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    Can we play science?: philosophical perspectives on participation in science research

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    Tese de mestrado, História e Filosofia da Ciência, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2015Podemos jogar ciência? Abordagens contemporâneas oferecem a possibilidade de participar na investigação científica. Muitas destas abordagens são feitas através duma gamificação da investigação científica usando a internet e ferramentas da Web 2.0, enquanto outras têm abordagens comunitárias que não estão dependentes do on-line. Como um trabalho de Filosofia da Ciência, este estudo preocupa-se sobre o significado de tal transformação. Isabelle Stengers é próxima à prática científica e sabe como o cientista é definido pelas suas paixões, por uma forma de se reportar ao mundo (Stengers 1993). No seu trabalho encontramos um ímpeto para re-inventar, re-enquadrar como as ciências se relacionam com a especialidade e a democracia. Será que estas abordagens participativas podem fazê-lo? Será que uma nova ciência está em movimento? Considerando as três ecologias de Félix Guattari, do nível mental, ao social, ao ambiental, ele considera que um valor maior se ganha abordando os diversos níveis de prática na sua singularidade (Guattari 1989). Neste estudo, um conjunto diverso de práticas participativas são investigadas, como os jogos de ciência cidadã Foldit e CosmoQuest e as redes de Do-It-Yourself biology e Nouveaux Commanditaires Sciences. Ciência cidadã on-line lida com desafios concretos apresentados à investigação científica e coloca novas questões científicas, contando com a contribuição cognitiva de cidadãos. Há uma quantidade enorme de informação e continua a aumentar. Este “conhecimentointensivo-em-informação” dá foco a inferências sintéticas, como o processo de fazer hipóteses, a abducção. Seguindo Charles Sanders Peirce, verificamos como o raciocínio abductivo construiu muitas perspectivas de interesse na epistemologia e filosofia da ciência. Seguindo cronologicamente o pensamento Peirciano, viajamos da fundação da retroducção nos silogismos aristotélicos até à sua aplicação numa lógica de ícones, em que as premissas se tornam em imagens. A partir da interacção com o ecrã onde a ciência é um jogo, a iconicidade dos elementos ganham relevo. Em segundo lugar, focando no conceito de experiência, tomamos a filosofia de John Dewey. Ele não tem a solidez lógica de Peirce, mas parece mais sistemático. Na interacção entre sujeito e natureza, o conhecimento torna-se instrumental. “Coisas na experiência” específicas servem como guias, como características que são sinais, índices de algo que prevalece na experiência. O que guia as inferências é parte da experiência do sujeito e envolve uma ligação entre a consciência e a natureza, que substancia uma ligação ao “universo completo”. O naturalismo empírico de Dewey faz um contraste interessante com o pensamento diagramático Peirciano.Para Dewey, qualquer esperança duma lógica da descoberta está perdida. Também o Pragmaticismo de Peirce não está preocupado com consequências práticas, como o Pragmatismo clássico. Em comum, sem dúvidas, está a importância dada à experiência. Considerando o nível social, usamos a emergência de esferas públicas como enquadradas por Habermas para ter um entendimento mais fino de como ferramentas online como os forums contribuem para o esforço intelectual conjunto da ciência cidadã virtual. Para participar no uso público da razão, é preciso de ser capaz de o fazer. O modelo heavyweight de produção de pares têm altos valores limites à participação. Mais, o papel do gatekeeper é criado, que pode ser reconhecido quando se abrem as portas da prática científica em jogos on-line, tal como nos salões franceses do século XVII. Outros jogos de investigação cientifica, como CosmoQuest e Zoo Universe têm valores limite à participação mais baixos. Quem quer que se registre, consegue imediatamente uma oportunidade para 'fazer ciência', usando as suas capacidades cognitivas para com os objectos no ecrã. O que é tida em linha de conta é o voto da maioria, pois muitos jogadores recebem a mesma imagem. Cientistas profissionais já assinam artigos científicos em publicações bem cotadas com peer-review. Assim é o caso do Foldit, do Polymath e do Galaxy Zoo. Interessantemente, muitos são assinados sobre um nome colectivo, que se relaciona com este enquadramento colectivo. Em tensão, existe uma dimensão agonal muito presente na gamificação da investigação científica. Há uma relevância dada ao pacto de competição, equivalente ao contrato de Agon. Colan Duclos dá ênfase ao elementos de tensão, stress, aleatoriedade e incerteza que fazem o jogo agonal. Um terceiro nível em análise é o político. Seguindo o argumento de uma re-encenação da comunidade de iguais com Jacques Rancière vemos que a comunidade de iguais: (i) é parte da interacção aleatória entre o que está lá e o que força a mudança; (ii) é fundamentalmente um processo de partilha; (iii) refere-se a um evento equalitário anterior e a um texto equalitário. O texto equalitário do movimento Do-It-Yourself biology corresponde ao Biocommons white paper. Ali está circunscrita uma forma inclusiva de abordar os comuns, a incluir não só “bens naturais”, como água, ar, terra, mas também organismos inteiros, processos bioquímicos e outras descobertas e conceitos biológicos e bioquímicos feitos pelo Homem. Biotecologia tem, então, com o Do-It-Yourself Biology, uma nova visão política e