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.
In the first Perspectives on Science seminar of autumn 2022, Adrian Blau (King’s College London) will give a talk on “The Logic of Inference of Thought Experiments in Moral and Political Philosophy: Scientific Parallels”.
The seminar takes place in hybrid format, both in person at Metsätalo (University of Helsinki) and online via Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 on the 19th of September. To join the seminar, please contact jessica.north@helsinki.fi for the location details 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:
Thought experiments are a key tool in political theory and philosophy, but they remain controversial. I first justify thought experiments in new ways, for instance by showing their role in conceptual analysis, and by denying the false dichotomy between ‘real’ examples and hypothetical thought experiments. I then highlight important and largely overlooked parallels between thought experiments in political philosophy and comparison in the natural and social sciences. This gives us powerful tools for testing and improving thought experiments, by using ideas like internal and external validity, controlled comparison, omitted variable bias, interaction effects, spurious correlations, testable implications, and parsimony. Focusing on variables is the key. This helps me address longstanding debates about ‘weird’ and ‘wacky’ thought experiments. Without exaggerating the scientific parallels – there are also important differences – this paper shows significant links between political philosophy and political science, and offers new insights into whether and how to use thought experiments, and about their limitations.
Author bio:
Adrian Blau was an undergraduate at Cambridge and did his Masters and PhD in Oxford. Since 2011 he has worked in the Political Economy department at King’s College London, where he is now a professor. He edited the first ever textbook in political theory methods, Methods in Analytical Political Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and has published more than 10 articles and book chapters on the methodology of history of political thought, including articles in the American Journal of Political Science (“How [not] to use the history of political thought for contemporary purposes”, 2021) and the Journal of Politics (“Anti-Strauss”, 2012). He also works on democratic theory and practice, on post-truth politics, on rationality, on Habermas, and on the political theory of Thomas Hobbes.
The seminar program for autumn 2022 is here, with international experts giving talks on their recent research as well as upcoming and published papers. This semester the seminar will be organised in hybrid format, with the possibility of in-person meetings as well as keeping the option to join via Zoom.
The seminar runs on a bi-weekly basis, the first session being on the 19th of September with Adrian Blau from King’s College London giving a talk on The Logic of Inference of Thought Experiments in Moral and Political Philosophy: Scientific Parallels.
Everyone is welcome to join! See the seminar page for updates and to attend.
In the last Perspectives on Science seminar of the semester, on Monday 6.6., Paul Thagard (University of Waterloo) will give a presentation titled “MisInformation: How Information Works, Breaks, and Mends”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45 EET.
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.
JOINING THE SEMINARS: To get a link for joining the seminars in Zoom, please contact research assistant jessica.north@helsinki.fi
Abstract:
Barack Obama has described disinformation as the single biggest threat to democracy. Misinformation is also threatening medicine, science, politics, social justice, and international relations, in problems such as vaccine hesitancy, climate change denial, conspiracy theories, claims of racial inferiority, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Dealing with misinformation requires explanation of how information is generated and spread, and how it breaks down but can be mended. This talk offers a new theory of information and misinformation that provides concrete advice on how improved thinking and communication can benefit individuals and societies.
Author bio:
Paul Thagard is a philosopher, cognitive scientist, and author of many interdisciplinary books. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo, where he founded and directed the Cognitive Science Program. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Association for Psychological Science. His books include the 3-book Treatise on Mind and Society published by Oxford University Press in 2019. In October 2021, MIT Press published his Bots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart? In July, 2022, Columbia University Press will publish Balance: How it works and what it means. He is now working on a book on misinformation and planning a book on complex consciousness.
At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 23.5., Antoinette Baujard (Université Jean Monnet) will give a presentation titled “Ethical values and scientific integrity in normative economics”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45.
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.
JOINING THE SEMINARS: To get a link for joining the seminars in Zoom, please contact research assistant jessica.north@helsinki.fi
Abstract:
This talk aims at discussing minimal criteria of scientific integrity in economics when social welfare is eventually the main challenge, as notably in welfare economics or in social choice theory. It is based on a typology of views regarding the positive-normative demarcation in normative economics (Baujard, A. Values in Welfare Economics, 2021, in Ch. 15: Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Economics, Conrad Heilmann and Julian Reiss Eds.). Elaborating on this typology, I first show that the best practices of scientific integrity should logically differ depending on how demarcation is viewed; I however emphasize that transparency rules and attention to entanglement issues remain prominent in every case. Second, focusing on normative transparency, I elaborate on a case study in voting theory, based on the experiment of different voting rules in French presidential elections: I defend my own view on the positive-normative demarcation, and the associated required values of scientific integrity in normative economics.
