Researchers misunderstand their role in creating ethical problems when they allow dogmas to purportedly divorce scientists and scientific practices from the values that they embody. Cortina, Edwards, and Powell help us clarify and further develop our position by responding to our critique of, and alternatives to, this misleading separation. In this rebuttal, we explore how the desire to achieve the separation of facts and values is unscientific on the very terms endorsed by its advocates—this separation is refuted by empirical observation. (...) We show that positivists like Cortina and Edwards offer no rigorous theoretical or empirical justifications to substantiate their claims, let alone critique ours. Following Powell, we point to how classical pragmatism understands ‘purpose’ in scientific pursuits while also providing an alternative to the dogmas of positivism and related philosophical positions. In place of dogmatic, unscientific cries about an abstract and therefore always-unobservable ‘reality,’ we invite all organizational scholars to join us in shifting the discussion about quantitative research towards empirically grounded scientific inquiry. This makes the ethics of actual people and their practices central to quantitative research, including the thoughts, discourses, and behaviors of researchers who are always in particular places doing particular things. We propose that quantitative researchers can thus start to think about their research practices as a kind of work, rather than having the status of a kind of dogma. We conclude with some implications that this has for future research and education, including the relevance of research and research methods. (shrink)

Archaeological data are shadowy in a number of senses. Not only are they notoriously fragmentary but the conceptual and technical scaffolding on which archaeologists rely to constitute these data as evidence can be as constraining as it is enabling. A recurrent theme in internal archaeological debate is that reliance on sedimented layers of interpretative scaffolding carries the risk that “preunderstandings” configure what archaeologists recognize and record as primary data, and how they interpret it as evidence. The selective and destructive nature (...) of data capture in archeology further suggests that there may be little scope for putting “legacy” data to work in new ways. And yet archaeologists have been strikingly successful in mining old datasets for new insights. I situate these concerns in the broader context of debate about the epistemic standing of the historical sciences, and then consider three strategies by which archaeologists address the challenges posed by legacy data. The first two – secondary retrieval and recontextualization – are a matter of reconfiguring the scaffolding that underpins evidential reasoning. The third turns on redeploying old data in the context of computational models that support the experimental simulation of the cultural systems and contexts under study. (shrink)

In addition to providing a rebuttal of the “paper-doubts” of the would-be skeptic, pragmatists have also been quite responsive to the social dimensions of doubt. This is true concerning the causes of doubt. This is true also regarding its consequences: doubt has consequences on epistemic trust; on the way we discuss truths, either about the sciences or about the “construction of good”. Readers of Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty and of some of his most important political writings can easily see (...) how practical uncertainty can degenerate into practical and political skepticism, preventing the emergence of the public. This social aspect of the question has received less attention, perhaps, than the general pragmatist stance towards skepticism, and the present symposium offers a rst round of insights into this aspect of the question: the papers retrieved below all cast light on important aspects of the debate on justi cation, on scienti c dogmatism, on irony and skepticism, on doubt and legal theory, on skepticism and political anarchism. (shrink)

In this topical section, we highlight the next step of research on modeling aiming to contribute to the emerging literature that radically refrains from approaching modeling as a scientific endeavor. Modeling surpasses “doing science” because it is frequently incorporated into decision-making processes in politics and management, i.e., areas which are not solely epistemically oriented. We do not refer to the production of models in academia for abstract or imaginary applications in practical fields, but instead highlight the real entwinement of science (...) and policy and the real erosion of their boundaries. Models in decision making – due to their strong entwinement with policy and management – are utilized differently than models in science; they are employed for different purposes and with different constraints. We claim that “being a part of decision-making” implies that models are elements of a very particular situation, in which knowledge about the present and the future is limited but dependence of decisions on the future is distinct. Emphasis on the future indicates that decisions are made about actions that have severe and lasting consequences. In these specific situations, models enable not only the acquisition of knowledge (the primary goal of science) but also enable deciding upon actions that change the course of events. As a result, there are specific ways to construct effective models and justify their results. Although some studies have explored this topic, our understanding of how models contribute to decision making outside of science remains fragmentary. This topical section aims to fill this gap in research and formulate an agenda for additional and more systematic investigations in the field. (shrink)

The omnipresence of the same basic equations, function forms, algorithms, and quantitative methods is one of the most spectacular characteristics of contemporary modeling practice. Recently, the emergence of the discussion of templates and template transfer has addressed this striking cross-disciplinary reach of certain mathematical forms and computational algorithms. In this paper, we develop a notion of a model template, consisting of its mathematical structure, ontology, prototypical properties and behaviors, focal conceptualizations, and the paradigmatic questions it addresses. We apply this notion (...) to three widely disseminated and powerful model templates: the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model of spin glasses, scale-free networks, and the Kuramoto model of synchronization. We argue that what appears to be an interdisciplinary model transfer between different domains turns out, from a broader perspective, to be the application of transdisciplinary model templates across a multitude of domains. We also point out a further feature of template-based modeling that so far has not been discussed: template entanglement. Such entanglement enhances and makes manifest the conceptual side of model templates. (shrink)

Templates travel because they offer a tractable format that can be used for model-building in a variety of domains. It is often because of this quality that a particular template is chosen. But one cannot assume that there are always templates ready to model a new phenomenon, and moreover, templates have also been designed at some point. A critical aspect of this designing process is the choice of the mathematical objects with which one hopes to capture this phenomenon. This means (...) that one has to assess which of the properties of different kinds of mathematical objects and which combinations of them are most appropriate. The selection of these objects is based on whether their properties enable the model to perform its function. This selection of mathematical objects is similar to the selection of materials in mechanical design. (shrink)

