The emergence of technoscience in the twentieth century changed scientific practice and the concept of interdisciplinarity. This article examines an important example of contemporary technoscience, which is the National Science Foundation (NSF) report Converging Technologies for improving Human Performance (CTIHP), and its support for a new kind of interdisciplinarity, the nano-bio-info-cogno (NBIC) technologies. The analysis of this report shows that the NSF concept of interdisciplinarity is instrumental, selective, and apparently reductionist, in detriment of the social sciences, arts and humanities. In the thesis, it is suggested that the concept of interprofessionality is more suitable for technoscience than that of interdisciplinarity.
Interdisciplinariety; Converging technologies; Nano-bio-info-cogno technoscience; Interprofesionality