Author bio:
Antoinette Baujard is a Professor of Economics at Université Jean Monnet and a member of CNRS GATE Lyon Saint-Etienne. Her research is based on reflexive studies (concretely history and philosophy of science) on how economics deals with normative issues. It is meant to convey pragmatic knowledge regarding the properties of instruments of public decision, such as methods of evaluation of public policies, voting procedures, deliberative processes. She published papers in journals such as the Journal of Economic Methodology, Social Choice and Welfare, or The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, and book review in journals such as Economics and Philosophy, History of Political Economy or Oeconomia. Her last book, Welfare theory, public action and ethical values, co-edited with Roger Backhouse and T. Nishizawa, and published in 2021 at Cambridge University Press, revisited the history of welfare economics.
At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 9.5., Karoliina Pulkkinen (University of Helsinki) will give a presentation titled “Values in climate modelling: testing the practical applicability of the Moral Imagination ideal”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45.
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.
There is much debate on how social values should influence scientific research. However, the question of practical applicability of philosophers’ normative proposals has received less attention. In this talk, I test the attainability of Matthew Brown’s (2020) Moral Imagination ideal (MI ideal), which aims to help scientists to make warranted value-judgements through reflecting on goals, options, values, and stakeholders of research. The MI ideal is applied to a climate modelling setting, where researchers are developing aerosol-cloud interaction parametrizations of a model with the broader goal of improving climate sensitivity estimation. After the identification of minor hinders to applying the MI ideal, I propose two more substantial ways for developing it further. First, its tools should be accompanied with more concrete guidance for identifying how social values enter more technical decisions in scientific research. Second, since research projects can have multiple goals, examining the alignment between the broader societal aims of research and the more technical goals should be part of the tools of the MI ideal.
Author bio:
Karoliina Pulkkinen is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki’s Aleksanteri Institute. Currently she is working on a project on the role of values in science in the Soviet Union with the aim of determining how past science can inform philosophers’normative guidance regarding the management of social, political, and epistemic values in scientific practice. She received her PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge. Her previous postdoc was at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in a project titled Values, Choices, and Uncertainties in Climate Modelling, which was a 2-year collaboration between philosophers and climate scientists in Stockholm. Her research articles have appeared in Philosophy of Science, Centaurus, and Ambix. Her recent comment for Nature Climate Change can be accessed here.
At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 28.3., Monika Krause (LSE) will give a presentation titled “Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45.
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.
Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites
Drawing on a comparison between the use of model systems in biology and practices in the social sciences, I distinguish between the material research object (what researchers study) and the epistemic research object (what researchers are trying to understand) to ask how social scientists chose the former. The selection of research objects is influenced by a range of ideological but also by mundane factors. Eurocentrism and historicist ideas about development over time, convenience, schemas in the general population and schemas particular to specific scholarly communities all sponsor some objects over others. Some research objects, which I call ‘model cases’, are studied repeatedly and shape our understanding of more general ideas in disproportionate ways. I discuss how an analysis of such patterns in collective knowledge production matter with a view to a discussion about collective, as well as individual methodology.
Author bio:
Monika Krause is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics.
She is the author of Model Cases: Canonical Research Objects in the Social Sciences. (University of Chicago Press 2021), “On Sociological Reflexivity”, Sociological Theory (2021) and “Comparative Research: Beyond linear-causal explanation”, in: Joe Deville, Michael Guggenheim and Zusanna Hrldckova (ed). Practising Comparison. Logics. Relations, Collaborations (Mattering Press 2016).
At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 28.3., Alessandra Basso (University of Helsinki) will give a presentation titled “Concepts of inequality and their measurement”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45.
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.