económica baseada na igualdade. Ainda, seguido o raciocínio de Rancière, podemos ver como este movimento tem que lidar com a desigualdade da organização social, tal como os fundados de Icaria tiveram que fazer no passado. Mas isto não significa por força que um tal empreendimento está fadado a fracassar. O “significador equalitário” que é agora parte integrante da sua identidade pode-se desvainecer, tal como o antigo apeiron grego, o desejo sem-limites pode enfraquecer. Se há perspectivas de ciência cidadã em favor do progresso e aceleração, outros querem desacelerar, tal como com os Nouveaux Commanditaires Sciences (NCS), pois a desconstrucção da investigação científica, no sentido de a fazer mais socialmente inclusiva, precisa de tempo. Inspirada pela emancipação de Freire, NCS usa a investigação científica para fazer trabalho comunitário. Acreditamos que participar na investigação científica é um acto de empoderamento. A aventura da Emancipação Intelectual foi aquela que juntou Rancière e Jacotot no livro de 1987 Le maître ignorant : cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle. A lição do poeta no âmago do método de Jacotot é feita para soltar a vontade, para ser um participante activo. As decisões que vêm da sociedade que têm decisores em tópicos que concernem à comunidade científica é um tópico em discussão nos estudos sociais da ciência. Para Funtowicz e Ravetz uma exigência que vem dum decisor seria interpretado como um caso de ciência pós-normal, no sentido de legitimar a expertise de outros actores em decisões políticas. Em oposição, Collins tem dúvidas sobre o reconhecimento de expertises locais ao mesmo nível que a investigação científica. Ele preferiria criar ambientes nos quais o foco seria reconhecer e compreender a atitude científica. Em relação à descoberta de Jacotot, a educação está em tal relação com a não-educação, tal como a emancipação intelectual está para o embrutecimento. NCS e Jacotot estão, antes de mais, focados na dimensão da emancipação, enquanto Collins, a par de muitas outras iniciativas, estão focados na pedagogia. A ciência cidadã on-line está a crescer em número de participantes, projectos e escala. Estas soluções lidam com desafios novos concretos à investigação científica que parecem fadados a ser mais desenvolvidos. Podeser mais do que uma moda ou uma linha de fuga. Podemos estar perante uma re-territorialização destas abordagens massivas à investigação científica. Do outro lado da moeda, os movimentos contra-progressistas também lidam com uma resingularização da investigação científica. Este jogo é possível, mas a escala e eficiência deste processo de heterogénese continua por qualificar.Can we play science? Contemporary approaches offer the possibility of participation in science. Many of these approaches are done through a gamification of science research done using the internet and web2.0 tools, while others, have community-based approaches that aren't exclusive to the on-line environment. As a work of Philosophy of Science, this study is concerned about the meaning of such transformation. Isabelle Stengers is a close relative to scientific practice and knows how the scientist is defined by his or hers passions, by a way of reporting to the world (Stengers 1993). Inspired by the three Ecologies of Félix Guattari, we engage the diverse levels of practice in their singularity (Guattari 1989). In this study, a diverse set of participative practices are researched in connection to relevant philosophical perspectives. “Data-intensive knowledge” brings forward the synthetic inferences, as the process of making hypothesis, abduction. From the interaction with the screen, the iconicity of the elements come forward. Following Charles Peirce, we travel from the foundation of retroduction in the Aristotelian syllogisms to the application of abduction in a logic of icons, in that the premisses become images. Focusing on the concept of experience we take John Dewey's philosophy. The experience to the subject involves a connection to the “complete universe”. Dewey's empirical naturalism, gives an interesting contrast to Peirce's diagrammatic reasoning. Considering a social level, we use the emergence of Habermasian public spheres. To participate to a public use of reason, one needs to be able to do it. Moreover, the role of the gatekeeper is crafted, that can be recognized when opening the gates of scientific practice in on-line citizen science games. In tension, there's an agonal dimension very much present in the gamifications of science research. On a political level we follow Jacques Rancière, and see how Do-It-Yourself biology statement of equality will have to deal with the inequality of social organization. Just as the “egalitarian signifier” that is part of its identity might fade away, as the old greek apeiron, the unbound desire might get dimmer. If there are perspectives of citizen science as in favor of progress and acceleration, others want to decelerate, as with Nouveaux Commanditaires Sciences (NCS). On the work of Rancière we see that education is in such relation to uneducation, as intellectual emancipation is to stultification, giving an insight into a dispute at Social Studies of Science. On-line citizen science might signify a reterritorialization of this massive approaches to science research. On the other side of the coin, the counter movements of progress also deal with a resingularisation of science research. This play seems feasible, but the scale and efficiency of this heterogenesis process remains unaccounted

