In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, Jaakko Kuorikoski (TINT / University of Helsinki) will give a talk titled “Structure without foundations? – DSGE, microfoundations, and causality”.

The seminar takes place in person at Metsätalo room 10 and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on Monday the 13th of January 2025. To join the seminar, please contact samuli.reijula@helsinki.fi for the Zoom invitation.

Perspectives on Science is a research seminar which brings together experts from the philosophy of science and several fields of science studies. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar can be found on the TINT web page https://tint.helsinki.fi.

Abstract
This paper argues that the standard narrative emphasizing the necessity of microfoundations in justifying assumptions about causal structure in DSGE models is a red herring and that the exclusive focus on the Lucas critique has meant that the more general role of theoretical grounds for causal inference and scenario modeling has been widely misunderstood. In contrast to the standard narrative, the practice of model building and modification within the DGSE program does not exemplify an epistemic strategy of deriving more secure structural assumptions from improved knowledge of individual choice behavior. Instead, the development of DSGE models largely consists in incorporating new and independently justified assumptions about aggregate invariances or meso-level mechanisms under general equilibrium constraints.

Author bio
Jaakko Kuorikoski is a professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki and a member of The Centre for Philosophy of the Social Sciences TINT. Before this, Kuorikoski worked as an associate professor in a cross-disciplinary New Social Research program at Tampere University and as a lecturer in Theoretical Philosophy at Helsinki. His main areas of specializations are philosophy of economics and philosophy of the social sciences. His current research interests include new kinds of data and evidence in the social sciences, scientific understanding, philosophy of macroeconomics, and model-based social epistemology of science.

In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, Guido Caniglia (University of Helsinki) will give a talk titled “Impure evidence for sustainability transformations”.

The seminar takes place in person at Metsätalo and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on Monday the 2nd of December 2024. To join the seminar, please contact jessica.north@helsinki.fi for the location or Zoom invitation.

Perspectives on Science is a research seminar which brings together experts from the philosophy of science and several fields of science studies. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar can be found on the TINT web page https://tint.helsinki.fi.

Abstract:

Biodiversity loss, climate change, rapid urbanization, and increasing inequalities are major sustainability challenges of our time. They are clearly messy, somewhat unsolvable, and often wicked. Similarly, the transformation processes that are advocated as necessary to address these challenges are complex, constantly emerging, and essentially uncontrollable. Yet, there is a problem in the way we think about the evidence produced through research about how to understand and foster sustainability transformations. Namely, we often work under the assumption that, in order to count as evidence-based, knowledge for actions, interventions, and policies needs to be purified and amended from the influence of the people, of the contexts, and of the processes that contribute to generating it. In my talk, I will argue that following epistemic purity is rather counterproductive. I will present cases of so-called transdisciplinary sustainability science and claim that we can retain important functions of evidence as supporting and guiding decisions and actions, while abandoning any pretense of epistemic purity. Relying on these examples and critically engaging with philosophical and STS literature on evidence for use and action, I will present a way of understanding evidence about and for sustainability transformations that praises and levers epistemic impurity. In this way, I will finally argue, evidence-based knowledge might support our capacities to muddle through the dirty waters of a world that we barely understand, can hardly anticipate, and definitely cannot control.  

Author bio:

Guido Caniglia (he/him) is Associate Professor of Social Policy at the University of Helsinki. He previously worked as Scientific Director of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (Austria). His work deals with the intersecting ethical, epistemological, and political dimensions of knowledge co-production both in theory and in practice. Guido recently acquired an ERC Consolidator Grant with the title: “Whose Sustainability? Understanding and redefining just sustainability transformations through disability and queer perspectives” (WEIRD). He earned a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Florence (Italy) in 2010 and a second PhD in Biology from Arizona State University (USA) in 2015.

In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, Ahmad Elabbar (University of Cambridge) will give a talk titled “Trusting scientific advisors as epistemic curators: from error to attention”.

The seminar takes place in person at Metsätalo and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on Tuesday the 5th of November 2024. To join the seminar, please contact jessica.north@helsinki.fi for the location or Zoom invitation.

Perspectives on Science is a research seminar which brings together experts from the philosophy of science and several fields of science studies. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar can be found on the TINT web page https://tint.helsinki.fi.