Inequality is a thick concept, because it is not simply descriptive, but implies a moral evaluation too (1). Scientists and policymakers use the term ‘inequality’ to describe the empirical distribution of a certain resource across a population. But the concept also suggests a departure from some sort of desirable equity, and therefore calls for a moral judgment about which equality is socially desirable. For instance, an influential handbook about Development Economics defines inequality as “the fundamental disparity that permits one individual certain material choices, while denying another individual those very same choices” (2). Multiple factors contribute to permit or deny these choices. This definition, therefore, reflects a broad conception of inequality, which includes multiple dimensions (income, wealth, education, freedom, etc.) and encompasses both inequality in opportunities and inequality in outcomes. When it comes to producing empirical knowledge about inequality, however, the concept of inequality is redefined as a technical term, which is narrower and deprived of its evaluative content. For measurement purposes, income inequality is defined as “a property of a variable’s frequency distribution within a population” (3). National statistical agencies, for instance, measure income inequality among households with Gini coefficients, and this measurement, in turn, depends on precise definitions of income and household, and requires choosing weighting systems and statistical tools.
The reliance on narrow, technical terms raises concerns about the significance and the reliability of the empirical knowledge produced on the bases of these concepts. How relevant are these measurements for the broader, thick concepts implementers are interested in? In contemporary scientific literature, there is increasing awareness that inequality is multidimensional and morally-charged, and scientists have developed strategies to address this issue. Some works developed the idea that inequalities about other aspects of people’s well-being (like health, nutrition, education, and political freedoms) should be measured too (4). Others, instead, bring in a subjective conception of inequality, and measure people’s perceptions about inequality and their demand for redistribution (5). My paper discusses the potentials and limitations of these strategies. Both strategies have the potential to enrich the empirical knowledge based on narrow, technical terms and can provide a broader view. However, I argue that they face challenges that pull in opposite directions, and therefore are hardly compatible.
The measurement of multiple dimensions of social inequality faces the problem that no measurement can take into account all aspects of inequality at the same time (and scientists disagree about which aspects should be taken into account and why). If the concept of inequality is too broad, it may be unsuitable for use in science and policy. In subjective measurements of inequality, instead, it is difficult to trace the different factors that contribute to people’s perceptions and concerns, and this brings about issues of conceptual clarity. It is difficult to intervene directly on people’s perceptions in order to disentangle different factors, and the effects of interventions are hardly traceable (6). Subjective conceptions of inequality, therefore, tend to be much broader than objective concepts, even when these are enriched with multiple dimensions.
(1) Anderson, E. (2002). Situated knowledge and the interplay of value judgments and evidence in scientific inquiry. In In the scope of logic, methodology and philosophy of science (pp. 497–517). Springer.
(2) Ray (1998).Development Economics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
(3) McGregor, Thomas, Brock Smith, and Samuel Wills. 2019. “Measuring Inequality.” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 35 (3): 368–95.
(4) Chancel, L., Piketty, T., Saez, E., Zucman, G. et al. World Inequality Report 2022, World Inequality Lab.
(5) Ciani, Fréget, Manfredi (2022) Learning about inequality and demand for redistribution: A meta-analysis of in-survey informational experiments, OECD papers on Well-being and inequalities No. 02.
(6) Eronen, M. I. and Bringmann, L. F. (2021). The theory crisis in psychology: How to move forward. Perspectives on Psychological Science 16(4), 779-788.
Author bio:
Alessandra Basso is a PhD candidate at the University of Helsinki’s TINT centre for the Philosophy of Social Science. In 2022, she will join the Department of History and Philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge as a Newton International Fellow, funded by The British Academy. She received an MA in Philosophy from the University of Bologna and an MSc in Philosophy of the Social Science from the London School of Economics. Her doctoral dissertation concerns the epistemology of measurement in the social sciences, in psychology and psychiatry; it explores measurement practices in these fields and the specific challenges they face. Her current research focuses on the conceptual and methodological foundations of inequality measurement. Her articles have appeared in European Journal of Philosophy of Science, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, and The British Journal for Philosophy of Science.
At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 14.3., Keith Tribe (Tartu University) will give a presentation titled “Constructing Economic Science”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45.
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.
“My new book Constructing Economic Science traces the transition of political economy from a form of public knowledge and political counsel into an academic science, mastery of which required systematic training. While the first three-year degree in economics was created in Cambridge in 1903, this was an inflection of an international argument for the development of commercial education, in Britain strongly represented in Manchester and then later by the LSE. The appointment of Robbins, who was hostile to commercial education, to a chair in economics at the LSE in 1929 fostered the creation of a replicable economics curriculum that structured the major British textbooks to the end of the century. But there was little interest in the UK outside school, college and university for graduates in economics. In general, British university education in the humanities and social sciences stalled in mid-century at the level of undergraduate education chiefly for lack of labour market demand for graduates, while in the United States graduate training developed strongly from the 1940s.
