This paper aims to contribute to the attempts to clarify and classify the vague notion of “technosciences” from a historical perspective. A key question that is raised is as follows: Does Francis Bacon, one of the founding fathers of the modern age, provide a hitherto largely undiscovered programmatic position, which might facilitate a more profound understanding of technosciences ? The paper argues that nearly everything we need today for an ontologically well-informed epistemology of technoscience can be found in the works (...) of Bacon—this position will be called epistemological real - constructivism. Rather than realist or constructivist, empiricist or rationalist, Bacon’s position can best be understood as real-constructivist since it challenges modern dichotomies. Reflection upon the contemporary relevance of Bacon could contribute to the expanding and critical discussion on technoscience. In the following I will reconstruct the term “technoscience”. My finding is that at least four different understandings or types of the term “technoscience” co-exist. In a second step, I will analyze and elaborate on Bacon’s epistemological position. I will identify central elements of the four different understandings in Bacon’s work. Finally, I will conclude that the epistemology of technoscience is, indeed, very old—it is the epistemological position put forward by Bacon. (shrink)

Deep learning (DL) has become increasingly central to science, primarily due to its capacity to quickly, efficiently, and accurately predict and classify phenomena of scientific interest. This paper seeks to understand the principles that underwrite scientists’ epistemic entitlement to rely on DL in the first place and argues that these principles are philosophically novel. The question of this paper is not whether scientists can be justified in trusting in the reliability of DL. While today’s artificial intelligence exhibits characteristics common to (...) both scientific instruments and scientific experts, this paper argues that the familiar epistemic categories that justify belief in the reliability of instruments and experts are distinct, and that belief in the reliability of DL cannot be reduced to either. Understanding what can justify belief in AI reliability represents an occasion and opportunity for exciting, new philosophy of science. (shrink)

Despite its potential implications for the objectivity of scientific knowledge, the claim that “scientific instruments are perspectival” has received little critical attention. I show that this claim is best understood as highlighting the dependence of instruments on different perspectives. When closely analyzed, instead of constituting a novel epistemic challenge, this dependence can be exploited to mount novel strategies for resolving two old epistemic problems: conceptual relativism and theory-ladeness. The novel content of this article consists in articulating and developing these strategies (...) by introducing two fine-grained notions of perspectives as the key units of analysis: “broad perspectives” and “narrow perspectives.”. (shrink)

The term " technoscience " gained philosophical significance in the 1970s but it aroused ambivalent views. On the one hand, several scholars have used it to shed light on specific features of recent scientific research, especially with regard to emerging technologies that blur boundaries (such as natural/artificial, machine/living being, knowing/making and so on); on the other hand, as a matter of fact " technoscience " did not prompt great interest among philosophers. In the French area, a depreciative meaning prevails: " (...) technoscience " means the contamination of science by management and capitalism. Some even argue that " technoscience " is not a concept at all, just a buzzword. In this chapter, on the contrary, we make the case for the constitution of a philosophical concept of technoscience based on the characterization of its objects in order to scrutinize their epistemological, ontological, political and ethical dimensions. (shrink)

The existence of a French philosophy of technology is a matter of debate. Technology has long remained invisible in French philosophy, due to cultural circumstances and linguistic specificities. Even though a number of French philosophers have developed views and concepts about technology during the twentieth century, “philosophy of technology” has never been established as a legitimate branch of philosophy in the French academic landscape so far. This book, however, demonstrates that a community of philosophers dealing with various issues related to (...) technology and built up on the legacy of the previous generations has emerged. In gathering scholars with quite diverse theoretical backgrounds and matters of concern, this volume outlines a coherent, albeit heterogeneous, philosophical trend. Five chief characteristics are identified in this introduction: a close connection between history and philosophy, with a focus on the temporalities of technology, the prevalence of the anthropological approach to technology whether it be social anthropology or paleoanthropology, a focus on technological objects that we characterize as a “thing turn” à la française, the dignification of technoscience as a philosophical category, and a pervading concern with ethical issues based on the anthropological interpretation of technology and quite distinct from current trends in applied ethics. (shrink)

