Dalla costruzione alla coproduzione. Natura e società nel recente dibattito su ambiente e tecnoscienza

Realism and constructionism have long enlivened the debate in sociology of the environment and science. The controversy deals with issues of theoretical soundness and critical capacity with regard to the ecological and societal implications of technoscience. Recently scholarship has come to the forefront which focuses on the notion of coproduction of natural and social orders. The idea is that there is no single way to describe the world because there is no single way it displays itself; or, vice versa, that the way the world displays itself is related to the way a society chooses to live and experience it. The article elaborates on the genesis, articulation and relevance of this field. The idiom of coproduction strengthens sociological critique yet it runs into trouble with the latest technoscientific wave. The latter shares with the former its premises while overturning the conclusions. The originality and theoretical potential of the coproduction idiom lie in the attempt to reassemble the nature/culture dualism by focusing neither on the Kantian theme of the relationship between reality and representation, nor on the Kuhnian theme of the stability of the latter, but on the constitutive contingency of knowledge and the world.