My presentation will first outline the “standard story” of the history of economics, which emphasises theoretical development, and suggest instead that an emphasis on teaching and the labour market provides a more promising line of analysis. I show how a “discipline” is the construct of academic institutions, rather than a process of progressive theoretical refinement.”
Author bio:
“Originally with a degree in sociology from the University of Essex in 1971, I did my postgraduate work from 1972 to 1975 at Cambridge, and my post-doctoral studies in Heidelberg and Göttingen 1979-1985. I was initially employed at the University of Keele to teach sociology, then in 1984 switched to the Department of Economics, retiring as Reader in Economics in 2002. From 2002 to 2013 I worked as a part-time rowing coach at King’s School Worcester and as a professional translator, also from 2005 teaching on the third year History of Economic Thought course at the University of Birmingham. I am currently an Associate Professor of History at Tartu University, Estonia.
My principal publications are: Land, Labour and Economic Discourse, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1978. (trans.) R. Koselleck, Futures Past, MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 1985/2004. Governing Economy. The Reformation of German Economic Discourse 1750-1840, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1988. Strategies of Economic Order. German Economics 1750-1950, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1995/2007. The Economy of the Word. Language, History, and Economics, Oxford University Press, New York 2015. (trans.) Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man and Letters to Prince Frederick Christian von Augustenburg, Penguin, London 2016. (trans.) Max Weber, Economy and Society. A New Translation, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 2019.”
At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 14.2., Remco Heesen (University of Western Australia) will give a presentation titled “How to Measure Credit ”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45.
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.
There is a rapidly growing body of research on the epistemic consequences of the credit economy. This research investigates how scientists’ motivations, in particular their desire to be credited with important discoveries, affect their decisions regarding what science gets done and how it gets done, and whether this is likely to make for epistemically effective scientific communities. I briefly review this literature and highlight a commonly used assumption: that scientists are expected credit maximizers. This only makes sense if we assume credit can be quantified and measured on a so-called interval scale. Why should we think this? I propose three arguments for interval-scaled credit and expected credit maximization: one based on counting citations, one based on conjoint measurement, and one based on von Neumann-Morgenstern lotteries. I consider advantages and disadvantages of each and conclude that the latter is the most convincing.
Author bio:
Remco Heesen is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy (tenure track) at the University of Western Australia as well as a postdoctoral researcher (2019–2023) at the University of Groningen, funded by an NWO Veni grant. His research analyzes the social structure of science using a combination of philosophical analysis and formal methods. Recent work focuses on the epistemic consequences of scientists’ decisions regarding journal publications. How and why do scientists choose to share a given result rather than keeping it secret? How do scientists make the tradeoff between speed and accuracy in deciding how long to work on a project before attempting to publish it? What role does peer review play in the social structure of science, and how can this be improved?
At the first Perspectives on Science seminar of the year on Monday 24.1., Dunja Šešelja (Eindhoven University of Technology) will give a presentation titled “Scientific Disagreements, Fast Science and Higher-Order Evidence”, based on work co-authored with Daniel Cserhalmi Friedman. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45.
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.
Scientific disagreements are commonly considered an important catalyst of scientific progress. But what happens if scientists disagree while society is depending on them for quick yet reliable results? In this paper we aim to provide a normative account for how scientists facing disagreement in the context of ‘fast science’ should respond, and how policy makers should evaluate such disagreement. Starting from an argumentative, pragma-dialectic account of scientific controversies (Rodriguez & Zamora Bonilla 2013), we argue for the importance of ‘higher-order evidence (HOE)’, which has largely been neglected in previous discussions on scientific disagreements and controversies. We specify roles that HOE can play in the handling of scientific disagreements and provide guidelines for how scientifically relevant HOE is acquired. We illustrate our point with a recent disagreement on the aerosol transmission of the COVID-19 virus.
Author bio:
Dunja Šešelja is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Science and Technology at TU Eindhoven. She serves as an Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal for Philosophy of Science. Previously, she held visiting professorships at the University of Vienna and Ghent University, and postdoctoral positions at Ghent University, Ruhr-University Bochum, and MCMP, LMU Munich. Her research focuses on social epistemology of science and at the integration of historically informed philosophy of science and formal models of scientific inquiry. She is the PI of the DFG Research Network “Simulations of Scientific Inquiry” with the core at MCMP, LMU Munich.