Ce texte vise à montrer les ressources variées de la thèse des trois mondes de Karl Popper dans l’analyse des questions liées au statut ontologique des artefacts matériels. Bien qu’elle ait été discutée depuis des années, et qu’elle ait fait l’objet de nombreuses critiques, on n’a presque pas remarqué que la thèse de Popper fournit d’excellentes idées pour la description philosophique des artefacts. Ce texte comprend deux sections. Dans la première, on donne un exposé critique des thèses de Popper quant (...) à la réalité et à l’autonomie des artefacts. La seconde section présente deux arguments. Le premier se concentre sur la composition et les caractéristiques des artefacts matériels, et le second souligne leurs aspects créatifs et épistémiques. (shrink)

Massimiliano Simons provides the first systematic study of Serres' work in the context of late 20th-century French philosophy of science. By proposing new readings of Serres' philosophy, Simons creates a synthesis between his predecessors, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Louis Althusser as well as contemporary Francophone philosophers of science such as Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers. Simons situates Serres' unique contribution through his notion of the quasi-object, a concept, he argues, organizes great parts of Serres' work into a promising philosophy (...) of science as well as a challenge to the narrower field of French epistemology, to which it has often been limited. Simons highlights how the concept encompasses Serres' commitment to positive relations between science and culture and his rejection of pleas to purify the scientific self from imaginative and cultural elements. It helps to situate Serres between the distinct traditions of Bachelard and Latour as well as progressing the innovative aspects of Serres' philosophy for current debates in the philosophy, history, and sociology of science. Showing how Serres' philosophy can serve as a normative approach to science and technology, Michel Serres and French Philosophy of Science takes in themes of materiality, religiosity, modernity and ecology to advance a timely alternative to philosophy of science for contemporary life. (shrink)

This monograph contributes to the scientific misconduct debate from an oblique perspective, by analysing seven novels devoted to this issue, namely: Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (1925), The affair by C.P. Snow (1960), Cantor’s Dilemma by Carl Djerassi (1989), Perlmann’s Silence by Pascal Mercier (1995), Intuition by Allegra Goodman (2006), Solar by Ian McEwan (2010) and Derailment by Diederik Stapel (2012). Scientific misconduct, i.e. fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, but also other questionable research practices, have become a focus of concern for academic communities (...) worldwide, but also for managers, funders and publishers of research. The aforementioned novels offer intriguing windows into integrity challenges emerging in contemporary research practices. They are analysed from a continental philosophical perspective, providing a stage where various voices, positions and modes of discourse are mutually exposed to one another, so that they critically address and question one another. They force us to start from the admission that we do not really know what misconduct is. Subsequently, by providing case histories of misconduct, they address integrity challenges not only in terms of individual deviance but also in terms of systemic crisis, due to current transformations in the ways in which knowledge is produced. Rather than functioning as moral vignettes, the author argues that misconduct novels challenge us to reconsider some of the basic conceptual building blocks of integrity discourse. (shrink)

Despite the vast amount of work produced by philosophers, historians and sociologists on the nature of scientific activity, “observation itself is rarely the focus of attention and almost never the subject of historical inquiry in its own right”. This general lack of interest in the nature of scientific observation was perhaps most clearly reflected in the Vienna Circle’s attempt to establish an analysis of science beginning at the level of protocol sentences. To do so, of course, they had to disregard (...) the humidity and fogged lenses facing the primatologist in the jungle, or the way in which flights aboard military aircraft were once sought by physicists in order to expose... (shrink)

ArgumentBy the year 1720, one could visit at least three large-scale wooden models of Solomon's Temple in the cities of Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Halle. For short periods of time, the Amsterdam and Hamburg Temple models were exhibited in London, where they attracted a great deal of attention. The Halle model, on the other hand, never moved from its original location: a complex of schools known today as the Francke Foundations (die Franckesche Stiftungen). This article explores the reasons for the Halle (...) model's striking immobility by considering its position at the center of a long-distance network, also referred to as the Danish-Halle mission. In this article I argue that the Halle Temple model functioned as an effigy and memory theater that helped proponents of this mission make a case for the Temple's status as the world's first information technology. Young people moved around the wooden model; they took virtual pilgrimages with it and internalized its infrastructure by memorizing its various components. The model's position at the center of the complex's striking ethnographical collection and curricula exposes relations between the Danish-Halle mission, Christian philosophy, and an irenical turn as public policy in early eighteenth-century Brandenburg-Prussia. (shrink)

