Remaking the Concept of “Trans-science”

Abstract

    The concept of “trans-science” has been widely used thanks to contributions from science, technology, and society scholars but sometimes interpreted arbitrarily. I examine original and current usage of the concept and then propose a new definition of it. “Trans-scientific questions” were originally defined as questions of facts which cannot be answered by science, while the standards of unanswerability in science were not definite. Nowadays Japanese scholars invoke “transscience” to claim that scientists should not answer political questions. My proposal is to remake the definition of “trans-scientific questions” in order to accept both original and current usage.