At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 13.12., Samuli Reijula (University of Helsinki) will give a presentation titled “Division of cognitive labor: The costs and benefits of interdisciplinarity”, based on work co-authored with Jaakko Kuorikoski and Miles MacLeod. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45.
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.
Interdisciplinarity in its many forms is aggressively promoted in science policy across the world. It is seen as a necessary condition for providing practical solutions to pressing complex problems for which no single disciplinary approach can single handedly hold all the required answers. In this paper we model multi- and interdisciplinary research as an instance of collective problem-solving. Our goal is to provide a basic representation of this type of problem-solving and chart the epistemic benefits and costs of researchers engaging in different forms of cognitive coordination. Forms of cognitive coordination often found in multidisciplinary research projects result in a conservative bias, which hinders progress in tasks requiring collaborative interdisciplinary problem solving.
Author bio:
Samuli Reijula is an Academy of Finland research fellow (2020-2025) and university lecturer in theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki.
At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 29.11., Säde Hormio (University of Helsinki) will give a presentation titled “Bad epistemic neighbourhoods”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45.
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.
The epistemic neighbourhoods we are born and live in have a heightened importance when it comes to issues such as climate change, where we have to trust experts. It would be unfair to hold most people blameworthy for their false beliefs regarding climate change given the complexities of climate science and the sophistication of the misinformation machine. Instead of concentrating on culpable individual ignorance, I will suggests that in some cases a more fruitful line of enquiry is to look at who impacts the epistemic community. This will also alleviate concerns about possible responsibility gaps as collective agents can be responsible for an individual’s ignorance through creating misinformation. We can roughly divide the collective agents that have polluted our epistemic neighbourhoods in relation to climate change into those that have done so for ideological reasons (ideological deniers), and those that have done so due to other considerations, such as profit and protecting their bottom line (cynical sceptics), although in practice these conceptual categories can overlap.While the goal of ideological deniers is to make other epistemic agents climate deniers, for the purposes of cynical sceptics, it is enough to create suspending ignorance about climate science at the level of public debate.
Author bio:
Säde Hormio is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Practical Philosophy, University of Helsinki, and part of the TINT research group. Her research focuses on shared and collective responsibility. She is also interested in questions to do with social epistemology, of knowledge and ignorance, and the mechanisms that can cause institutional ignorance, either deliberately or by accident.
At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 22.11., Julie Zahle (University of Bergen) will give a presentation titled “Reactivity in Qualitative Data Collection”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45.
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.
PLEASE NOTE: If you registered for this talk on 15.11. that was cancelled, the same Zoom invitation is still valid. You do not need to sign up again.
Abstract:
Reactivity in qualitative data collection occurs when the research participants are influenced by the researcher during data collection, as exemplified by the research participants diverging from their routines in the presence of the researcher or by their telling the researcher what they think she wants to hear. In qualitative research, there are two basic approaches to reactivity. The traditional position maintains that data should be uncontaminated by reactivity since data otherwise fail to be informative about social life independently of its being studied. In short, good data are reactivity-free. By contrast, the more recent view holds that data about situations with reactivity are also informative about social life independently of its being studied. This is the case insofar as the researcher is aware of the reactivity and takes it into account when drawing inferences from her data.
Thus far, the more recent approach to reactivity has not been spelled out and defended in any detail. In this paper, I take on this task. More precisely, I argue that good data are reactivity-transparent, and I consider the implications of this view for the practice of qualitative data collection. Further, I briefly indicate how my reflections on reactivity-transparent data contribute to recent philosophical discussions of data quality.
Author bio:
Julie Zahle is associate professor at University of Bergen. Her main area of research is the philosophy of the social sciences. In particular, she works on qualitative methods, values and objectivity in science, the individualism/holism debate, social theories of practice, and the philosophy of anthropology and sociology.
At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 8.11., Katherine Furman (University of Liverpool) will give a presentation titled “Epistemic Bunkers”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45.
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.