Personalised medicine has been discussed as a medical paradigm shift that will improve health while reducing inefficiency and waste. At the same time, it raises new practical, regulatory, and ethical challenges. In this paper, we examine PM strategies epistemologically in order to develop capacities to address these challenges, focusing on a recently proposed strategy for developing patient-specific models from induced pluripotent stem cells so as to make individualised treatment predictions. We compare this strategy to two main PM strategies—stratified medicine and (...) computational models. Drawing on epistemological work in the philosophy of medicine, we explain why these two methods, while powerful, are neither truly personalised nor, epistemologically speaking, novel strategies. Both are forms of correlational black box. We then argue that the iPSC models would count as a new kind of black box. They would not rely entirely on mechanistic knowledge, and they would utilise correlational evidence in a different way from other strategies—a way that would enable personalised predictions. In arguing that the iPSC models would present a novel method of gaining evidence for clinical practice, we provide an epistemic analysis that can help to inform the practical, regulatory, and ethical challenges of developing an iPSC system. (shrink)

James Prescott Joule’s (1818–1889) bicentenary took place in 2018 and commemorated by the IDTC with a Symposium—‘James Joule’s Bicentenary: Scientific and Pedagogical Issues Concerning Energy Conservation’—at the European Society for the History of Science (ESHS & BSHS), 14th–17th September, 2018, in London. This symposium had three main objectives: It aimed specifically to celebrate James Joule’s achievements considering the most recent historiographical works with a particular focus on the principle of conservation of energy; It served the purpose of discussing the scientific (...) and pedagogical issues related to heat, energy and work and how they are presented in textbooks and worked out in classrooms; It also provided discussions on the present situation of teaching and learning science through the use of History of Science, both in K-12 and college level with an emphasis on energy and related concepts. In the following, the Introduction of this Special Issue on Joule is presented. (shrink)

Dans cet article, on suggère qu’un rôle central peut être assigné à la philosophie de la chimie dans la philosophie des sciences post-kuhnienne en général, et dans l’analyse du débat opposant le réalisme scientifique à l’anti-réalisme dans la philosophie des sciences standard. La philosophie des sciences construit la science comme une pratique plus que comme un réseau d’assertions. On soutient que le réalisme pratique permet d’éviter les défauts à la fois du réalisme scientifique standard et de l’anti-réalisme. On analyse un (...) livre important publié récemment, B. Bensaude-Vincent’s & J. Simon’s Chemistry — The Impure Science [Bensaude-Vincent & Simon 2008], et on interprète la position des auteurs comme une sorte de réalisme pratique. (shrink)

Dans cet article, on suggère qu’un rôle central peut être assigné à la philosophie de la chimie dans la philosophie des sciences post-kuhnienne en général, et dans l’analyse du débat opposant le réalisme scientifique à l’anti-réalisme dans la philosophie des sciences standard. La philosophie des sciences construit la science comme une pratique plus que comme un réseau d’assertions. On soutient que le réalisme pratique permet d’éviter les défauts à la fois du réalisme scientifique standard et de l’anti-réalisme. On analyse un (...) livre important publié récemment, B. Bensaude-Vincent’s & J. Simon’s Chemistry — The Impure Science [Bensaude-Vincent & Simon 2008], et on interprète la position des auteurs comme une sorte de réalisme pratique. (shrink)

In this paper we disambiguate the design stance as proposed by Daniel C. Dennett, focusing on its application to technical artefacts. Analysing Dennett’s work and developing his approach towards interpreting entities, we show that there are two ways of spelling out the design stance, one that presuppose also adopting Dennett’s intentional stance for describing a designing agent, and a second that does not. We argue against taking one of these ways as giving the correct formulation of the design stance in (...) Dennett’s approach, but propose to replace Dennett’s original design stance by two design stances: an intentional designer stance that incorporates the intentional stance, and a teleological design stance that does not. Our arguments focus on descriptions of technical artefacts: drawing on research in engineering, cognitive psychology and archaeology we show that both design stances are used for describing technical artefacts. A first consequence of this disambiguation is that a design stance, in terms of interpretative assumptions and in terms of the pragmatic considerations for adopting it, stops to be a stance that comes hierarchically between the physical stance and the intentional stance. A second consequence is that a new distinction can be made between types of entities in Dennett’s approach. We call entities to which the intentional designer stance is applied tools and entities to which the teleological design stance is applied instruments, leading to a differentiated understanding of, in particular, technical artefacts. (shrink)

