Anticipation and responsible innovation: opening-up futures through plausibility negotiations

Abstract

This dissertation aims to develop a more robust conceptualisation of anticipation as a methodological-interventive relevant tool to promote more socio-politically responsible science, technology, and innovation (STI) practices. This conceptualisation would arguably allow a better understanding of anticipation regarding both (i) its functional and heuristic heterogeneity, and (ii) its interpretative and context-dependent character (as a situated socio-epistemic practice subject to potentials and limitations). The thesis argues that anticipation is a semantically and methodologically heterogeneous tool, whose heuristic capacity is of a heterogeneous kind in terms of both type and radicality. Regarding type heterogeneity, it is argued that the diverse modes of anticipation considered valuable to recent normative-interventive frameworks (e.g. Anticipatory Governance, Responsible Research and Innovation, Responsible Innovation) can be subsumed under three general types: strategic, exploratory, and critical-hermeneutic. Regarding radicality heterogeneity, it is shown that this fundamentally depends on two aspects. First and foremost, it depends on (a) which spaces of problematisation are formally enabled by the frameworks through which anticipation is instrumentally interpreted and adopted. Secondly, this formal radicality will be empirically settled depending on (b) how the (im)plausibility negotiation processes of the sociotechnical futures at stake deal with the openness/closure dynamics that prevail in the sociotechnical system in which anticipatory exercises operate.