One reason that fake news and other objectionable views gain traction is because they often come to us in the form of testimony from those in our immediate social circles; from those we trust. A language around this phenomenon has developed which describes social epistemic structures of “epistemic bubbles” and “epistemic echo chambers”. These concepts involve the exclusion of external evidence in various ways. While these concepts help us see the ways that evidence is socially filtered, it doesn’t help us understand the social functions that these structures play, which limits our ability to intervene on them. In this paper, I introduce a new concept – that of the epistemic bunker. This concept helps us better account for a central feature of the phenomenon, which is that exclusionary social epistemic structures are often constructed to offer their members safety, either actual or perceived. Recognising this allows us to develop better strategies for mitigating their negative effects.
Author bio:
Katherine is a lecturer in the University of Liverpool Philosophy Department. She is a philosopher of public policy and works closely with social scientists. Currently, she is working mostly on issues of public distrust in science. She has previously worked in Cork and in Durham. Her PhD was in philosophy at the London School of Economics.
At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 1.11., Dingmar van Eck (University of Amsterdam) will give a presentation titled “Mechanist Idealisation in Systems Biology”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45.
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.
This paper adds to the philosophical literature on mechanistic explanation by elaborating two related explanatory functions of idealisation in mechanistic models. The first function involves explaining the presence of structural/organizational features of mechanisms by reference to their role as difference-makers for performance requirements. The second involves tracking counterfactual dependency relations between features of mechanisms and features of mechanistic explanandum phenomena. To make these functions salient, we relate our discussion to an exemplar from systems biological research on the mechanism for countering heat shock—the heat shock response (HSR) system—in Escherichia coli (E.coli) bacteria. This research also reinforces a more general lesson: ontic constraint accounts in the literature on mechanistic explanation provide insufficiently informative normative appraisals of mechanistic models. We close by outlining an alternative view on the explanatory norms governing mechanistic representation.
Author bio:
Dingmar van Eck is assistant professor in philosophy of science at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and postdoctoral researcher in philosophy of science at Ghent University, Belgium. His research focuses on scientific explanation, explanatory power, and scientific methods. His current research is focused on a variety of issues related to scientific explanation in various scientific disciplines, such as biology, engineering science, cognitive science, and neuroscience, as well as general issues concerning scientific explanation. Recent research foci have been, inter alia, roles of idealizations in explanatory models in systems biology, the explanatory value of dynamical models in cognitive science, the applicability of philosophical accounts of mechanism discovery to cognitive scientific practice, and explications of inference to the best explanation in failure analysis in engineering science. What unites these investigations is a pluralist approach to the study of scientific explanation that takes seriously (and makes precise) the idea that scientific explanation is not a unitary notion but, rather, that different kinds of scientific explanation are suited for different explanatory requests.
At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 25.10., Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) will give a presentation titled “Public Engagement and Argumentation in Science” (joint work with Silvia Ivani). The seminar takes place in Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45.
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.
Public engagement is one of the fundamental pillars of the European programme for research and innovation Horizon 2020. The programme encourages engagement that not only fosters science education and dissemination, but also promotes two-way dialogues between scientists and the public in various stages of research. Establishing dialogues between scientists and different groups of societal actors is seen as crucial to attain both epistemic and social desiderata in science. However, whether these dialogues can actually help with the attainment of these desiderata is far from obvious. This paper discusses the costs, risks, and benefits of dialogical public engagement practices and proposes a strategy to analyse these argumentative practices, based on a three-tiered model of epistemic exchange. As a case study, we discuss the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy, arguably a result of suboptimal public engagement, and show how the proposed model can shed new light on the problem.
Author bio:
Catarina Dutilh Novaes is Professor of Philosophy and University Research Chair at the VU Amsterdam, and Professorial Fellow at Arché, St. Andrews. Her work spans over different areas of philosophy, including history and philosophy of logic, philosophy of mathematics, argumentation, and social epistemology, and is characterized by sustained engagement with other disciplines such as psychology, cognitive science, mathematics, computer science, history, and the social sciences. She is the author of numerous articles and three monographs, including Formal Languages in Logic (CUP, 2012) and The Dialogical Roots of Deduction (CUP, 2020). From 2018 to 2023 she is leading the ERC-Consolidator project ‘The Social Epistemology of Argumentation’, which aims at formulating a realistic account of the role of argumentation in processes of producing and sharing knowledge, which can be used to analyze concrete instances of argumentation in different domains such as politics and science.
At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 18.10., Michiru Nagatsu (University of Helsinki) will give a presentation titled “Behavioral economics for sustainability? A critical review”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45.