While epistemic justification is a central concern for both contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science, debates in contemporary epistemology about the nature of epistemic justification have not been discussed extensively by philosophers of science. As a step toward a coherent account of scientific justification that is informed by, and sheds light on, justificatory practices in the sciences, this paper examines one of these debates—the internalist-externalist debate—from the perspective of objective accounts of scientific evidence. In particular, we focus on Deborah Mayo’s (...) error-statistical theory of evidence because it is a paradigmatically objective theory of evidence that is strongly informed by methodological practice. We contend that from the standpoint of such an objective theory of evidence, justification in science has both externalist and internalist characteristics. In reaching this conclusion, however, we find that the terms of the contemporary debate between internalists and externalists have to be redefined to be applicable to scientific contexts. (shrink)

The classic approach to science is dominated by the belief that science is a form of cognitive activity that focuses on constructing theories to describe and explain the phenomena and processes found in the world. Due to the fulfilment of the criteria of intersubjective communicability and controllability, theories are considered to be objective products of research activity that do not bear social responsibility for their applications. In this paper, the issue of social responsibility of science is addressed both from the (...) classic perspective and from the non-classic viewpoint represented by laboratory sciences, i.e. those sciences that are predominantly concerned with creating phenomena rather than discovering them. It is argued that whereas in the former case the problem of social responsibility of science does not provoke serious controversy, in the latter case such controversies do exist and, furthermore, they are justified. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the use of companion animals (pets) in studies of drugs and devices aimed at human and animal health and situate it within the context of philosophy of technology. We argue that companion animals serve a unique role in illuminating just what it means to use biological technologies and examine the implications for human-animal relationships. Though philosophers have often treated animals as technologies, we argue that the biomedical use of companion animals presents a new configuration of (...) ethical and technological concerns that deserves more attention. Though it seems that companion animals solve many of the ethical dilemmas caused by the use of laboratory animals, the use of companion animals presents its own set of ethical concerns. This paper contextualizes the use of companion animals in research. (shrink)

The program of intervening, manipulating, constructing and creating is central to natural and engineering sciences. A renewed wave of interest in this program has emerged within the recent practices and discourse of nano-technoscience. However, it is striking that, framed from the perspective of well-established epistemologies, the constructed technoscientific objects and engineered things remain invisible. Their ontological and epistemological status is unclear. The purpose of the present paper is to support present-day approaches to techno-objects ( ontology ) insofar as they make (...) these hidden objects epistemologically perceivable. To accomplish this goal, it is inspiring to look back to the origin of the project of modernity and to its founding father: Francis Bacon. The thesis is that everything we need today for an adequate (dialectic-materialist), ontologically well-informed epistemology of technoscience can be found in the works of Bacon—this position will be called epistemological real-constructivism. Rather than describing it as realist or constructivist, empiricist or rationalist, Bacon’s position can best be understood as real-constructivist since it challenges modern dichotomies, including the dichotomy between epistemology and ontology. Such real-constructive turn might serve to promote the acknowledgement that natural and engineering sciences, in particular recent technosciences, are creating and producing the world we live in. Reflection upon the contemporary relevance of Bacon is intended as a contribution to the expanding and critical discussion on nano-technoscience. (shrink)

Francis Bacon's experimental philosophy is discussed, and the way in which it not only shapes scientific methodology but also deeply pervades all philosophical and social learning. Bacon draws us in to participate in an experiment with experience. The central driving force is the idea that learning how to learn is necessary in order to know. To meet this requirement, he considers the relation of form and content of pivotal importance, and therefore the selection of the literary form and the form (...) of data inscription is decisive in the construction of a heuristic tool. His inductive method serves a dual purpose: first, the so-called indicative form aims at securing knowledge by a comprehensible procedure that controls and guides hypothetical thinking. Second, the literary forms "fragment" and "aphorism" embody the subjunctive, and invite intellectual openness and even speculation. In this article, special emphasis is put on Bacon's use and justification of the aphorism. Bacon's pervasive experimentalism meets in some sense today's broad adoption of the experimental mode. His philosophy calls for an ontology that is also at work in recent notions of co-action and co-working, or of affordance. (shrink)

