Description
Science has developed significantly over the last century. Scientific research has grown increasingly collaborative, and today most new scientific knowledge is produced by groups in which multiple scientists collaborate in order to combine their knowledge, manpower, materials and other resources in creating results that neither of them could have produced alone. Further, more and more research today cut across disciplinary boundaries in addressing complex problems that reach beyond what can be solved within the individual disciplines. However, at the same time these developments have often been met with skepticism because they were seen to blur accountability and endanger quality control. In this talk, I shall address these developments in science and lay the foundations for a philosophical analysis of the structure and development of contemporary science. In developing this analysis I shall first return to classical accounts in philosophy of science on the structure of science and its development and show their close links to a disciplinary view of science that does not fully capture the interdisciplinary and collaborative practices that characterize science today. I shall therefore offer a renewed account that is based on analyses of the cognitive resources employed in research activities, how these resources relate to domains in a historical process, and the epistemic dependence entailed by the distribution among the scientists engaged in these activities. On this basis, I shall provide an analysis of the tension that seems to be inherent in contemporary science between, on the one side the development towards collaboration and interdisciplinarity, and on the other side classical ideals of individual accountability and community based quality control, and I shall discuss how this tension can be resolved.| Period | 21 Apr 2016 |
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| Event title | Nordic Network in Philosophy of Science |
| Event type | Conference |
| Conference number | 4 |
| Location | EstoniaShow on map |