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.
It is now widely accepted that behavioral economics is not one of so-called heterodox schools of thought anymore, but a part of mainstream economics with nontrivial impact on policy: ‘we are all behavioral economists now’, as Angner (2019) provocatively declares. Experimental anomalies such as the framing effect and preference reversals shock the axiomatic foundations of economic theory some fifty years ago, but a new academic equilibrium has now been established around the idea of new behavioral synthesis: psychology understood as cognitive and affective mechanisms that make people’s behavior deviate from the models of rational choice can be fruitfully integrated into the economic analysis of individual and interactive decision making by pragmatically and flexibly modifying assumptions, up to a point. Although the minority still complain that this approach is a ‘neoclassical economics in disguise’ (e.g. Berg and Gigerenzer 2010), the main focus has shifted largely from the empirical questions of whether some assumptions of choice models need to be modified or abandoned, to normative implications of stylized behavioral anomalies (e.g. Sugden 2018).
In contrast to the ascent of behavioral economics, ecological economics, which emerged around the same time (Boulding 1966; Spash 2013), remains strikingly heterodox, despite the prominence of the sciences on which it is based (e.g. Rockström et al. 2009). In this talk, instead of directly exploring reasons for the contrasting trajectories of the two schools, I start from another type of questions arising as a side-effect of this contrast: How can behavioral economics—which has been more ‘successful’ in a way than ecological economics so far—help us solve the ongoing ecological crises? I provide a preliminary review of a range of approaches, such as (1) nudge and boost for pro-environmental behavioral change; (2) improve neoclassical environmental economics by behavioral insights; to (3) argue for economic policy change (e.g., abandoning GDP as an indicator to guide policy) based on behavioral insights. I argue that none of them, independently or jointly, guide us in systematically and sufficiently resolving the cur- rent crises, which makes it urgent for methodologists to tackle the original question: Why are we not all ecological economists yet? Is there something fundamentally wrong with economic thinking?
Author bio:
Michiru Nagatsu is an associate professor in Practical Philosophy (Faculty of Social Sciences) and Methodologies for Inter- and Transdisciplinary Sustainability Science (Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science). His work includes philosophy of emotion, experimental philosophy of science, as well as philosophy of economics.
At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 11.10., Diane Coyle (University of Cambridge) will give a talk on her upcoming book “Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45.
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.
Digital technology, big data, big tech, machine learning, and AI are revolutionizing both the tools of economics and the phenomena it seeks to measure, understand, and shape. In Cogs and Monsters, Diane Coyle explores the enormous problems—but also opportunities—facing economics today if it is to respond effectively to these dizzying changes and help policymakers solve the world’s crises, from pandemic recovery and inequality to slow growth and the climate emergency.
Mainstream economics, Coyle says, still assumes people are “cogs”—self-interested, calculating, independent agents interacting in defined contexts. But the digital economy is much more characterized by “monsters”—untethered, snowballing, and socially influenced unknowns. What is worse, by treating people as cogs, economics is creating its own monsters, leaving itself without the tools to understand the new problems it faces. In response, Coyle asks whether economic individualism is still valid in the digital economy, whether we need to measure growth and progress in new ways, and whether economics can ever be objective, since it influences what it analyzes. Just as important, the discipline needs to correct its striking lack of diversity and inclusion if it is to be able to offer new solutions to new problems.
Author bio:
Professor Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Diane co-directs the Bennett Institute where she heads research under the themes of progress and productivity. Her new book ‘Cogs and Monsters’ looks at how economics needs to change, while her previous book, ‘Markets, State and People – Economics for Public Policy’ examines how societies reach decisions about the use and allocation of economic resources.
Diane is also a Director of the Productivity Institute, a Fellow of the Office for National Statistics, an expert adviser to the National Infrastructure Commission, and Senior Independent Member of the ESRC Council. She has served in public service roles including as Vice Chair of the BBC Trust, member of the Competition Commission, of the Migration Advisory Committee and of the Natural Capital Committee. Diane was Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester until March 2018 and was awarded a CBE for her contribution to the public understanding of economics in the 2018 New Year Honours.
Her books include GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History, The Economics of Enough, The Soulful Science, and The Weightless World. Her recent papers have been published by Science, Review of International Political Economy, Nature, Antitrust Law Journal, and Regional Studies.
