A Falsificationist Treatment of Auxiliary Hypotheses in Social and Behavioral Sciences:Systematic Replications Framework

Auxiliary hypotheses (AHs) are indispensable in hypothesis-testing, because without them specification of testable predictions and consequently falsification is impossible. However, as AHs enter the test along with the main hypothesis, non-corroborative findings are ambiguous. Due to this ambiguity, AHs may also be employed to deflect falsification by providing “alternative explanations” of findings. This is not fatal to the extent that AHs are independently validated and safely relegated to background knowledge. But this is not always possible, especially in the so-called “softer” sciences where often theories are loosely organized, measurements are noisy, and constructs are vague. The Systematic Replications Framework (SRF) provides a methodological solution by disentangling the implications of the findings for the main hypothesis and the AHs through pre-planned series of systematically interlinked close and conceptual replications. SRF facilitates testing alternative explanations associated with different AHs and thereby increases test severity across a battery of tests. In this way, SRF assesses whether the corroboration of a hypothesis is conditional on particular AHs, and thus allows for a more objective evaluation of its empirical support and whether post hoc modifications to the theory are progressive or degenerative in the Lakatosian sense. Finally, SRF has several advantages over randomization-based systematic replication proposals, which generally assume a problematic neo-operationalist approach that prescribes exploration-oriented strategies in confirmatory contexts

Kommunikaatio ja persoonuuden alkuperä

Kommunikaatio ja persoonuuden alkuper

Collective scientific knowledge without a collective subject

Large research collaborations constitute an increasingly prevalent form of social organization of research activity in many scientific fields. In the last decades, the concept of distributed cognition has provided a suitable basis for thinking about collective knowledge in the philosophy of science. Karin Knorr-Cetina’s and Ronald Giere’s analyses of high energy physics experiments are the most prominent examples. Although they both conceive the processes of knowledge production in these experiments in terms of distributed cognition, their accounts regarding the epistemic subject of knowledge thus produced are quite different. While Knorr-Cetina argues for an irreducibly collective subject, Giere argues for eliminating the epistemic subject and opting for using the passive voice in describing collectively produced knowledge. Neither of these views are easy to assimilate within an epistemological account, since epistemology traditionally operates within an individualist framework. They both entail that we should deny knowledge to individuals when the processes of knowledge production are distributed. I will argue that epistemology should be extended in a way that can accommodate collectively produced knowledge, but that we would have a serious problem if we deny scientific knowledge to individuals. If the members of a large collaboration cannot be said to know, we have to accept the absurd conclusion that either no one or only a supra-individual entity learns from the most successful research collaborations we have. I will argue instead for conceiving research collaborations in terms of a cognitive system that produces (not possesses) knowledge, which can eventually be possessed (though not produced) by constituent individuals when certain conditions are met. Firstly, the distributed research process should be reliable in producing scientific evidence and secondly, there should be a reliable distributed process of criticism for scrutinizing the reliability of the scientific evidence that is collectively produced. I will analyze both conditions in terms of distributed first-order and second-order justification, where I put forward a reliabilist account of justification that is compatible with epistemic dependence. I will conclude that the notion of justified epistemic dependence enables us to attribute knowledge to individuals when knowledge production is irreducibly social

We Should Redefine Scientific Expertise: An Extended Virtue Account

An expert is commonly considered to be somebody who possesses the right kind of knowledge and skills to find out true answers for questions in a domain. However, this common conception that focuses only on an individual’s knowledge and skills is not very useful to understand the epistemically interdependent nature of contemporary scientific expertise, which becomes increasingly more relevant due to the rise of large interdisciplinary research collaborations. The typical scientific expert today relies substantially on complex scientific instruments and numerous other experts in forming expert judgment. Moreover, we have research collaborations where multiple scientists interact in a way that gives rise to distributed cognitive systems, which can act as a single informant. Accordingly, our concept of scientific expertise should not consist only in individual knowledge and skills, but also accommodate epistemic dependence and collective knowledge production. To this aim, this paper proposes a reconstruction of the concept of scientific expertise as informant reliability by building on the virtue-epistemological account of epistemic competences and theories of extended and distributed cognition. Considered in reference to the social epistemic function of expertise, a scientific expert should be conceived as a reliable informant in a scientific domain, which implies that when consulted on matters in that domain they assert competently, honestly, and completely. Competent expert assertion involves the epistemic responsibility to draw on nothing but the highest degree of epistemic competence relevant to the given context. Thus, being a reliable informant may require one to draw on an extended epistemic competence that goes beyond one’s individual competence, or to form supra-individual or group-informants that manifest collectively the kind of complex epistemic competence required for the investigation of certain research questions