: This paper is concerned with the claim that epistemic terms and categories are historical entities. The starting point is the observation that recent attempts at historical studies of epistemic terms fail to bridge the gap between history and philosophy proper. I examine whether, and how, it is possible to forge a closer link between historical and philosophical aspects of conceptual analysis. The paper explores possible links by analyzing aspects of the concept of error. A "pragmatic" and a "mentalist" notion (...) of error are identified in current philosophical studies of error: according to the latter, errors can be ascribed only to mental operations, according to the former, errors can also be ascribed to things and processes. The paper then draws on historical accounts of optical instruments to highlight certain presuppositions and implications of these two uses of the term. Contextual features and trans-contextual structures of the notion of error are distinguished. In conclusion, I argue that an intimate link between history and philosophy of science can be forged by an analysis ofthe development of conceptual arrangements which allows for trans- contextual structural aspects while drawing attention to the contextual epistemological and scientific conditions of their re-arrangement. (shrink)

In this article I consider some central aspects of the naturalist philosophy of science and science and technology studies in dealing with the contested status of technoscience in medicine. Focusing on the concepts of realism and representation, I argue that theories of science-as-practice in naturalist philosophy of science should expand their scope so as to reflect more thoroughly on the social and political context of technoscience. I develop a hermeneutic of technomedical objects in order to highlight the internal connectedness between (...) social action, material agency, and the actions of scientific communities. The framework thus developed is used to re-consider the genomic turn in medicine. Pointing to the discrepancies between socially dominant representations of genomic technology and the actual interventions brought about through those technologies, I raise the question of how and where to address problems of theory and policy. (shrink)

From the 1950s to 1970s, physical techniques replaced many classical methods in the chemical and biological sciences. In this development, a novel type of method‐oriented scientists emerged, relying on cooperation with instrument manufacturers and forging close links with science‐funding agencies. Their main engagement was the development of methods and the improvement of instruments, responding to the needs of the chemical and biomedical communities. In the United States, an important institutional locus of such method‐oriented scientists were instrument centers, providing service to (...) regional and national groups of scientific users. This article analyzes the knowledge transfer involved in investigating the Biotechnology Resources Program of the National Institutes of Health, and presenting the example of one of these centers, the Stanford Magnetic Resonance Laboratory. (shrink)

To one side of the wide third-floor hallway of Victoria College, just outside the offices of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, lies the massive carcass of a 1960s-era electron microscope. Its burnished steel carapace has lost its gleam, but the instrument is still impressive for its bulk and spare design: binocular viewing glasses, beam control panel, specimen tray, and a broad work surface. Edges are worn, desiccated tape still feebly holds instructive reminders near control (...) dials; this was once a workhorse in some lab. But it exists now out of time and place; like many of the scientific instruments we study, it has not been touched by knowing hands in decades. (shrink)

Prediction is more than testing established theory by examining whether the prediction matches the data. To show this, I examine the practices of a community of scientists, known as threaders, who are attempting to predict the final, folded structure of a protein from its primary structure, i.e., its amino acid sequence. These scientists employ a careful and deliberate methodology of prediction. A key feature of the methodology is calibration. They calibrate in order to construct better models. The construction leads to (...) knowledge of how to construct or build an object. Thus, prediction serves a cognitive goal of model construction and not just model or theory testing. The kind of knowledge that results is relevantly different than theoretical knowledge. (shrink)

Science and technology are so intertwined that technoscience has been argued to more accurately reflect the progress of science and its impact on society, and most socioscientific issues require technoscientific reasoning. Education policy documents have long noted that the general public lacks sufficient understanding of science and technology necessary for informed decision-making regarding socioscientific/technological issues. The science–technology–society movement and scholarship addressing socioscientific issues in science education reflect efforts in the science education community to promote more informed decision-making regarding such issues. (...) Now Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics education has emerged as a major reform movement impacting science education. STEM education efforts emphasize literacy across the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, but with rare exceptions, treat issues of technology superficially and uncritically. Informed decision-making regarding many personal and societal issues requires technological literacy beyond merely becoming an enthusiastic designer or skilled user of technology, but the science education community has given little attention to what such literacy entails. Here, we present results of an extensive review of the literature regarding the nature of technology in order to identify key issues among scholars who study technology. We then provide predominant perspectives among those scholars and suggest which identified NOT issues are most essential to address as part of STEM education efforts that seek to promote informed personal and societal decision-making. (shrink)

James Prescott Joule’s (1818–1889) bicentenary took place in 2018 and commemorated by the IDTC with a Symposium—‘James Joule’s Bicentenary: Scientific and Pedagogical Issues Concerning Energy Conservation’—at the European Society for the History of Science (ESHS & BSHS), 14th–17th September, 2018, in London. This symposium had three main objectives: It aimed specifically to celebrate James Joule’s achievements considering the most recent historiographical works with a particular focus on the principle of conservation of energy; It served the purpose of discussing the scientific (...) and pedagogical issues related to heat, energy and work and how they are presented in textbooks and worked out in classrooms; It also provided discussions on the present situation of teaching and learning science through the use of History of Science, both in K-12 and college level with an emphasis on energy and related concepts. In the following, the Introduction of this Special Issue on Joule is presented. (shrink)