Abstract:

Scientific advice plays a key role in shaping public policy. In light of its influence, and the growing realisation among philosophers of the depth of value-ladenness in science, the literature on epistemic trust in science has recently flourished. Yet, despite its richness, work on epistemic trust in science remains ‘error-centric’: epistemic trust in science is understood in terms of the reliability of inquiry, epistemic risk, and expert disagreement, among other related notions that centre on error. In this talk, I argue for expanding accounts of epistemic trust in science away from error towards attention. Building on an account of scientific advice as ‘epistemic curation’, and a case study of the IPCC’s assessment of the collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet, I argue trusting scientific advisors as epistemic curators requires more than what error-centric accounts presume. In particular, it requires that we look beyond questions of reliability and error-management towards the fair distribution of attention.

Author bio:

Ahmad Elabbar completed a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge in 2024. His thesis developed a framework of distributive epistemic justice for global climate assessment. He is currently the Adrian Research Fellow in Environmental Humanities at Darwin College, Cambridge, where he will continue working on the distribution of climate science. He is interested in the ethics and politics of science more broadly, and in bringing perspectives from political theory into the social epistemology of science and values-in-science literatures.

In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, Benjamin Santos Genta (University of California, Irvine) will give a talk titled “The Easy and Hard Problem of Similarity”.

The seminar takes place in person at Metsätalo and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on Monday the 7th of October 2024. To join the seminar, please contact jessica.north@helsinki.fi for the location or Zoom invitation.

Perspectives on Science is a research seminar which brings together experts from the philosophy of science and several fields of science studies. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar can be found on the TINT web page https://tint.helsinki.fi.

Abstract:

 In this talk, I distinguish between two kinds of similarity judgments made when reasoning analogically from models: an easy and a hard kind. The easy kind can be empirically explored and analysed, while it is much harder to conceptualize how to do this with the hard kind. I then show how some of the most forceful recent objections against the similarity view of model representation are substantially mitigated when this distinction is taken into account.

Author bio:

Benjamin Santos Genta is a PhD candidate in Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine. His work lies at the intersection of philosophy of science and social science. His dissertation explores the role similarity judgments play in the methodology of social sciences.

In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, Vincent Lam (University of Bern) will give a talk titled “Anthropocene, planetary boundaries and tipping points: interdisciplinarity and values in Earth system science”

The seminar takes place in person at Metsätalo and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on Monday the 23rd of September 2024. To join the seminar, please contact jessica.north@helsinki.fi for the location or Zoom invitation.

Perspectives on Science is a research seminar which brings together experts from the philosophy of science and several fields of science studies. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar can be found on the TINT web page https://tint.helsinki.fi.

Abstract:

Earth system science (ESS) and modelling have given rise to a new conceptual framework in the recent decades, which goes much beyond climate science. Indeed, Earth system science and modelling have the ambition “to build a unified understanding of the Earth”, involving not only the physical Earth system components (atmosphere, cryosphere, land, ocean, lithosphere) but also all the relevant human and social processes interacting with them. This unified understanding that ESS aims to achieve raises a number of epistemological issues about interdisciplinarity. We argue that the interdisciplinary relations in ESS between natural and social / human sciences are best characterized in terms of what is called ‘scientific imperialism’ in the literature and we show that this imperialistic feature has some detrimental epistemic and non-epistemic effects, notably when addressing the issue of values in ESS. This paper considers in particular the core ESS concepts of Anthropocene, planetary boundaries and tipping points in the light of the philosophy of science discussions on interdisciplinarity and values. We show that acknowledging the interconnections between interdisciplinarity and values suggests ways for ESS to move forward in view of addressing the climate and environmental challenges.

Author bio:

Vincent Lam is a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) professor in the Institute of Philosophy and at the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research (OCCR) at the University of Bern, where he is leading the Epistemology of Climate Change project (philoclimate.ch). He is also a Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Queensland. Between 2018 and 2021 he held a Chair of Excellence in Philosophy of Quantum Physics at the University of Grenoble Alpes. Besides his work in philosophy of physics and metaphysics of science, his current research concerns the philosophy of climate and Earth system sciences, as well as, more broadly, philosophical issues related to the climate and global environmental challenges.

