Category: Perspectives on Science seminar

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.

To join the seminar, please sign up here.

Abstract:

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.

To join the seminar, please sign up here.

Abstract:

“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.

To join the seminar, please sign up here.

Abstract:

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.

To join the seminar, please sign up here.

Abstract:

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.

To join the seminar, please sign up here.

Abstract:

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.

To join the seminar, please sign up here.

Abstract:

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.

To join the seminar, please sign up 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.

To join the seminar, please sign up here.

Abstract:

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.

To join the seminar, please sign up here.

Abstract:

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.

To join the seminar, please sign up here.

Abstract:

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.