In his article on radical innovation, Shinn (2005) examined the role of scientific instruments in innovation. This paper continues to investigate this theme, but the main focus is on how scientists or engineers from one discipline may learn from another and produce new knowledge and new technology. The paper looks at the role that tools and instruments developed by one discipline, in one environment, can play in the development of knowledge in a new environment. The theoretical basis for this study (...) is Vygotsky’s (1978) concept of tool-mediated activity. The proposed conceptualisation views instruments as dynamic and suggests types of tool-mediated activities which may contribute to knowledge creation. The collaborative process of experimentation is examined and opportunities for knowledge creation are discussed in relation to the instruments used. Methods used are interviews and observations. The case study is a small multidisciplinary laboratory developing a new process for producing nanoreactors, with potential applications in pharmaceuticals and energy. (shrink)

Discussions of technoscience are bringing to light that scientific journals feature very different knowledge claims. At one end of the spectrum, there is the scientific claim that a hypothesis needs to be reevaluated in light of new evidence. At the other end of the spectrum, there is the technoscientific claim that some new measure of control has been achieved in a laboratory. The latter claim has not received sufficient attention as of yet. In what sense is the achievement of control (...) genuine knowledge in its own right; how is this knowledge acquired; and publicly validated? Notions of tacit or embodied knowledge, of knowledge by acquaintance, of engineering or thing knowledge, and reconstructions of ability or skill take us only part of the way towards answering such questions. The epistemology of technoscience needs to account for the acquisition and demonstration of a public knowledge of control that does not consist in the holding of propositions, even though it is usually communicated in writing: Technoscientific knowledge is, firstly, objective and public insofar as it is exhibited and documented. Secondly, it presupposes a specific context of technology and expertise. Thirdly, it is communicable, even where the achieved capability itself is not. Knowledge of control entails, fourthly, a knowledge of causal relationships, and it sediments itself, fifthly, as a habit of action in the sense proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce. (shrink)

Au cours des dernières décennies, la philosophie des sciences est devenue la philosophie des sciences particulières. En conséquence, certaines des questions majeures de la philosophie des sciences sont adressées à la recherche en nanosciences et technologie. C’est le cas notamment des questions concernant la nature de la connaissance, le rôle de la théorie, les pratiques expérimentales et observationnelles. Ces questions habituelles suscitent des réponses inattendues, suggérant que la nanotechnoscience est un exemple non pas d’une science mais d’une technoscience.

Au cours des dernières décennies, la philosophie des sciences est devenue la philosophie des sciences particulières. En conséquence, certaines des questions majeures de la philosophie des sciences sont adressées à la recherche en nanosciences et technologie. C’est le cas notamment des questions concernant la nature de la connaissance, le rôle de la théorie, les pratiques expérimentales et observationnelles. Ces questions habituelles suscitent des réponses inattendues, suggérant que la nanotechnoscience est un exemple non pas d’une science mais d’une technoscience.

I discuss changes of perspective of four kinds in science and about science. Section 2 defends a perspectival nonrealism—something akin to Giere’s perspectival realism but not a realism—against the idea of complete, “Copernican” objectivity. Section 3 contends that there is an inverse relationship between epistemological conservatism and scientific progress. Section 4 casts doubt on strong forms of scientific realism by taking a long-term historical perspective that includes future history. Section 5 defends a partial reversal in the status of so-called context (...) of discovery and context of justification. Section 6 addresses the question of how we can have scientific progress without scientific realism—how progress is possible without the accumulation of representational truth. The overall result is a pragmatic instrumentalist perspective on the sciences and how to study them philosophically, one that contains a kernel of realism—instrumental realism. (shrink)