In the Perspectives on Science seminar on 20 May, 2024, Patricia Rich (University of Bayreuth) will give a talk “The Evolution of Cooperation … in Science“

Perspectives on Science is a research seminar which brings together experts from the philosophy of science and several fields of science studies. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar can be found on the TINT web page https://tint.helsinki.fi.

The seminar takes place in person at Soc&kom, room 209 and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on Monday the 20th of May 2024. To join the seminar, please contact samuli.reijula@helsinki.fi for the Zoom invitation.

Abstract
Explaining human cooperation has been a major interdisciplinary challenge, but we now have many insightful accounts to draw on. One example comes from Bowles, Choi and Hopfensitz; they offer a fairly detailed account of the co-evolution of cooperative individuals and group-level institutions supporting cooperation. Specifically, they argue that intergroup conflict can explain altruistic behaviors and leveling institutions (such as food sharing and monogamy). This talk addresses the question of whether the authors’ analysis can be used to construct an explanation of cooperation in the context of modern science. I argue that the basic argument can be translated, but that this leads us to three distinct evolutionary stories (potentially) explaining three distinct kinds of scientific cooperation. For each case, I indicate the relevant individuals, groups, and currency of evolution; the nature of the intergroup conflict and the types of scientific cooperation that give the group an advantage in such a conflict; and the group-level institutions that lower the costs to the relevant types of cooperation. Thus, a framework for analyzing scientific cooperation emerges. This framework can be used to situate existing models and arguments from the philosophy of science and social epistemology; it also highlights further aspects of scientific cooperation that can be integrated.

Bio
Patricia Rich is the Junior Professor for Philosophy of Economics at the University of Bayreuth. Her research generally focuses on human rationality and covers game and decision theory, epistemology, philosophy of science, and computational cognitive science. For links to her publications, see https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=1-fm_skAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

In the Perspectives on Science seminar on 13 May, 2024, N. Emrah Aydinonat (University of Helsinki) will give a talk titled “Economic Models as Argumentative Devices”

Perspectives on Science is a research seminar which brings together experts from the philosophy of science and several fields of science studies. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar can be found on the TINT web page https://tint.helsinki.fi.

The seminar takes place in person at Metsätalo room 10 and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on Monday the 13th of May 2024. To join the seminar, please contact samuli.reijula@helsinki.fi for the location or Zoom invitation.

Abstract
In this talk I critically evaluate Itzhak Gilboa, Andrew Postlewaite, Larry Samuelson, and David Schmeidler’s account of economic models. First, I give a selective overview of their argument, highlighting its emphasis on similarity and their oversight of the role of idealizations in economics. Second, I propose a sketch of an account that views models as arguments and argumentative devices. This approach not only sheds light on Gilboa et al.’s approach, including its shortcomings, but also identifies key challenges in model-based inference, suggesting a fresh perspective on the uses of models in economics for diverse objectives.

Author Bio:
N. Emrah Aydinonat (PhD, Docent) is a philosopher of economics working at the University of Helsinki, and a member of the Centre for Philosophy of Social Science (TINT). He is one of the Chief Editors of the Journal of Economic Methodology, and a member of the Editorial Board of the History of Economic Ideas. He also serves in the International Advisory Board of The Review of Evolutionary Political Economy (REPE). More info: https://neaydinonat.com/

In the Perspectives on Science seminar on 6 May, 2024, Mattia Gallotti (London Interdisciplinary School) will give a talk titled “Towards a Framework for Interdisciplinary Integrative Research”

Perspectives on Science is a research seminar which brings together experts from the philosophy of science and several fields of science studies. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar can be found on the TINT web page https://tint.helsinki.fi.

The seminar takes place in person at Metsätalo room 10 and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on Monday the 6th of May 2024. To join the seminar, please contact samuli.reijula@helsinki.fi for the location or Zoom invitation.

Abstract

Despite widespread recognition, interdisciplinarity still lacks a consistent system of research evaluation. At a time when ever more research is recognized and classed as being interdisciplinary, the need for clear and shared evaluative standards is now seen as a pressing concern in the academic and policy world. Calls have been made for better theoretically founded, more sophisticated, and dynamic approaches to accurately capture the ethos of interdisciplinary research. In recent years, important systematic work has been done to distill general criteria for cross-disciplinary integration from successful cases of local research activity and design. However, increasing knowledge of the processes and techniques through which interdisciplinary outputs can be generated through integration has not yet led to an agreed upon framework. This paper seeks to address this issue in the context of the broader debate on integration as the guiding method of interdisciplinarity, thus contributing to current efforts towards a philosophy of science of interdisciplinarity.

