Abstract
In the past few years, social epistemologists have developed several formal models of the social organisation of science. While their robustness and representational adequacy has been analysed at length, the function of these models has begun to be discussed in more general terms only recently. In this article, I will interpret many of the current formal models of the scientific community as representing the latest development of what I will call the ‘Kuhnian project’. These models share with Kuhn a number of questions about the relation between individuals and communities. At the same time, they also inherit some of Kuhn’s problematic characterisations of the scientific community. In particular, current models of the social organisation of science represent the scientific community as essentially value-free. This may put into question both their representational adequacy and their normative ambitions. In the end, it will be shown that the discussion on the formal models of the scientific community may contribute in fruitful ways to the ongoing debates on value judgements in science.
Highlights
In the past few years, social epistemologists have developed a number of formal models of the social organisation of scientific research—or, to borrow from Martini and Fernández Pinto (2017), ‘SOSR models’
What is the ‘philosophical argument’ that these models are making? What can philosophers, scientists, and policy makers learn from SOSR modelling? Are computer based methods the best ways to represent the social organisation of science? This article is a contribution to the philosophical debate on SOSR models in general
Martini and Fernández Pinto (2017) argue that, contrary to the Agent-Based Models (ABM) employed in the social sciences, SOSR formal models fail to connect with empirical data
Summary
In the past few years, social epistemologists have developed a number of formal models of the social organisation of scientific research—or, to borrow from Martini and Fernández Pinto (2017), ‘SOSR models’. Such models provide highly idealised representations of the scientific community. Overviews on the most discussed SOSR models in philosophy of science have been provided by, among the others, Weisberg (2010) and Reijula and Kuorikoski (2019)
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