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

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

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