Author Bio:

Mattia Gallotti is a founding Faculty member and currently the Head of Research & Development at the new London Interdisciplinary School (LIS). A trained philosopher of social science, he has researched concepts of collective intentionality across several disciplines spanning from cognitive science to literary criticism. His current research focuses on the methodology of interdisciplinary research and teaching.

www.linkedin.com/in/mattiagallotti

In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, Kármen Kovács (University of Pécs) will give a talk titled “Is early novelty switching beneficial for consumers? The impact of impatience on the consumer utility derived from innovation from a behavioural economic perspective”

The seminar takes place in person at Metsätalo room 10 and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on Monday the 29th of April 2024. To join the seminar, please contact samuli.reijula@helsinki.fi for the location or Zoom invitation.

Perspectives on Science is a research seminar which brings together experts from the philosophy of science and several fields of science studies. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar can be found on the TINT web page https://tint.helsinki.fi.

Abstract

This research investigates from a behavioural economic perspective the reasons, the manifestations and the consequences of the early purchase of various innovations when consumers have present-biased preferences. The present study aims to analyse how consumers’ impatience influences their utility stream when various innovations are launched with increasing frequency. A simple theoretical model is presented that proceeds on the general form of the hyperbolic discounting utility function. Its purpose is to analyse how consumers’ impatience influences their utility stream derived from purchasing various types of innovations and a potential early novelty switching. The findings show why impatient consumers tend to finance the desired innovation by borrowing. The results indicate how the level of impatience, price level, and added value of innovations influence consumers’ utility stream.

Bio

Kármen Kovács graduated from the University of Pécs, Faculty of Business and Economics in 2002. She defended her PhD dissertation with summa cum laude in 2007; then she habilitated successfully in 2015. She was an assistant professor from September 2008 at the University of Pécs, Faculty of Business and Economics. She has been an associate professor since July 2016 at the Faculty. She has taught academic research and writing, research methods, basic mathematics, innovation management, business economics and behavioural economics. Her major research interest is behavioural economics. For the academic year 2016/17, she received a postdoctoral scholarship from the New National Excellence Program of the Ministry of Human Capacities. She received the János Bolyai Research Fellowship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences between 2017 and 2020. She has won the Hungarian State Eötvös Scholarship for the academic year 2023/24. She is an Associate Editor of the journal Marketing Intelligence and Planning.

In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, Charlie Kurth (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies; Western Michigan University) will give a talk titled “What is the Place of Emotion AI in Moral Education?”

The seminar takes place in person at Metsätalo and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on Monday the 8th of April 2024. To join the seminar, please contact samuli.reijula@helsinki.fi for the location or Zoom invitation.

Perspectives on Science is a research seminar which brings together experts from the philosophy of science and several fields of science studies. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar can be found on the TINT web page https://tint.helsinki.fi.

Abstract

Cultivating one’s emotions—learning to feel anger, say, at the right time and in the right way—has long been viewed as central to moral education. Recently, educators, philosophers, and entrepreneurs have pointed to “emotion nudges” and other forms of emotion-focused AI (EAI) as powerful, but under-utilized tools for emotion cultivation. The initial results are intriguing: merely placing “watching-eye” icons in online chatrooms can prompt feelings of anxiety that help curb vicious posting, and virtual reality (VR) simulations can engage stereotype-challenging empathy. But while there’s a growing body of research examining the use of AI for education as well as emotion-focused AI in general, there is little that looks specifically at the science and ethics of using EAI for moral education. 

In an effort to start filling this gap, my paper has two aims. First, I identify a trio of issues that must be addressed if EAI is to live up to its promise. More specifically, as it stands, we (i) lack answers to basic questions about how EAI will identify, assess, and educate emotions, (ii) have not considered (much less addressed) very real concerns about how EAI could lead to the deskilling of crucial meta-emotional capacities, and (iii) have done little to tackle problematic political and financial influences that threaten to distort the development of EAI educational tools. While these considerations should leave us very worried about the continued use of EAI, the second part of the paper attempts to find reasons for optimism. To do this, I examine emerging VR technologies in order to explore what scientifically and pedagogically responsible uses of EAI for moral education might look like. 