Are we entering a major new phase of modern science, one in which our standard, human modes of reasoning and understanding, including heuristics, have decreasing value? The new methods challenge human intelligibility. The digital revolution inspires such claims, but they are not new. During several historical periods, scientific progress has challenged traditional concepts of reasoning and rationality, intelligence and intelligibility, explanation and knowledge. The increasing intelligence of machine learning and networking is a deliberately sought, somewhat alien intelligence. As such, it (...) challenges the traditional, heuristic foresight of expert researchers. Nonetheless, science remains human-centered in important ways—and yet many of our ordinary human epistemic activities are alien to ourselves. This fact has always been the source of “the discovery problem”. It generalizes to the problem of understanding expert scientific practice. Ironically, scientific progress plunges us ever deeper into complexities beyond our grasp. But how is progress possible without traditional realism and the intelligibility realism requires? Pragmatic flexibility offers an answer. (shrink)

Alexander Bird argues for an epistemic account of scientific progress, whereas Darrell Rowbottom argues for a semantic account. Both appeal to intuitions about hypothetical cases in support of their accounts. Since the methodological significance of such appeals to intuition is unclear, I think that a new approach might be fruitful at this stage in the debate. So I propose to abandon appeals to intuition and look at scientific practice instead. I discuss two cases that illustrate the way in which scientists (...) make judgments about progress. As far as scientists are concerned, progress is made when scientific discoveries contribute to the increase of scientific knowledge of the following sorts: empirical, theoretical, practical, and methodological. I then propose to articulate an account of progress that does justice to this broad conception of progress employed by scientists. I discuss one way of doing so, namely, by expanding our notion of scientific knowledge to include both know-that and know-how. (shrink)

According to Popper's rationality principle, agents act in the most adequate way according to the objective situation. I propose a new interpretation of the rationality principle as consisting of an idealization and two abstractions. Based on this new interpretation, I critically discuss the privileged status that Popper ascribes to it as an integral part of all social scientific models. I argue that as an idealization, the rationality principle may play an important role in the social sciences, but it also has (...) inherent limitations that inhibit it from having the privileged status that Popper ascribes to it in all cases. (shrink)

People increasingly form beliefs based on information gained from automatically filtered Internet ‎sources such as search engines. However, the workings of such sources are often opaque, preventing ‎subjects from knowing whether the information provided is biased or incomplete. Users’ reliance on ‎Internet technologies whose modes of operation are concealed from them raises serious concerns about ‎the justificatory status of the beliefs they end up forming. Yet it is unclear how to address these concerns ‎within standard theories of knowledge and justification. (...) To shed light on the problem, we introduce a ‎novel conceptual framework that clarifies the relations between justified belief, epistemic responsibility, ‎action, and the technological resources available to a subject. We argue that justified belief is subject to ‎certain epistemic responsibilities that accompany the subject’s particular decision-taking circumstances, ‎and that one typical responsibility is to ascertain, so far as one can, whether the information upon which ‎the judgment will rest is biased or incomplete. What this responsibility comprises is partly determined by ‎the inquiry-enabling technologies available to the subject. We argue that a subject’s beliefs that are ‎formed based on Internet-filtered information are less justified than they would be if she either knew how ‎filtering worked or relied on additional sources, and that the subject may have the epistemic ‎responsibility to take measures to enhance the justificatory status of such beliefs.‎. (shrink)

According to the Value-Neutrality Thesis, technology is morally and politically neutral, neither good nor bad. A knife may be put to bad use to murder an innocent person or to good use to peel an apple for a starving person, but the knife itself is a mere instrument, not a proper subject for moral or political evaluation. While contemporary philosophers of technology widely reject the VNT, it remains unclear whether claims about values in technology are just a figure of speech (...) or nontrivial empirical claims with genuine factual content and real-world implications. This paper provides the missing argument. I argue that by virtue of their material properties, technological artifacts are part of the normative order rather than external to it. I illustrate how values can be empirically identified in technology. The reason why value-talk is not trivial or metaphorical is that due to the endurance and longevity of technological artifacts, values embedded in them have long-term implications that surpass their designers and builders. I further argue that taking sides in this debate has real-world implications in the form of moral constraints on the development of technology. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Types of Knowledge in Technology A Neglected Topic Empirical Studies Philosophical Explorations References and Further Reading.

