Argumentative Trajectories and Discursive Constellations

Every scientific and technological proposal involves visions of the future. These visions which give rise to all kinds of judgments and critical evaluations, may be based on different regimes of belief, ranging from technological promises to prophecies of happiness or unhappiness, through forms of anticipation or foresight, or even science fiction narratives. In order to explore the visions of the future linked to nanosciences and nanotechnologies (NST), this article articulates a quantitative, a qualitative and a network analysis, applied to a large corpus of texts and discourses in French and English, and divided into a constellation of sub-corpus for specific studies and systematic comparisons. Based on a pragmatist approach to inquiry, the computer-based analysis, called “socio-informatics”, provides a deep description of the evolution of sets of players and arguments.