Communication and the Origins of Personhood

This thesis presents a communicative account of personhood that argues for the inseparability of the metaphysical and the practical concepts of a person. It connects these two concepts by coupling the question “what is a person” (concerning the necessary conditions of personhood) with the question "how does one become a person"(concerning its genetic conditions). It argues that participation in social interactions that are characterized by mutual recognition and giving-and-taking reasons implied by the practical concept of a person is in fact an ecological and developmental condition for an entity to possess the kind of characteristics and capacities such as reflexive self-consciousness addressed by the metaphysical concept. The chief theoretical contribution of the dissertation research lies, accordingly, in demonstrating that an adequate metaphysical concept of a person has to make reference to the kind of social processes that are necessary for the emergence and development of the distinguishing attributes of persons among other moving, perceiving, desiring and cognizing agents. Methodologically, it undertakes an original philosophical analysis that is enriched by an interdisciplinary investigation of several notions and insights from semiotics, comparative and developmental psychology, cognitive science and anthropology. The main argument of the thesis is that one becomes a person through internally recreating a social, communicative process; namely, that of dialogical transformation of habits. We find the paradigmatic case of this social process in mutual persuasion. The internalization of this process in the form of an inner dialogue cultivates a social self that is in ongoing communication with the embodied, organismic self of uncritically habituated attitudes, convictions and desires. This inner dialogue can be conceived as a temporally extended process of self-persuasion, which is characterized by an ongoing strive for attaining higher degrees of self-control; that is, for achieving a more coherent alignment between our habits and the kind of person we would like to be. It starts with self-interpretation and self-evaluation, and culminates in the formation of higher-order desires that facilitate habit-change and novel habit formation in accordance with certain social, moral, aesthetical or intellectual categories and norms one comes to endorse. For this reason, self-induced, deliberate habit-change is also a process of appropriation or self-appropriation, through which we strive to cultivate habits of feeling, thinking, acting that we can deem more truly ours. The thesis demonstrates that the capacity for engaging in this kind of self-persuasion consists chiefly in the capacities for metasemiosis, perspective-taking, and for cultivating habits of reflexivity. It explicates how all these capacities have a social origin and ultimately a social function by showing that they all presuppose certain higher-order communicative patterns that arose through an evolutionary and cultural history, and develop through the internal reconstruction of these patterns as cognitive-semiotic processes. The thesis concludes that becoming a kind of being who can engage in self-persuasion, thus a person, consists ultimately in internalizing the patterns of communicative social interactions in the form of an ongoing auto-communication.  Väitöskirjassa käsitellään persoonuuden kommunikatiivista prosessia ja osoitetaan, että persoonan metafyysiset ja käytännölliset käsitteet ovat erottamattomat. Nämä kaksi käsitettä yhdistetään tarkastelemalla kysymyksiä ”mikä on persoona” ja ”miten tullaan persoonaksi”. Väitöskirjassa osoitetaan, että osallistuminen sosiaaliseen kanssakäymiseen, johon kuuluu persoonan käytännön käsitteeseen kuuluva vastavuoroinen tunnustaminen sekä kompromissi, on itse asiassa entiteetin ekologinen ja kehityksellinen olotila, jossa se saavuttaa piirteitä ja taitoja, kuten persoonan metafyysisen käsitteen mukainen refleksiivinen itsetietoisuus. Väitöskirjan keskeinen teoreettinen tavoite on osoittaa, että persoonan onnistuneessa metafyysisessä käsitteessä on otettava huomioon sosiaaliset prosessit, jotka ovat välttämättömiä persoonan erityisten attribuuttien kehittymiselle, kuten liikkuminen, havaitseminen, haluaminen sekä kognitiiviset agentit. Väitöskirjan metodologia koostuu filosofisesta analyysista, jota monitieteisesti rikastutetaan semiotiikan, vertailevan ja kehityspsykologian, kognitiivisten tieteiden ja antropologian lähestymistavoilla. Väitöskirjan keskeinen teesi on, että agentista tulee persoona, kun se luo uudestaan sisäisesti sosiaalisen, kommunikatiivisen prosessin, toisin sanoen tapojen dialogisen transformaation kautta. Tämän sosiaalisen prosessin paradigmaattinen esimerkki on molemminpuolinen vakuuttaminen. Sen sisäistäminen sisäisen dialogin muotoon kehittää sosiaalista minuutta, joka on jatkuvassa kommunikaatiossa epäkriittisten asenteiden, vakaumusten ja halujen elimellisesti ruumiillistuneen minän kanssa. Tämä sisäinen dialogi voidaan mieltää itsensä suostuttelun prosessiksi. Itsensä suostuttelu on jatkuva pyrkimys saavuttaa itsehillinnän korkeampia tasoja, toisin sanoen saattaa yhteen tapamme ja se persoona, joka haluaisimme olla. Se alkaa itsearviolla ja huipentuu niiden ylevämpien halujen muodostumiseen, jotka edistävät persoonan tapojen muutosta niiden tiettyjen sosiaalisten, moraalisten, esteettisten ja intellektuaalisten normien mukaisesti, joita yksilö alkaa noudattamaan. Tästä syystä itse toteutettu tapojen muutos on myös itsensä hallitsemisen prosessi, jonka kautta me voimme kehittää tapoja, joita pidämme aidommin ominamme. Väitöskirja osoittaa, että taito ryhtyä itsensä suostutteluun muodostuu pääsääntöisesti kyvystä metasemioosiin, perspektiivin ottamisesta sekä refleksiivisyyden kehittämisestä. Se esittää, että kaikilla näillä taidoilla on sosiaalinen alkuperä ja viime kädessä sosiaalinen merkitys, osoittamalla, että ne kaikki edellyttävät tiettyjä ylevämpiä kommunikatiivisia malleja, jotka nousevat kehitys- ja kulttuurihistoriasta ja kehittyvät näiden mallien sisäisen rekonstruktion kautta kognitiivis-semioottisina prosesseina. Lopuksi väitöskirja osoittaa, että tuleminen sellaiseksi olevaksi, joka voi toteuttaa itsensä suostuttelun, toisin sanoen persoonaksi, muodostuu viime kädessä sosiaalisen kanssakäymisen kommunikatiivisten mallien sisäistämisestä jatkuvan autokommunikaation muodossa.