Bio

Charlie Kurth is a Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and a Professor in the Philosophy Department at Western Michigan University. His research focuses on issues at the intersection of ethical theory, moral psychology, and the philosophy of emotion; methodologically, he takes philosophical questions about the nature of value and the mind to be productively informed by empirical inquiry in the cognitive and social sciences. Recently, his work has examined the role that emotions play in shaping moral thought and agency.

In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, Sam White (University of Helsinki) will give a talk titled “Rabbits, Ducks, and Conceptual Problems in the Environmental History of Late Antiquity.”

The seminar takes place in person at Metsätalo and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on Monday the 11th of March 2024. To join the seminar, please contact samuli.reijula@helsinki.fi for the location or Zoom invitation.

Perspectives on Science is a research seminar which brings together experts from the philosophy of science and several fields of science studies. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar can be found on the TINT web page https://tint.helsinki.fi.

Abstract

Investigations in the historical sciences often confront persistent (contrastive) under-determination of theory by evidence. In some cases, rival theories may persist indefinitely in a state of uncertainty or indifference. Yet in most cases the hope is that new evidence and methods will bring at least partial and provisional resolution. Unfortunately, there can be cases when new evidence and methods appear to aggravate problems of under-determination rather than resolve them, producing sharply divided and apparently irreconcilable positions on historical questions. One such case is the environmental history of the Late Antique Mediterranean (e.g., early Byzantine Empire): once a quaint and obscure branch of study that has now drawn a disproportionate share of research attention and scholarly polemics. Teams of historians, archaeologists, paleoclimatologists, and geneticists have clashed over “maximalist” and “minimalist” positions regarding environmental disasters, plague mortality, and political collapse in the 3^rd-6^th centuries CE; and in numerous cases, have attacked each other’s methods, epistemology, and reasoning. Using the familiar rabbit-duck illusion as a metaphor, I argue that debates in the field have been derailed by feedbacks between divergent historical interpretations, on the one hand, and divergent approaches to historical analysis and interdisciplinary consilience, on the other. The paper proposes some modest solutions grounded in Bayesian reasoning. Problems in the environmental history of Late Antiquity analyzed in my paper may also represent wider problems in historical epistemology.

Author bio

Sam White joined the University of Helsinki as professor of political history in October 2022. He teaches on environmental history, historiography, and the uses and politics of history. His research specializes in reconstructing past climates and extreme weather and understanding their roles in human history. His publications include narrative monographs, scientific collaborations, and works on theory and methods. He currently leads the Past Global Changes (PAGES) working group on Climate Reconstruction and Impacts from the Archives of Societies. 

In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, María Jiménez-Buedo (UNED) will give a talk titled “Explanation and generality in Analytical Sociology: what is a catalogue of mechanisms?” (Joint work with Saúl Pérez-González (University of Valencia))

The seminar takes place in person at Metsätalo and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on Monday the 12th of February 2024. To join the seminar, please contact samuli.reijula@helsinki.fi for the location or Zoom invitation.

Perspectives on Science is a research seminar which brings together experts from the philosophy of science and several fields of science studies. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar can be found on the TINT web page https://tint.helsinki.fi.

Abstract:

One of the defining features of current analytical sociology is its emphasis on the centrality of mechanisms in social science. It is considered that the explanation of social phenomena is mainly achieved through the identification and description of underlying social mechanisms. These mechanisms often aggregate individual actions to form macro-phenomena. Following this idea, the founders of analytical sociology envisioned the future of the discipline as one in which there would be a variety of mechanism schemes that would collectively constitute a catalogue of explanations available for social phenomena. This work addresses the idea of a catalogue of mechanisms and examines the promises, but also the difficulties, that the idea entails. It evaluates to what extent the catalogue currently plays the role envisioned by early analytical sociologists.

Author bios:

María Jiménez-Buedo is a lecturer at the Department of Logic, History and Philosophy of Science, UNED. She works in the philosophy of the social sciences, with an emphasis on methodological issues. Her recent work focuses on experimental methods in the social sciences and their evidential uses  policy formulation.

