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In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, Marion Godman (Aarhus university) will give a talk on “The Nordic Racial Hygiene Studies: How Science becomes a Force for Cultural Domination“.

The seminar takes place in hybrid format in person and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on Monday the 13th of January 2023. To join the seminar, please contact jessica.north@helsinki.fi for the location or Zoom invitation.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

Abstract:

This paper argues that science can become a force for cultural (group) dominance and thus is a topic ripe for scrutiny by political philosophy. I review the case of the Nordic racial hygiene studies – a branch of physical anthropology in the northern Nordic region in the early 20^th century. I argue that although it is highly likely that there were racist biases and ideological influences affecting these researchers, this is not why we primarily should find fault with them. We should instead focus on condemning them for their epistemic conduct that means they abused the epistemic authority invested in them. As Michele Luchetti (2022) has argued for American craniologists active at the same time, there were serious problems that had to do with both circularity and coordination in the measurement assumptions employed – problems which were also pointed out to the researchers at the time, only to be ignored. It is this neglect coupled with the epistemic authority that I argue translates into a problem of reactivity and eventually new patterns of cultural dominance when these scientists interacted and disseminate their research results.  

So far, the moral problems of interactivity have mostly been seen from the purview of an individualistic research ethics framework. Based on this case, however, I try to show that it is really (also) a problem of political philosophy, in two ways: first, it is a problem for scientific institutions and their certification of scientific authority; and, second, the effects of scientific reactivity often lies at the level of populations (the kinds of people under study) and as such has their more troubling and lasting effects. 

Author bio:

Marion Godman is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Aarhus university, a core member of their Centre of Excellence of the Experimental Philosophy of Discrimination, (CEPDISC) and an affiliated scholar of the History and Philosophy of Science department, Cambridge university. Between 2012 and 2018 she was also based at Helsinki university working at TINT/Centre of Excellence in Philosophy of the Social Sciences.

She works on a range of issues with philosophy of biology, philosophy of social science & political philosophy and endeavours to find a synthesis between these different areas as can be seen in her first book, The Epistemology and Morality of Human Kinds (2020, Routledge).

In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, Brian Nosek (University of Virginia) will give a talk on “Shifting incentives from getting it published to getting it right“.

The seminar takes place in hybrid format in person and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on Monday the 30th of January 2023. To join the seminar, please contact jessica.north@helsinki.fi for the location or Zoom invitation.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

Abstract:

The currency of academic science is publishing.  Producing novel, positive, and clean results maximizes the likelihood of publishing success because those are the best kind of results.  There are multiple ways to produce such results: (1) be a genius, (2) be lucky, (3) be patient, or (4) employ flexible analytic and selective reporting practices to manufacture beauty.  In a competitive marketplace with minimal accountability, it is hard to avoid (4).  But, there is a way.  With results, beauty is contingent on what is known about their origin.  With methodology, if it looks beautiful, it is beautiful. The only way to be rewarded for something other than the results is to make transparent how they were obtained.  With openness, I won’t stop aiming for beautiful papers, but when I get them, it will be clear that I earned them. 

Author bio:

Brian Nosek is co-Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Open Science (http://cos.io/) that operates the Open Science Framework (http://osf.io/). COS is enabling open and reproducible research practices worldwide. Brian is also a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2002. He co-founded Project Implicit (http://projectimplicit.net/), an multi-university collaboration for research and education investigating implicit cognition–thoughts and feelings that occur outside of awareness or control. Brian investigates the gap between values and practices, such as when behavior is influenced by factors other than one’s intentions and goals. Research applications of this interest include implicit bias, decision-making, attitudes, ideology, morality, innovation, and barriers to change. Nosek applies this interest to improve the alignment between personal and organizational values and practices. In 2015, he was named one of Nature’s 10 and to the Chronicle for Higher Education Influence list.

In the first Perspectives on Science seminar of the year, Vanessa Seifert (University of Athens) will give a talk on “The periodic table as law(s) of nature“.