The subject of knowledge in collaborative science

The epistemic subject of collective scientific knowledge has been a matter of dispute in recent philosophy of science and epistemology. Following the distributed cognition framework, both collective-subject accounts (most notably by Knorr-Cetina, in Epistemic Cultures, Harvard University Press, 1999) as well as no-subject accounts of collective scientific knowledge (most notably by Giere, Social Epistemology 21:313–320, 2007; in Carruthers, Stich, Siegal (eds), The Cognitive Basis of Science, Cambridge University Press, 2002a) have been offered. Both strategies of accounting for collective knowledge are problematic from the perspective of mainstream epistemology. Postulating genuinely collective epistemic subjects is a high-commitment strategy with little clear benefits. On the other hand, eliminating the epistemic subject radically severs the link between knowledge and knowers. Most importantly, both strategies lead to the undesirable outcome that in some cases of scientific knowledge there might be no individual knower that we can identify. I argue that distributed cognition offers us a fertile framework for analyzing complex socio-technical processes of contemporary scientific knowledge production, but scientific knowledge should nonetheless be located in individual knowers. I distinguish between the production and possession of knowledge, and argue that collective knowledge is collectively produced knowledge, not collectively possessed knowledge. I propose an account of non-testimonial, expert scientific knowledge which allows for collectively produced knowledge to be known by individuals