    String Theory, Non-Empirical Theory Assessment, and the Context of Pursuit

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    In this paper, I offer an analysis of the radical disagreement over the adequacy of string theory. The prominence of string theory despite its notorious lack of empirical support is sometimes explained as a troubling case of science gone awry, driven largely by sociological mechanisms such as groupthink (e.g. Smolin 2006). Others, such as Dawid (2013), explain the controversy by positing a methodological revolution of sorts, according to which string theorists have quietly turned to nonempirical methods of theory assessment given the technological inability to directly test the theory. The appropriate response, according to Dawid, is to acknowledge this development and widen the canons of acceptable scientific methods. As I’ll argue, however, the current situation in fundamental physics does not require either of these responses. Rather, as I’ll suggest, much of the controversy stems from a failure to properly distinguish the “context of justification” from the “context of pursuit”. Both those who accuse string theorists of betraying the scientific method and those who advocate an enlarged conception of scientific methodology objectionably conflate epistemic justification with judgements of pursuit-worthiness. Once we get clear about this distinction and about the different norms governing the two contexts, the current situation in fundamental physics becomes much less puzzling. After defending this diagnosis of the controversy, I’ll show how the argument patterns that have been posited by Dawid as constituting an emergent methodological revolution in science are better off if reworked as arguments belonging to the context of pursuit

    Is abduction ignorance-preserving? Conventions, models and fictions in science

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    Abduction is a procedure in which something that lacks classical explanatory epistemic virtue can be accepted because it has virtue of another kind: Gabbay and Woods (2005, The Reach of Abduction) contend (GW-model) that abduction presents an ignorance-preserving or (ignorance-mitigating) character. From this perspective abductive reasoning is a response to an ignorance-problem; through abduction the basic ignorance—that does not have to be considered a total ‘ignorance’—is neither solved nor left intact. Abductive reasoning is an ignorance-preserving accommodation of the problem at hand. Is abduction really ignorance-preserving? To better answer this question I will take advantage of my eco-cognitive model (EC-model) of abduction and of three examples taken from the areas of both philosophy and epistemology. It will be illustrated that through abduction, knowledge can be enhanced, even when abduction is not considered an inference to the best explanation (IBE) in the classical sense of the expression, i.e. an inference necessarily characterized by an empirical evaluation phase, or an inductive phase, as Peirce called it. (1) Peirce provides various justifications of the knowledge enhancing role of abduction, even when abduction is not considered an IBE in the classical sense of the expression, i.e. an inference necessarily characterized by an empirical evaluation phase, or inductive phase. These justifications basically resort to the conceptual exploitation of evolutionary and metaphysical ideas, which clearly show that abduction is constitutively akin to truth, even if certainly always ignorance-preserving or mitigating in the sense that the ‘absolute truth’ is never reached through abduction; (2) in empirical science abducing conventions favours and increases knowledge even if these hypotheses remain evidentially inert—at least in the sense that it is not possible to empirically falsify them. Consequently abduced conventions are evidentially inert but knowledge enhancing at the rational level of science; (3) in science we do not have to confuse the process of abducing models with the process of abducing fictions: the recent epistemological conundrum concerning fictionalism presents to us the epistemic situation in which the models abduced by scientists reveal themselves not to be ‘airy nothings’ at all, and certainly different in their gnoseological status from literary fictions. Scientific models instead play fundamental ‘rational’ knowledge enhancing roles: in a static perspective (e.g. when inserted in a textbook) scientific models can appear fictional to the epistemologist, but their fictional character disappears if a dynamic perspective is adopted. Abduction in scientific model-based reasoning is not a suspicious process of guessing fictions

    Peirce in contemporary semiotics

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    This essay traces the fortunes of Peirce in contemporary semiotics. Although many accounts of the development of semiotics refer to both Peirce and Saussure as founding fathers of modern sign study, the tangled history of semiotics in the contemporary academy is far less straightforward. Furthermore, general Peirce scholarship has taken routes that do not always converge with those of semiotics. The essay therefore evaluates the shortcomings and successes of Peircean endeavour in semiotics. In appraising the place of Peirce in contemporary semiotics, close attention is paid to the 69-page review of Short's book, Peirce's Theory of Signs, by John Deely (2006) as an example of what is at stake in respect of the issues covered in the essay

