Grounding knowledge and normative valuation in agent-based action and scientific commitment

Philosophical investigation in synthetic biology has focused on the knowledge-seeking questions pursued, the kind of engineering techniques used, and on the ethical impact of the products produced. However, little work has been done to investigate the processes by which these epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical forms of inquiry arise in the course of synthetic biology research. An attempt at this work relying on a particular area of synthetic biology will be the aim of this chapter. I focus on the reengineering of metabolic pathways through the manipulation and construction of small DNA-based devices and systems synthetic biology. Rather than focusing on the engineered products or ethical principles that result, I will investigate the processes by which these arise. As such, the attention will be directed to the activities of practitioners, their manipulation of tools, and the use they make of techniques to construct new metabolic devices. Using a science-in-practice approach, I investigate problems at the intersection of science, philosophy of science, and sociology of science. I consider how practitioners within this area of synthetic biology reconfigure biological understanding and ethical categories through active modelling and manipulation of known functional parts, biological pathways for use in the design of microbial machines to solve problems in medicine, technology, and the environment. We might describe this kind of problem-solving as relying on what Helen Longino referred to as “social cognition” or the type of scientific work done within what Hasok Chang calls “systems of practice”. My aim in this chapter will be to investigate the relationship that holds between systems of practice within metabolic engineering research and social cognition. I will attempt to show how knowledge and normative valuation are generated from this particular network of practitioners. In doing so, I suggest that the social nature of scientific inquiry is ineliminable to both knowledge acquisition and ethical evaluations

The Field-tested and Grounded Technological Rule as Product of Mode 2 Management Research �

management, research

Coordinating Spatial Referencing Using Shared Gaze

To better understand the problem of referencing a location in space under time pressure, we had two remotely located partners (A, B) attempt to locate and reach consensus on a sniper target, which appeared randomly in the windows of buildings in a pseudorealistic city scene. The partners were able to communicate using speech alone (shared voice), gaze cursors alone (shared gaze), or both. In the shared-gaze conditions, a gaze cursor representing Partner A’s eye position was superimposed over Partner B’s search display and vice versa. Spatial referencing times (for both partners to find and agree on targets) were faster with shared gaze than with speech, with this benefit due primarily to faster consensus (less time needed for one partner to locate the target after it was located by the other partner). These results suggest that sharing gaze can be more efficient than speaking when people collaborate on tasks requiring the rapid communication of spatial information. Supplemental materials for this article may be downloaded from http://pbr.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental

Participatory Sense-making as Consensual Validation of Phenomenal Data

This article proposes a method for consensually validating phenomenal data. Such a method is necessary due to underreporting of explicit validation procedures in empirical phenomenological literature. The article argues that descriptive sciences – exemplified by phenomenology and natural history – rely on nominalization for construction of intersubjectively accessible knowledge. To this effect, epistemologies of phenomenology and natural history are compared. The two epistemological frameworks differ in terms of their attitudes towards the interpretation of texts and visual epistemology, however, they both rely on eidetic intuition of experts for knowledge construction. In developing the method of consensual validation, I started out with the prismatic approach, a method for researching embodied social dynamics. I then used debriefings on the experience of consensual validation to further refine the method. The article suggests that for a nominalization of experiential world to be intersubjectively accessible, such a vocabulary must be independently constructed by the entire group of co-researchers. I therefore propose that during consensual validation, co-researchers be presented with composite descriptions of experiential categories, compare them with their experience, attempt to falsify them, and finally jointly name them. This approach does not yield a single vocabulary for description of experience, but several commensurable vocabularies, contingent on a specific research setting

Proceedings of the ECCS 2005 satellite workshop: embracing complexity in design - Paris 17 November 2005