We Should Redefine Scientific Expertise: An Extended Virtue Account

An expert is commonly considered to be somebody who possesses the right kind of knowledge and skills to find out true answers for questions in a domain. However, this common conception that focuses only on an individual’s knowledge and skills is not very useful to understand the epistemically interdependent nature of contemporary scientific expertise, which becomes increasingly more relevant due to the rise of large interdisciplinary research collaborations. The typical scientific expert today relies substantially on complex scientific instruments and numerous other experts in forming expert judgment. Moreover, we have research collaborations where multiple scientists interact in a way that gives rise to distributed cognitive systems, which can act as a single informant. Accordingly, our concept of scientific expertise should not consist only in individual knowledge and skills, but also accommodate epistemic dependence and collective knowledge production. To this aim, this paper proposes a reconstruction of the concept of scientific expertise as informant reliability by building on the virtue-epistemological account of epistemic competences and theories of extended and distributed cognition. Considered in reference to the social epistemic function of expertise, a scientific expert should be conceived as a reliable informant in a scientific domain, which implies that when consulted on matters in that domain they assert competently, honestly, and completely. Competent expert assertion involves the epistemic responsibility to draw on nothing but the highest degree of epistemic competence relevant to the given context. Thus, being a reliable informant may require one to draw on an extended epistemic competence that goes beyond one’s individual competence, or to form supra-individual or group-informants that manifest collectively the kind of complex epistemic competence required for the investigation of certain research questions

We Should Redefine Scientific Expertise: An Extended Virtue Account

An expert is commonly considered to be somebody who possesses the right kind of knowledge and skills to find out true answers for questions in a particular domain. However, this common conception that focuses only on an individual’s knowledge and skills is not very useful to understand the social epistemic dimension and the epistemically interdependent nature of contemporary scientific expertise, which becomes increasingly more relevant due to the rise of large interdisciplinary research collaborations. The typical scientific expert today relies substantially on complex scientific instruments and numerous other experts in forming expert judgment. Accordingly, our concept of expertise should not consist only in individual knowledge and skills, but also accommodate technological and social forms of epistemic dependence, which the paper analyses under the notion of extended epistemic competence. To this aim, this paper proposes a virtue-theoretical reconstruction of the concept of expertise as informant reliability. Considered in reference to the social epistemic function of expertise, an expert should be conceived as a reliable informant in a particular domain, which implies that when consulted on matters in that domain she asserts competently, honestly and completely. Competent expert assertion involves the epistemic responsibility to draw on nothing but the highest degree of epistemic competence relevant to the given context. Thus, being a reliable informant may require one to draw on an epistemic competence that goes beyond one’s individual competence and to assert on the basis of an extended competence, which involves epistemic dependence on external sources

The epistemic and pragmatic function of dichotomous claims based on statistical hypothesis tests

Researchers commonly make dichotomous claims based on continuous test statistics. Many have branded the practice as a misuse of statistics and criticize scientists for the widespread application of hypothesis tests to tentatively reject a hypothesis (or not) depending on whether a p-value is below or above an alpha level. Although dichotomous claims are rarely explicitly defended, we argue they play an important epistemological and pragmatic role in science. The epistemological function of dichotomous claims consists in transforming data into quasibasic statements, which are tentatively accepted singular facts that can corroborate or falsify theoretical claims. This transformation requires a prespecified methodological decision procedure such as Neyman-Pearson hypothesis tests. From the perspective of methodological falsificationism these decision procedures are necessary, as probabilistic statements (e.g., continuous test statistics) cannot function as falsifiers of substantive hypotheses. The pragmatic function of dichotomous claims is to facilitate scrutiny and criticism among peers by generating contestable claims, a process referred to by Popper as “conjectures and refutations.” We speculate about how the surprisingly widespread use of a 5% alpha level might have facilitated this pragmatic function. Abandoning dichotomous claims, for example because researchers commonly misuse p-values, would sacrifice their crucial epistemic and pragmatic functions.</p

Collective epistemic vice in science: Lessons from the credibility crisis

We investigate the explanatory role of epistemic virtue in accounting for the success (or failure) of science as a social institution that is characterized by predominantly epistemic ends. Several structural explanations of the epistemic success of science that commonly rule out virtue attributions to scientists are explored in reference to a case of collective epistemic vice; namely, the credibility crisis in the social and behavioral sciences. These accounts underline the social structure of science as the chief explanatory factor in its collective success, and endorse a common conclusion, namely that individual virtue is neither necessary nor sufficient for science to be successful. While acknowledging that divergent motivations and behaviors might also serve the collective goals of science, our analysis of the credibility crisis shows that the presence of a significant proportion of epistemically virtuous scientists in a scientific community is a necessary condition for collective epistemic success in a scientific community