This is a thought experiment on the consequences of technical rationality, the dominant epistemology of practice that tells us that “professional activity consists in instrumental problem solving made rigorous by the application of scientific theory and technique” (Schön 2017, 22). My aim is not to demonize technical rationality at the outset. Instead, I attempt to lay out the stakes of such a project when scaled beyond the confines of the spaces where experts conceive them. What happens when an “epistemic thing”—an unstable, experimental object of scientific research—is taken out of the controlled confines of the lab or the pages collated from a scientific symposium and introduced into the real world (Rheinberger 1997)? To borrow Anna Tsing’s phrasing, what happens when you increase the scale of an experiment without altering its frame for the differences encountered in the real world (Tsing 2015, 38; 2019, 506)? (read more...)