Saúl Pérez-González is assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Valencia. Previously, he held a post-doctoral position at the Center for Logic, Language, and Cognition (LLC) of the University of Turin. His main areas of interest are philosophy of science, philosophy of the social sciences, and philosophy of the biomedical sciences.

In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, Sofia Blanco Sequeiros (University of Helsinki) and Samuli Reijula (University of Helsinki) will give a talk titled “Explaining evidential discordance.”

The seminar takes place in person at Metsätalo and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on Monday the 15th of January 2024. To join the seminar, please contact samuli.reijula@helsinki.fi for the location or Zoom invitation.

Perspectives on Science is a research seminar which brings together experts from the philosophy of science and several fields of science studies. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar can be found on the TINT web page https://tint.helsinki.fi.

Abstract:

Successful replication is a hallmark of scientific truth. Discordant evidence refers to the situation where findings from different studies of the same phenomenon do not agree. Although evidential discordance can spur scientific discovery, it also gives scientists a reason to rationally disagree and thereby compromises the formation of scientific consensus. Discordance indicates that facts about the phenomenon of interest remain unsettled and that a finding may not be reliably replicable. We single out persistent evidential discordance as a particularly difficult problem for the epistemology of science, and distinguish between different causes of evidential discordance – non-systematic error, noise, and bias. Unlike discordance brought about by non-systematic error or noise, persistent discordance often cannot be rationally resolved by temporarily suspending judgment and collecting more data within existing lines of inquiry. We suggest that the analysis of enriched lines of evidence (Boyd 2018) provides a useful approach to diagnosing and evaluating episodes of evidential discordance. Attention to the line of evidence, which extends from raw data to an evidential claim supporting or disconfirming a hypothesis, can help researchers to localize the source of discordance between inconsistent findings. We argue that reference to metadata, information about how the data were generated and processed, is key to resolving normative questions of correctness, i.e., whether a line of evidence provides a legitimate answer to a particular research question. We illustrate our argument with two cases: the alleged discovery of gravitational waves in the late 1960s, and the social priming controversy in experimental psychology.

Author bios:

Sofia Blanco Sequeiros is a PhD-student at the University of Helsinki. She works on questions concerning scientific evidence and methodology and the science-policy interface.

Samuli Reijula is an Academy of Finland research fellow and a university lecturer in theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki, Finland. His area of expertise is the philosophy of science, with interests in cognitive science and science studies (incl. science of science). His research interests include collective problem solving, cognitive diversity, science policy, and foundations of evidence-based policy.

In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, Luca Ausili (Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan) will give a talk titled “Quantification, Transparency, and Epistemic Heterogeneity“.

The seminar takes place in person at Metsätalo and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on Monday the 13th of November 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 communication between science and society is strongly mediated, inter alia, by two factors: quantification and transparency. Scientific results are represented in numerical form as the outcomes of standardized research processes, and both the results and the processes themselves are made available. This system is conceived to share important results to the widest public, in the fastest way, and to foster public trust in science. However, both quantification and transparency have their shortcomings. Quantification, in particular, causes the loss of local knowledge, since everything that cannot be represented within the current systems of categorization is automatically not taken into account. In this work, my intention is to show that this inevitable shortcoming, the systematic loss of local forms of knowledge, is having important political consequences, and is partially and indirectly, contributing to the proliferation of scientific disinformation. I argue that this is related to the fact that quantification and transparency can impair the epistemically heterogeneous nature of the relation between science and society.

Author bio:

I am a Phd student in Philosophy at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University (Milan) and currently Phd visiting student at the University of Helsinki. I am broadly interested in the relation between Science and Society, in their communication, and in the ways by which they mutually condition each other. I am also very interested in the reasons and causes of the proliferation of scientific disinformation within the infosphere, which is the main topic of my research project.

In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, Miriam Teschl (EHESS, Aix-Marseille School of Economics) and Stéphane Luchini (CNRS, Aix-Marseille School of Economics) will give a talk titled “Cognitive Pathways to Complexity“.

The seminar takes place in person at Metsätalo and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on Monday the 30th of October 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:

What happens when we face complex situations, situations in which predictions are out of reach, at least without making untestable assumptions? Over the last few years, we have embarked into a journey on complexity, how we perceive it and can (or not) manage it. Our research involves interdisciplinary conceptual and experimental work with neuro-scientists, with whom we tested ideas with animals and humans, and applied some of these ideas to real world complex challenges (e.g. Covid-19). In the seminar, we will present this ongoing research and provide some elements about how our approach has changed our own way of “doing” (economic) science.

