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My starting goal in this chapter is to spell out in more detail the distinction between contextures-of-equipment and contexts of inquiry as it was preliminarily depicted in the Introductory Chapter. I will cite again the established/received view: A scientific practice consists of actions and activities following a rule(s) in pursuing a goal. This view implies a purely "humanistic" approach to studying science as practices. All (non-normative and normative) elements of a scientific practice are determined by cognitive, volitional, and emotive faculties and dispositions of humans. However, I argued that the interrelatedness of (scientific) practices has ontological primacy over each and every particular practice of inquiry. The "humanistic" approach is no longer to be applied to this interrelatedness. The latter has a being in the interplay of practices and possibilities understood as the facticity of inquiry. In another formulation, the potentiality-for-being of the interrelatedness of scientific practices (disclosing a domain of reality) is always involved in a hermeneutic circularity. Thus considered, the interrelatedness is not only a dimension of the trans-subjective facticity of inquiry, but also of characteristics that post-humanist trends in science and technology studies (STS) describe. The interrelatedness of scientific practices is not determined by human faculties, and for this reason, it can be characterized as a "trans-human" facticity (i.e., transcending the human factors organizing the single practices). It is precisely this characterization that seems to be in line with those trends in science studies which advance strategies of deconstructing the imposed borderlines between humans and nonhumans involved in technoscience.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-39289-9_4

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