The seminar takes place in hybrid format in person and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on the 16th of January 2023. To join the seminar, please contact jessica.north@helsinki.fi for the location or Zoom invitation.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

Abstract:

The periodic table as law(s) of nature

Chemists often refer to the periodic table as the ‘periodic law’. However whether it actually refers to a law of nature is far from evident. To this end, I identify what kind of relationships are represented in the periodic table and claim that the table identifies various law-like regularities about (different groups of) chemical elements. Secondly, I present some key features typically assigned to laws and argue that they are satisfied by the periodic table. Thirdly, I consider two potential problems to the claim that the periodic table represents laws of nature. The first concerns the existence of alternative representations of the table. The second problem concerns the potential reducibility of the periodic table to quantum physics. All in all, whether the periodic table represents a law of nature is far from uncontroversial. Nevertheless, it is a novel issue within the metaphysics of science that could not only inform our understanding of laws, but also make us appreciate in a new way the enormous significance of the periodic table.

Author bio:

Vanessa Seifert currently works as a postdoctoral researcher in the project NoMoS at the University of Athens. She has worked as a researcher at the University of Bristol where she also completed her PhD in philosophy. She has a master’s in philosophy of science from the LSE and her undergraduate studies were in chemical engineering. She has published in several journals (incl. Philosophy of Science, British Journal for Philosophy of Science, and European Journal for Philosophy of Science) around topics on reduction, scientific realism, models and idealisations. She is interested in exploring these topics primarily from the perspective of chemistry, and has written about them in popular science journals, such as The Conversation and Chemistry World. 

In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, Carlo Martini (Vita-Salute San Raffaele University Milan) and Mason Majszak (University of Bern) will give a talk on “Values within boundaries – Climate science and tipping points“.

The seminar takes place in hybrid format in person and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on the 12th of December. To join the seminar, please contact jessica.north@helsinki.fi for the location or Zoom invitation.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

Abstract:

It is often argued that non-epistemic values can play the role of both biases (Lloyd 2006, 244-45) and background assumptions (Parker and Winsberg 2018) in scientific research, with the possibility of resulting in both a positive and/or negative impact on science. This has caused a discussion to arise on when the use of non-epistemic values should be considered legitimate or illegitimate in scientific research, and more specifically in the climate modeling context (Intemann 2015). However, identifying the legitimate use of values tends to become more complicated when discussing science-based policy making and further scientific communication, where values can play a larger and, as we will argue, a slightly different role. In this paper we look at the interplay of science and values on a topic of growing interest in climate science and the larger society: climate tipping points.

While there exists a theoretical and mathematical account of the concept of tipping points in the climate system the scientific community has not reached agreement on any specific tipping point – i.e. ice collapse in Antarctica or Greenland, boreal forest dieback, changes in the frequency or amplitude of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, etc. – nor on its physical mechanisms, as well as the uncertainty or likelihood of these tipping points occurring under certain climate scenarios (Lenton et al. 2008). As a result, some have argued that “the possibility of global tipping remains highly speculative” (Lenton et al. 2019). In turn, tipping points can, in general, be considered as highly uncertain but potentially highly impactful events.

Even though the uncertainty surrounding climate tipping point is extremely high, this concept has made its way into the popular culture discussions on climate change, where usually subtleties tend to disappear, including considerations about uncertainty levels (Schneider 2016). News outlets, in multiple countries, have highlighted concerns of potential climate catastrophe around tipping point events. Illustrating that not only a large cross section of individuals in our global society are aware of this scientific concept but that they are also concerned about the potential of crossing one of these tipping point thresholds. This presents an interesting case where there is currently high uncertainty within the scientific community, regarding the likelihood of a climate tipping point event of global magnitude occurring, however the importance and relevance of tipping points for decision making is relatively agreed upon within our larger society, as demonstrated by the recent survey by The Global Commons Alliance. They have reported that “among G20 countries, 73% of people believe Earth is close to ‘tipping points’ because of human action” (Gaffney et al. 2021, 4).

