Towards a Third ‘Practice Turn’: An Inclusive and Empirically Informed Perspective on Risk

In this chapter we identify three practice turns in the social and philosophical study of technology that we also relate to risk analysis. The first practice turn singled out technology as a topic meriting serious investigation as a social phenomenon, the second turn steered the field towards the consideration of philosophical problems directly relating to what technology is and what engineers do. The third practice turn explicitly aims at changing the field’s practice by close collaboration with the engineers. We argue that given the entanglement of evaluative and descriptive aspects of risk, it is important to develop approaches geared at this third turn, which is only now starting to take place. We propose that phronesis can play an important role in making context-sensitive assessments of evaluative aspects of risks, and that it can be assisted by emotions and art, as sources of moral reflection.