Embracing complexity in design is one of the critical issues and challenges of the 21st century. As the realization grows that design activities and artefacts display properties associated with complex adaptive systems, so grows the need to use complexity concepts and methods to understand these properties and inform the design of better artifacts. It is a great challenge because complexity science represents an epistemological and methodological swift that promises a holistic approach in the understanding and operational support of design. But design is also a major contributor in complexity research. Design science is concerned with problems that are fundamental in the sciences in general and complexity sciences in particular. For instance, design has been perceived and studied as a ubiquitous activity inherent in every human activity, as the art of generating hypotheses, as a type of experiment, or as a creative co-evolutionary process. Design science and its established approaches and practices can be a great source for advancement and innovation in complexity science. These proceedings are the result of a workshop organized as part of the activities of a UK government AHRB/EPSRC funded research cluster called Embracing Complexity in Design (www.complexityanddesign.net) and the European Conference in Complex Systems (complexsystems.lri.fr). Embracing complexity in design is one of the critical issues and challenges of the 21st century. As the realization grows that design activities and artefacts display properties associated with complex adaptive systems, so grows the need to use complexity concepts and methods to understand these properties and inform the design of better artifacts. It is a great challenge because complexity science represents an epistemological and methodological swift that promises a holistic approach in the understanding and operational support of design. But design is also a major contributor in complexity research. Design science is concerned with problems that are fundamental in the sciences in general and complexity sciences in particular. For instance, design has been perceived and studied as a ubiquitous activity inherent in every human activity, as the art of generating hypotheses, as a type of experiment, or as a creative co-evolutionary process. Design science and its established approaches and practices can be a great source for advancement and innovation in complexity science. These proceedings are the result of a workshop organized as part of the activities of a UK government AHRB/EPSRC funded research cluster called Embracing Complexity in Design (www.complexityanddesign.net) and the European Conference in Complex Systems (complexsystems.lri.fr)

Rational determination and the prism of the first person

In “How Facts Make Law”, Mark Greenberg argues that any plausible theory of law must meet what he calls “the rational determination requirement”. In short, this requirement supposes that any explanation of legal facts calls for a kind of interpretation of the role of institutional practice therein. Heeding this requirement will show that a full constitutive account of law includes not only social facts but also normative facts. In this thesis, I argue that we have no reason to accept Greenberg’s rational determination doctrine. I make this argument in two stages. First, I proceed by giving an account of the reasons that substantiate rational determination. Most prominently, the need for rational determination in law arises out of the arbitrariness of “brute” ontological determination. As far as brute determination is concerned, there can be endlessly different and inconsistent mappings from complete sets of law-determining facts to complete sets of legal facts, and there is nothing in the determining facts themselves to choose between one mapping or another. Since the legal domain cannot simply be brute, Greenberg argues that there must be an epistemic adequacy constraint playing a role in the metaphysical relation. This constraint is furnished by the doctrine of rational determination. According to rational determination, a given legal fact exists only insofar as it is intelligible for all rational creatures which aspects of the law practices support that legal fact and how. Second, I continue by presenting my case against rational determination. I start by making explicit what I take to be the main premise of Greenberg’s argument: as far as legal practices are concerned, it is ontologically indeterminate how they inferentially yield legal propositions. I argue that this assumption follows from Greenberg’s particular conception of legal practices as including only contents that are publicly available from the third-person perspective. My strategy consists in rejecting rational determination by offering a reductio ad absurdum of its premises: if it is true that the legal domain is indeterminate, then certain fundamental distinctions and notions we know independently to be valid from the first-person perspective would be lost. I push my case forward by challenging the assumption that legal understanding supposes drawing inferences from the more basic determining facts. I argue that the intentional structure of the legal domain is such that we can have non-inferential knowledge of legal facts. If this line of reasoning is right, then the legal domain is not indeterminate, and Greenberg’s rational determination happens to be simply the familiar underdetermination of hypothesis by empirical evidence, an ordinary epistemic problem that plays no role in the metaphysical determination relation. The conclusion is that, contrary to what contemporary interpretivism suggests, legal understanding can be explanatorily prior to interpretation

Adam Smith and the Modern Science

Third-party decision-makers, or spectators, have emerged as a useful empirical tool in modern social science research on moral motivation. Spectators of a sort also serve a central role in Adam Smith\u27s moral theory. This paper compares these two types of spectatorship with respect to their goals, methodologies, visions of human nature and emphasis on moral rules. I find important similarities and differences and conclude that this comparison suggests significant opportunities for philosophical ethics to inform empirical and theoretical research on moral preferences and vice versa