We argue that this divergence highlights the role values play in the communication of scientific information and, in this context, claims about climate tipping points. Despite the statement that values play a role in science, it is not always clear the way values play a role in how information is framed or presented. We will show how values are introduced and used in the scientific communication surrounding climate tipping points, by discussing a number of prominent papers, written by climate scientists, that have a specific focus on a wider public audience. These examples will illustrate the way values, specifically the precautionary principle as an evaluative value set, are used by experts to fill the knowledge gaps during scientific communication. This brings up questions of legitimate vs the illegitimate use of values in climate science and the scientific communication on tipping points. We begin to address these questions and contrast the difference in using these values to legitimately support further research/inquiry into climate tipping points and the use of these values to illegitimately fuel or support climate alarmism.

Author bios:

Carlo Martini is an Associate Professor in Philosophy of Science at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University (Milan) and visiting researcher at the University of Helsinki. He has worked on the interface between science and policy, scientific expertise, and science communication. He is leader of the work package “Behavioral Tools for Building Trust” in the H2020 Project “Policy, Expertise and Trust” (https://peritia-trust.eu)

Mason Majszak is a PhD student at the University of Bern, in Switzerland, where he is a part of the Epistemology of Climate Change working group and holds joint membership within the Institute for Philosophy as well as the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research (OCCR). His work focuses on expertise in climate science and methodological issues in climate science more generally. Before arriving in Switzerland Mason completed his master’s degree in the UK at the London School of Economics with a thesis titled “A Critical Analysis of the Methodology for the Detection and Attribution of Climate Change”.

In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, Säde Hormio and Samuli Reijula (University of Helsinki) will give a talk on “Universities as anarchic knowledge institutions.

The seminar takes place in hybrid format in person and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on the 5th of December. To join the seminar, please contact jessica.north@helsinki.fi for the location or Zoom invitation.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

Abstract:

Universities are knowledge institutions. Compared to several other knowledge institutions (e.g., think tanks, schools, government research organisations), universities have unusual, anarchic, organisational features. We argue that such anarchic features are not necessarily a weakness. Rather, they reflect the special standing of universities among knowledge institutions. We argue that the distributed, self-organising mode of knowledge production maintains a diversity of approaches, topics and solutions needed in frontier research, which involves generating relevant knowledge under uncertainty. Organisational disunity and inconsistencies should sometimes be protected by institutional structures and procedures in order for universities to best serve their purpose as knowledge institutions. The quality control for the knowledge produced in a university comes from knowledge fields, clusters of knowledge and research that exist beyond the confines of individual organisations. The diversity of epistemic contributions is therefore kept in check by the order imposed by the internal logic of science as a social practice. Our argument provides a new defence of autonomy of research conducted at universities.

Author bios:

Säde Hormio is a postdoctoral researcher in Practical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki and a member of TINT. Her research focuses on social epistemology and collective responsibility.

Samuli Reijula is an Academy of Finland research fellow (2020-2025) and a university lecturer in theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki.

In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, Pekka Syrjänen (University of Helsinki) will give a talk on “Novel prediction and the selectionist challenge”.

The seminar takes place in hybrid format in person and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on the 14th of November. To join the seminar, please contact jessica.north@helsinki.fi for the location or Zoom invitation.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

Abstract:

One of the most prominent arguments for scientific realism is that it is the only view that does not make the success of science ‘a miracle.’ van Fraassen famously challenged the Miracle argument, arguing that it is no surprise that empirically successful theories survive in the scientific process, as scientists actively select empirically successful theories. Realists often argue that van Fraassen’s response is uncompelling, because it does not challenge realism’s explanation for the novel predictive success of scientific theories. I present a new version of the selectionist argument that responds to the realist’s objection and challenges the novelty-based Miracle argument. 

Author bio:

Pekka Syrjänen is a doctoral student in theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki. His PhD research focuses on the epistemic value of prediction in science.

In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, Corey Dethier (Leibniz Universität Hannover) will give a talk on “How should the IPCC present uncertainty?”.

