Paper short abstract:

In January 2016, Brazil passed a new law that resulted from four years of negotiations involving the academic and business sectors to enhance scientific research and innovation in the country. An analysis of this law highlights epistemic and ontological conditionings and obstacles to practice RRI.

Paper long abstract:

In January 2016, Brazil passed a new law seeking to enhance research activities in the country. According to congressmen and the Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science, the text resulted from "four years of negotiations involving the academic and business sectors". Scientists tended to praise the new law, while it called for precaution in the humanities and social sciences milieu. This work presents an analysis of the more prominent features of the new law from an ontological viewpoint. The analysis highlights the tensions and contradictions that show up in setting the desirable conditions for the construction of scientific knowledge in different modes of existence. For consolidated research groups, the law cleans up the area for their work by eliminating bureaucratic hurdles in their way. For those who are more prone to contest the neutrality and universality of modern sciences and technologies, the new law continues to fall prey of a modern ontology that presents readymade research objects while the constellation of (heterogeneous) elements that constitutes these research objects remain hidden in, so to speak, ontological black boxes. Practicing "responsible research and innovation" requires the enactment of politics on the ontological level, that is, taking up the cosmopolitical discussion about which entities (objects and subjects) will be part of the world in agreed upon modes of existence. If RRI is to be taken seriously, given the planetary limitation of resources, the discussion of such laws as the one passed in Brazil should explicitly address the problem of (scientific?) knowledge construction in the encounter and distribution of different modes of existence.