be explained in terms of its productivity, the explanation may rest again with the ways in which certain gurus take their claims to their audience.
There is nanotechnology which is legitimate and productive: it is devoted to the construction of very small things (you may have heard of the steam-engine which fits into a period-sign). Another kind of nanotechnology speculates about deconstructing and reconstructing molecules (you probably have not heard yet about building a ham in your refrigerator). The latter speculations by Drexler and Minsky, in particular, have found attentive ears among politicians and west-coast philosophers (who are interested in new weapons or in such issues as post-/transhumanism, cyborgs, etc.). There is a Foresight Institute for molecular nanotechnology, and most interestingly, there is an exchange of claims and counter-claims, something that looks like regular 'scientific discourse' (even though it appears to be more regulated, less open than ideal scientific discourse). In a forthcoming book (Praeger Publishers) David investigates this peculiar discourse about (as-of-yet?) non-existent phenomena: Technevangelism: Claims and Counterclaims. David's other publications include an article with the intriguing title 'What Killed Schrödinger's Cat: Parametric Topicality, That's What!' (in Advanced Debate, Thomas and Hart, eds., 1991, pp. 430-452). Another example of work that contributes to issues in rhetoric and debate by drawing on (philosophy of) science is a 1994 presentation at the Convention of the Speech Communication Association: 'Counterfactual Reasoning and Time/Causality Considerations.'
Postscript: David published an article on 'Nano-Socialism' in the April 1996 issue of NanoTechnology (Pre-Press Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 4). According to the byline, David is "a member of the Science Studies Program at the University of South Carolina." These nano-technologists, clearly ahead of their time...!
Alfred Nordmann
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