Integrating Ethicists and Social Scientists into Cutting Edge Research and Technological Development

Abstract

Ethics is an integral part of scientific and technological thinking, whether the practitioners recognize it or not. The kind of expertise the scientist gains about ethics and the ethicist about science can be labeled interactional. An interactional expert learns the language of a community with sufficient depth to communicate on matters like research strategy. The concept of trading zone is employed to understand how people from different perspectives and agencies can work together to define a common goal in a way that would be acceptable to their core communities. These concepts will be honed by applying them to case-studies of social scientists and humanists who integrated themselves into science and engineering laboratories. This paper will particularly focus on the value of complementing interactional expertise with the acquisition of somatic tacit knowledge.