The seminar takes place online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on the 31st of October. To join the seminar, please contact jessica.north@helsinki.fi for the Zoom invitation.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

Abstract:

At present, the IPCC has a unique two-tier method for communicating uncertainty: claims about (e.g.) future warming are qualified using both “likelihood” and “confidence” scales. Recently, however, a number of climate scientists have called attention to the weaknesses of this method, arguing that it is confusing, hard to understand, and used in different ways by different author groups. In this talk, I consider what a better alternative might look like. I begin by arguing that good science communication is like good science modeling: it highlights or emphasizes what’s important by abstracting away from the unimportant. The IPCC’s current approach can be thought of as emphasizing two features of the IPCC’s knowledge: the degree of imprecision or uncertainty and origins of imprecision or uncertainty. I suggest that there are reasons why we should prioritize emphasizing imprecision, but that the origins of uncertainty are less important. Finally, I consider a few different options for capturing imprecision and consider some broader lessons for science communication. 

Author bio:

Corey Dethier is postdoctoral fellow at Leibniz Universität Hannover with the research group “Integrating Ethics and Epistemology of Science.” His work focuses on uncertainty in climate science and how can and should respond to it.

In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, N. Emrah Aydinonat (University of Helsinki) will give a talk on “The puzzle of model-based explanations”.

The seminar takes place online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on the 17th of October. To join the seminar, please contact jessica.north@helsinki.fi for the Zoom invitation.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

Abstract:

Almost everyone agrees that one of the many functions of scientific models is the help scientists explain real-world phenomena. Nevertheless, there is no agreement about how models perform this function. How do models explain? What is the relation between models and explanations? Can idealized models, which contain falsehoods, provide true explanations? This talk gives a brief overview of the philosophical literature on the so-called model explanations and outlines a framework to understand the explanatory role of idealized models.

Author bio:

N. Emrah Aydinonat (PhD, Docent) is a researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki and TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science. He is one of the chief editors of the Journal of Economic Methodology (w/ J. Vromen). He is a member of the board of directors of the International Network for Economic Method (INEM), the editorial board of the History of Economic Ideas and the International Advisory Board of The Review of Evolutionary Political Economy (REPE). He is the author of The Invisible Hand in Economics (Routledge, 2008) and the co-editor of Economics Made Fun: Philosophy of the pop-economics (Routledge, 2015). Aydinonat is currently working on an Academy of Finland research project entitled Economics as Serviceable Social Knowledge (ESSK) led by Uskali Mäki at University of Helsinki. More information at http://neaydinonat.com

In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, Mary S. Morgan (London School of Economics) will give a talk on “Narrative: A General Purpose Technology for Science”.

The seminar takes place online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on the 3rd of October. To join the seminar, please contact jessica.north@helsinki.fi for the Zoom invitation.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

Abstract:

Narrative is ubiquitous inside the sciences. While it might be hidden, evident only from its traces, it can be found regularly in scientists’ accounts both of their research, and of the natural, human and social worlds they study.  Investigating the functions of narrative, it becomes clear that narrative-making provides scientists a means of making sense of the phenomena in their field, that narrative provides a means of representing that knowledge, and that narrative may even provide the site for scientific reasoning.  Narrative emerges as a ‘general purpose technology’, used in many different forms in different sites of science, enabling scientists to figure out and express their scientific knowledge claims. Understanding scientists’ use of narrative as a sense-making technology suggests that narrative functions as a bridge between the interventionist practices of science and the knowledge gained from those practices.

Abstract from Narrative Science: Reasoning, Representing and Knowing since 1800, edited M.S. Morgan, K.M. Hajek and D.M. Berry (CUP, 2022).]

Author bio:

Mary S. Morgan is the Albert O. Hirschman Professor of History and Philosophy of Economics at the London School of Economics; she is a Fellow of the British Academy (and served as Vice President 2014-6), and an Overseas Fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences.  She is currently President-Elect of the Royal Economic Society, to become President for 2023-4.