Traditionally, empiricism has relied on the specialness of human observation, yet science is rife with sophisticated instrumentation and techniques. The present article advances a conception of empirical evidence applicable to actual scientific practice. I argue that this conception elucidates how the results of scientific research can be repurposed across diverse epistemic contexts: it helps to make sense of how evidence accumulates across theory change, how different evidence can be amalgamated and used jointly, and how the same evidence can be used (...) to constrain competing theories in the service of breaking local underdetermination. (shrink)

We track and analyze the re-situation of scientific knowledge in the field of human population genomics ancestry studies. We understand re-situation as a process of accommodating the direct or indirect transfer of objects of knowledge from one site/situation to other sites/situations. Our take on the concept borrows from Mary S. Morgan’s work on facts traveling while expanding it to include other objects of knowledge such as models, data, software, findings, and visualizations. We structure a specific case study by tracking the (...) re-situation of these objects between three research projects studying human population diversity reported in three articles in Science, Genome Research and PLoS Genetics between 2002 and 2005. We characterize these three engagements as a unit of analysis, a “skirmish,” in order to compare: the divergence of interests in how life-scientists answer similar research questions and to track the challenging transformation of workflows in research laboratories as these scientific objects are re-situated individually or in bundles. Our analysis of the case study shows that an accurate understanding of re-situation requires tracking the whole bundle of objects in a project because they interact in particular key ways. The absence or dismissal of these interactions opens the door to unforeseen trade-offs, misunderstandings and misrepresentations about research design and workflow and what these say about the questions asked and the findings produced. (shrink)

The provocative paper by John Forrester ‘If p, Then What? Thinking in Cases’ opened up the question of case thinking as a separate mode of reasoning in the sciences. Case-based reasoning is certainly endemic across a number of sciences, but it has looked different according to where it has been found. This article investigates this mode of science – namely thinking in cases – by questioning the different interpretations of ‘If p?’ and exploring the different interpretative responses of what follows (...) in ‘Then What?’. The aim is to characterize how ‘reasoning in, within, with, and from cases’ forms a mode of scientific investigation for single cases, for runs of cases, and for comparative cases, drawing on materials from a range of different fields in which case-based reasoning appears. (shrink)

Genomics is increasingly considered a global enterprise – the fact that biological information can flow rapidly around the planet is taken to be important to what genomics is and what it can achieve. However, the large-scale international circulation of nucleotide sequence information did not begin with the Human Genome Project. Efforts to formalize and institutionalize the circulation of sequence information emerged concurrently with the development of centralized facilities for collecting that information. That is, the very first databases build for collecting (...) and sharing DNA sequence information were, from their outset, international collaborative enterprises. This paper describes the origins of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration between GenBank in the United States, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory Databank, and the DNA Database of Japan. The technical and social groundwork for the international exchange of nucleotide sequences created the conditions of possibility for imagining nucleotide sequences as a “global” objects. The “transnationalism” of nucleotide sequence was critical to their ontology – what DNA sequences came to be during the Human Genome Project was deeply influenced by international exchange. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophers of science have begun to realize that the clear separation of the creation of models in academia and the application of models outside science is not possible. When these philosophers address hybrid contexts in which science is entwined with policy, business, and other realms of society, these often practically oriented realms no longer represent ‘the surroundings’ of science but rather are considered an essential part of it. I argue—and demonstrate empirically—that the judgement of a theory or (...) model conducted by scientists in such hybrid contexts may contain two parts: one is truth supportive and the other is utility oriented. In relation to the debate on science and values, the article seeks to reinforce the argument in modern philosophy of science that the boundaries between epistemic and non-epistemic values are blurred. The article stresses that non-epistemic values may be also understood as values that contribute to the instrumental success of a theory or model and—in this way—influence scientific practice in the hybrid contexts. (shrink)

The case history in the colonial context was a hybrid form, caught between bureaucratic pressures toward racialization, aggregation, and generalization, on the one hand, and the individualistic bias of the genre, on the other. This tension posed a problem for colonial rulers. In their drive to harvest neat, ideologically reliable knowledge about the minds of colonial subjects, officials and researchers in the 20th-century British Empire read case histories in selective ways, pared them down to simplistic fables, and ultimately bypassed them (...) whenever they could. In other words, although they worked mightily to bend the case history to their purposes, they never fully succeeded. The authority granted to personal testimony and the capaciousness of the detail in case histories always contained a subversive potential. As a result, the politics of the colonial case history were underdetermined, overflowing the categories and resisting the generalizations that colonial rulers sought to impose. (shrink)

This article investigates how national histories marred by racial conflict can be translated into narratives of group identity formation. I study the role of “identity-driven” museums in converting American’s racial past into a metanarrative of black identity from subjugation to citizenship. Drawing on a thick description of exhibitions at 15 museums, interviews with curators and directors, museum documents, and newspaper articles, I use the “political economy of memory” as a framework to explain how ideological and material processes intersect in the (...) production of exhibitions. I show that in addition to struggles over the truth and interpretive styles, more prosaic issues of funding, attendance, and institutional capacity-building hve an impact on representational selectivities. I explain how these issues affect black museums operating during the civil rights and post-civil rights eras. I consider the motivations and consequences of “remembering” national histories of violence and intolerance through the prism of group identity formation. (shrink)