The modern understanding of radiation got its start in 1895 with X-rays discovered by Wilhelm Röntgen, followed in 1896 by Henri Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity. The development of the study of radiation opened a vast field of research concerning various disciplines: chemistry, physics, biology, geology, sociology, ethics, etc. Additionally, new branches of knowledge were created, such as atomic and nuclear physics that enabled an in-depth knowledge of the matter. Moreover, during the historical evolution of this body of knowledge a wide (...) variety of new technologies was emerging. This article seeks to analyze the characteristics of experimental research in radioactivity and microphysics, in particular the relationship experience-theory. It will also be emphasized that for more than two decades, since the discovery of radioactivity, experiments took place without the theory being able to follow experimental dynamics. Some aspects identified as structural features of scientific research in the area of radiation and matter will be addressed through historical examples. The inventiveness of experiments in parallel with the emergence of quantum mechanics, the formation of teams and their relationship with technology developed from the experiments, as well as the evolution of microphysics in the sense of “Big Science” will be the main structural characteristics here focused. The case study of research in radioactivity in Portugal that assumes a certain importance and has structural characteristics similar to those of Europe will be presented. (shrink)

Those with knowledge about scientific instruments come from many different fields. Prominent among them are (1) collectors and dealers, (2) curators, (3) historians, (4) instrument makers, (5) philosophers, and (6) scientists (the order is alphabetical, not value-laden). The annual symposium of the Scientific Instrument Commission often brings members of each of these groups together, and they learn from one another. What follows are brief reflections on the activities of each group when its members consider instruments.

ArgumentFilm scholars have long posed the question of the specificity of the film medium and the apparatus of cinema, asking what is unique to cinema, how it constrains and enables filmmakers and audiences in particular ways that other media do not. This question has rarely been considered in relation to scientific film, and here it is posed within the specific context of cell biology: What does the use of time-based media such as film coupled with the microscope allow scientists to (...) experience that other visualization practices do not? Examining three episodes in the twentieth-century study of the cell, this article argues that the apparatus of microcinematography constitutes what might be thought of as a technical portal to another world, a door that determines the experience of the world that lies on the other side of it. In this case, the design of apparatuses to capture time-lapsed images enabled the acceleration of cellular time, bringing it into the realm of human perception and experience. Further, the experience of the cellular temporal world was part of a distinct kind of cell biology, one that was focused on behavior rather than structure, focused on the relation between cells, and between the cell and its milieu rather than on cell-intrinsic features such as chromosomes or organelles. As such, the instruments and technical design of the microcinematographic apparatus may be understood as a kind of materialized epistemology, the history of which can elucidate how cinema was and is used to produce scientific knowledge. (shrink)

Since the practice turn, the role technologies play in the production of scientific knowledge has become a prominent topic in science studies. Much existing scholarship, however, either limits technology to merely mechanical instrumentation or uses the term for a wide variety of items. This article argues that technologies in scientific practice can be understood as a result of past scientific knowledge becoming sedimented in materials, like model organisms, synthetic reagents or mechanical instruments, through the routine use of these materials in (...) subsequent research practice. The proposed theoretical interpretation of technology is examined through a case where a model organism—Drosophila melanogaster—acted as a technology for investigating a contested biological effect of a mechanical instrument: Hermann J. Muller’s experiments on X-ray mutagenicity in the 1920s. The article reconstructs how Muller employed two synthetic Drosophila stocks as tests for measuring X-rays’ capacity to cause genetic aberration. It argues that past scientific knowledge sedimented in the Drosophila stocks influenced Muller’s perception of X-ray-induced mutation. It further describes how Muller’s concept of X-ray mutagenicity sedimented through the adoption of X-ray machines as a ready-made resource for producing mutants by other geneticists, for instance George Beadle and Edward Tatum in their experiments on Neurospora crassa, despite ongoing disputes surrounding Muller’s conclusions. Technological sedimentation is proposed as a potential explanation why sedimentation and disputation may often coexist in the history of science. (shrink)

The picture of synthetic biology as a kind of engineering science has largely created the public understanding of this novel field, covering both its promises and risks. In this paper, we will argue that the actual situation is more nuanced and complex. Synthetic biology is a highly interdisciplinary field of research located at the interface of physics, chemistry, biology, and computational science. All of these fields provide concepts, metaphors, mathematical tools, and models, which are typically utilized by synthetic biologists by (...) drawing analogies between the different fields of inquiry. We will study analogical reasoning in synthetic biology through the emergence of the functional meaning of noise, which marks an important shift in how engineering concepts are employed in this field. The notion of noise serves also to highlight the differences between the two branches of synthetic biology: the basic science-oriented branch and the engineering-oriented branch, which differ from each other in the way they draw analogies to various other fields of study. Moreover, we show that fixing the mapping between a source domain and the target domain seems not to be the goal of analogical reasoning in actual scientific practice. (shrink)