Author bios:

Miriam Teschl: originally studying economics, but then moving more and more towards philosophy and the social sciences, Miriam is now particularly interested in conceptual and epistemological questions, notably around notions such as effort, uncertainty, and complexity. She is also interested in issues of wellbeing and social justice, notably in the context of language learning and multilingualisme. She is associate professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, based at the Aix-Marseille School of Economics in France.
 
Stéphane Luchini: Stephane Luchini’s general interest is directed towards the understanding of human decision making and how institutions shape behaviour. His research is based on the use of questionnaires in surveys and on  the study of behaviour in the lab, i.e. experimental economics. He has engaged over the years in interedisciplinary work with medical doctors, psychologists, sociologists and neuro-scientists His a research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) , based at the Aix-Marseille School of Economics in France.

In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, Svetlana Vetchinnikova (Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies) will give a talk titled “Disciplinary community as a complex adaptive system“.

The seminar takes place in person at Metsätalo and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on Monday the 16th of October 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:

Members of disciplinary communities interact through scientific publications. To what extent do regular social, cognitive and linguistic processes contribute to scientific knowledge production? This project aims to answer this question by modelling disciplinary community as a complex adaptive system. This framework makes it possible to integrate theoretical and methodological approaches from several different research traditions, including corpus, computational and cognitive linguistics, language typology and network science. The results will have implications for the role of concepts in scientific inquiry.   

Author bio:

Svetlana Vetchinnikova obtained her PhD in English Linguistics at the University of Helsinki in 2014. Currently, she is Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies working on chunking and individual variation using corpus linguistic and behavioural data. She is author of Phraseology and the Advanced Language Learner (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and co-editor of Changing English (De Gruyter, 2017) and Language Change: The impact of English as a lingua franca (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, Pekka Mäkelä (University of Helsinki) and Raul Hakli (University of Helsinki) will give a talk titled “RESPONSIBLE AI: A wee bit of philosophy and an introduction to an approach“.

The seminar takes place in person at Metsätalo and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on Monday the 2nd of October 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 speed of progress in the development of automation, such as autonomously operating artificially intelligent systems and social and industrial robots is enormous. Algorithms and robots functioning and making decisions in areas that used to be controlled by humans alone, for instance, in stock trading, medical diagnosing, and car driving are becoming ubiquitous. This development is inspiring but also raising a lot of worries. One rather generic fear concerning increasingly autonomous systems has to do with responsibility. What happens to responsibility when technology is less and less in the control of human agents? In this talk we will discuss some of the worries concerning the societal risks brought about by autonomous machines focusing on moral and legal senses of responsibility. We distinguish between two ways of understanding responsibility in the context of AI: One that tracks the ideas discussed under the generic title responsibility of AI systems, and the other that tracks ideas discussed under the generic title of responsible AI.At the core of the former sense is the idea that we could captivate responsibility into a computer program and by that way bring about an artificial moral agent capable of bearing moral responsibility pretty much in the same sense as some human beings are considered to be morally responsible. This would provide us with a neat solution to the problem of responsibility gaps. We will critically evaluate the fruitfulness of this sense of responsibility and end up arguing in favor of an institutional interpretation of responsible AI. Here we are thinking about social and institutional structures that can be identified at least to an extent in terms of constitutive rules. Some such rules create social roles and positions which can be cashed out in terms of tasks. We would claim that structural institutional responsibility allocation on the basis of formal rules is the most promising approach to the problems of moral and legal responsibility created by autonomous systems. This leads us to study and evaluate the responsibility of human beings either individually, jointly, or collectively. In this context we will briefly discuss regulation and the value-sensitive design approach and introduce a down to earth way of contributing to the implementation of this sense of formalizing responsibility by way raising the institutional sensitivity to moral reasons.   

Author bios:

Pekka Mäkelä in an ex-coordinator of TINT.

Raul Hakli is a university researcher in practical philosophy. 

In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, Aki Lehtinen (Nankai University) will give a talk titled “Derivational Robustness and Independence“.

