Knowledge and Value Prerequisites of Evaluation and Decision-Making (Comments on Major Features of Knowledge Society)

Abstract

Throughout the centuries, the key function of science and technology efforts was seen in expanding and improving the available pool of knowledge and the technical world, in broadening and enriching the environment which man is capable to control and whose advantages he can efficiently exploit. Only in the past few decades of this century has this image been substantially changing, showing that such endeavours have revealed not only their bright side but also their shadows, successes as well as risks, posing a broad spectrum of negative impacts. This has led many contemporary intellectuals to formulate countless new initiatives, pointing to what they called “limits to growth”, issues of globalization and world-wide integration (the Club of Rome), the need to introduce a system-based and prognostically oriented assessment of the impacts of science and technology progress (TA), impose purposeful and knowledge-based constraints (Royal Society of Canada, the group of Nobel Prize laureates), and cultivate an “active”, “cognitive” and “educated” civil society or a “knowledge society”, and many other analogous initiatives. Also the author of this paper has been involved and often invited to take part in discussions on the impacts and trends of science and technology innovations, especially thanks to his study concerning what he described as a “double-faced technology”, a work published more than thirty years ago, his accent on the great importance of primary decisions and start-up of some technology processes (Constraints to Freedom of Scholarship and Science, The Royal Society of Canada) and many other works devoted to the philosophy of technology and technological thinking and reasoning.