    Peirce in contemporary semiotics

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    This essay traces the fortunes of Peirce in contemporary semiotics. Although many accounts of the development of semiotics refer to both Peirce and Saussure as founding fathers of modern sign study, the tangled history of semiotics in the contemporary academy is far less straightforward. Furthermore, general Peirce scholarship has taken routes that do not always converge with those of semiotics. The essay therefore evaluates the shortcomings and successes of Peircean endeavour in semiotics. In appraising the place of Peirce in contemporary semiotics, close attention is paid to the 69-page review of Short's book, Peirce's Theory of Signs, by John Deely (2006) as an example of what is at stake in respect of the issues covered in the essay

    Teaching Peirce to Undergraduates

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    Fourteen philosophers share their experience teaching Peirce to undergraduates in a variety of settings and a variety of courses. The latter include introductory philosophy courses as well as upper-level courses in American philosophy, philosophy of religion, logic, philosophy of science, medieval philosophy, semiotics, metaphysics, etc., and even an upper-level course devoted entirely to Peirce. The project originates in a session devoted to teaching Peirce held at the 2007 annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. The session, organized by James Campbell and Richard Hart, was co-sponsored by the American Association of Philosophy Teachers

    Hypothesis Generation and Pursuit in Scientific Reasoning

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    This thesis draws a distinction between (i) reasoning about which scientific hypothesis to accept, (ii) reasoning concerned with generating new hypotheses and (iii) reasoning about which hypothesis to pursue. I argue that (ii) and (iii) should be evaluated according to the same normative standard, namely whether the hypotheses generated/selected are pursuit worthy. A consequentialist account of pursuit worthiness is defended, based on C. S. Peirce’s notion of ‘abduction’ and the ‘economy of research’, and developed as a family of formal, decision-theoretic models. This account is then deployed to discuss four more specific topics concerning scientific reasoning. First, I defend an account according to which explanatory reasoning (including the ‘inference to the best explanation’) mainly provides reasons for pursuing hypotheses, and criticise empirical arguments for the view that it also provides reasons for acceptance. Second, I discuss a number of pursuit worthiness accounts of analogical reasoning in science, arguing that, in some cases, analogies allow scientists to transfer an already well-understood modelling framework to a new domain. Third, I discuss the use of analogies within archaeological theorising, arguing that the distinction between using analogies for acceptance, generation and pursuit is implicit in methodological discussions in archaeology. A philosophical analysis of these uses is presented. Fourth, diagnostic reasoning in medicine is analysed from the perspective of Peircean abduction, where the conception of abduction as strategic reasoning is shown to be particularly important

    Knowledge-based Design:

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    The assumptions underlying this book are that urban & regional design can be developed into a societally relevant science, that this depends on the view held regarding the significance of urban & regional design to society, and what is considered to be the object of the discipline derived from this view. The author bases these assumptions on the knowledge and insights she has acquired during the last fifteen years; the first ten years within the Chair of Urban & Regional Design, and after that within the Chair of Spatial Planning, both of the Faculty of Architecture of the Delft University of Technology

    Rationality in discovery : a study of logic, cognition, computation and neuropharmacology

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    Part I Introduction The specific problem adressed in this thesis is: what is the rational use of theory and experiment in the process of scientific discovery, in theory and in the practice of drug research for Parkinson’s disease? The thesis aims to answer the following specific questions: what is: 1) the structure of a theory?; 2) the process of scientific reasoning?; 3) the route between theory and experiment? In the first part I further discuss issues about rationality in science as introduction to part II, and I present an overview of my case-study of neuropharmacology, for which I interviewed researchers from the Groningen Pharmacy Department, as an introduction to part III. Part II Discovery In this part I discuss three theoretical models of scientific discovery according to studies in the fields of Logic, Cognition, and Computation. In those fields the structure of a theory is respectively explicated as: a set of sentences; a set of associated memory chunks; and as a computer program that can generate the observed data. Rationality in discovery is characterized by: finding axioms that imply observation sentences; heuristic search for a hypothesis, as part of problem solving, by applying memory chunks and production rules that represent skill; and finding the shortest program that generates the data, respectively. I further argue that reasoning in discovery includes logical fallacies, which are neccesary to introduce new hypotheses. I also argue that, while human subjects often make errors in hypothesis evaluation tasks from a logical perspective, these evaluations are rational given a probabilistic interpretation. Part III Neuropharmacology In this last part I discusses my case-study and a model of discovery in a practice of drug research for Parkinson’s disease. I discuss the dopamine theory of Parkinson’s disease and model its structure as a qualitative differential equation. Then I discuss the use and reasons for particular experiments to both test a drug and explore the function of the brain. I describe different kinds of problems in drug research leading to a discovery. Based on that description I distinguish three kinds of reasoning tasks in discovery, inference to: the best explanation, the best prediction and the best intervention. I further demonstrate how a part of reasoning in neuropharmacology can be computationally modeled as qualitative reasoning, and aided by a computer supported discovery system
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