The seminar takes place in person at Metsätalo and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on Monday the 25th of September 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 discusses independence conditions in the context of modelling. It is argued that variety of evidence in experiments and derivational robustness are fundamentally different. The former requires independence of sources of evidence, but the latter is better seen to demonstrate a relevant independence. In a recent criticism of Kuorikoski, Lehtinen and Marchionni’s (2010) analysis of derivational robustness, Margherita Harris (2021) argued that the independence condition they proposed is not credible. While this criticism is cogent, I argue that it is impossible to formulate any independence condition because incremental epistemic benefits from robustness require violating an independence condition. The failure to satisfy a relevant independence condition is best seen as a failure to show the robustness of every assumption in a model family. This illustrates the difference between an increment in confidence in the robust result, and a high absolute degree of confidence in a result: a high absolute degree of confidence in a result does require demonstrating the independence of every false assumption.

Author bio:

Aki Lehtinen is a Talent Professor of Philosophy at Nankai University, Tianjin, China. He has spent most of his academic career at University of Helsinki. In his early career he published papers on social choice and voting theory, rational and game choice theory. As a philosopher of science, he has written about the philosophy of modelling and simulation, confirmation, and philosophy of economics. His most recent interests lie in data, meta-analysis, scientific representation, generalisation, and robustness. See https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Aki-Lehtinen for most of his publications.

In the next Perspectives on Science seminar, Milutin Stojanovic (University of Helsinki) will give a talk titled “Is there a crisis in sustainability research?“.

The seminar takes place in hybrid format in person and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on Monday the 18th of September 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:

Integrity of the planetary bio-physical systems on which the human and other species depend for survival and the sustainability of their destruction by human socio-economic systems have recently become the main challenges delegated to the modern science. As science historically both contributed to a large extent to the environmental destruction and devoted little attention to the problem, the new challenge was to harness the existing tools and create new knowledge-production and institutional capacities which would enable the science to successfully represent and intervene in this unprecedently complex system. As a result, sustainability research emerged, mostly employing the established scientific capacities, integrating them, and hoping for evolution. Three decades later, the problem this paper tackles is that we have very little and partial information on the success of this epic scientific undertaking. Yet it is crucial to evaluate its current state to develop the field further. The present study will first make a systematic account of the actual state of Sustainability Research (SR), accounting the scattered meta-reviews of research dynamics in published SR and analyses of its key scientific features. I will signal the signs of a crisis in quality within the field and explore the ways it is navigated. Second, the paper will explore how the replicability crisis in the key disciplines engaged in interdisciplinary SR affect the field, together with the wider institutional framework and its narratives. Emphasis will be on modeling the value of novel discoveries, the operating standards of success in science, and signaling the need for well-ordering the aims and methods of the institution. Finally, building on the previous meta-science analyses, I analyze three problematic trends in SR and discuss how they square off with a SR-specific idea of well-ordered science. 

Keywords: sustainability research, crisis in science, meta-science, systems thinking, well-ordered science. 

Relevant background articles: 

• Stojanovic, M. Pursuitworthiness in urgent research: Lessons on well-ordered science from sustainability science, Stud Hist Phil Sci, 49-61 (2023) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2023.01.004 
• Stojanovic, M. Philosophy of sustainability experimentation: experimental legacy, normativity and transfer of evidence. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 11, 83 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-021-00383-4 
• Nagatsu, M., Davis, T., DesRoches, C.T. et al. Philosophy of science for sustainability science. Sustain Sci 15, 1807–1817 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-020-00832-8\ 
• Soininen, N., Raymond, C.M., Tuomisto, H. et al. Bridge over troubled water: managing compatibility and conflict among thought collectives in sustainability science. Sustain Sci 17, 27–44 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-021-01068-w 

Author bio:

Milutin Stojanovic is a post-doctoral researcher at the Practical Philosophy department, University of Helsinki, specializing in philosophy of sustainability science. His research spans various areas, including crisis in science, systems thinking, meta-science, methodological misconduct, and well-ordered science. His work has been featured in prestigious journals such as European Journal for Philosophy of Science, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, and Sustainability Science. Stojanovic is particularly interested in systemic approaches to sustainability, the role of normative considerations in shaping research methodologies and evidence, and addressing the quality crisis in modern science.