Epistemology Of Social Sciences Research Articles

Highly idealized models of scientific inquiry as conceptual systems

The social epistemology of science has adopted agent-based computer simulations as one of its core methods for investigating the dynamics of scientific inquiry. The epistemic status of these highly idealized models is currently under active debate in which they are often associated either with predictive or the argumentative functions. These two functions roughly correspond to interpreting simulations as virtual experiments or formalized thought experiments, respectively. This paper advances the argumentative account of modeling by proposing that models serve as a means to (re)conceptualize the macro-level dynamics of complex social epistemic interactions. I apply results from the epistemology of scientific modeling and the psychology of mental simulation to the ongoing debate in the social epistemology of science. Instead of considering simulation models as predictive devices, I view them as artifacts that exemplify abstract hypothetical properties of complex social epistemic processes in order to advance scientific understanding, hypothesis formation, and communication. Models need not be accurate representations to serve these purposes. They should be regarded as pragmatic cognitive tools that engender rather than replace intuitions in philosophical reasoning and argumentation. Furthermore, I aim to explain why the community tends to converge around few model templates: Since models have the potential to transform our intuitive comprehension of the subject of inquiry, successful models may literally capture the imagination of the modeling community.

Argumentation, cognition, and the epistemic benefits of cognitive diversity

The social epistemology of science would benefit from paying more attention to the nature of argumentative exchanges. Argumentation is not only a cognitive activity but a collaborative social activity whose functioning needs to be understood from a psychological and communicative perspective. Thus far, social and organizational psychology has been used to discuss how social diversity affects group deliberation by changing the mindset of the participants. Argumentative exchanges have comparable effects, but they depend on cognitive diversity and emerge through critical interaction. An example of a cognitive psychological theory is discussed that explains how mutual reasoning affects how we think, make decisions, and solve problems, as well as how cognitive biases may facilitate an efficient division of cognitive labor. These observations are compared with the existing results in the social epistemology of science. Moreover, I explicate the conceptual differences between the distributed and social processing of information. While argumentative exchanges belong to the latter domain, most existing simulations model distributed processing, which may compromise their real-world relevance and proper conceptual interpretation. However, I aim not to criticize the existing simulation methods but to promote an approach from the cognitive psychology of reasoning that complements the current use of organizational psychology and computer simulations by investigating a different set of mechanisms relating to similar phenomena of interest in the social epistemology of science.

Sins of inquiry: How to criticize scientific pursuits

Criticism is a staple of the scientific enterprise and of the social epistemology of science. Philosophical discussions of criticism have traditionally focused on its roles in relation to objectivity, confirmation, and theory choice. However, attention to criticism and to criticizability should also inform our thinking about scientific pursuits: the allocation of resources with the aim of developing scientific tools and ideas. In this paper, we offer an account of scientific pursuitworthiness which takes criticizability as its starting point. We call this the apokritic model of pursuit. Its core ideas are that pursuits are practices governed by norms for asking and answering questions, and that criticism arises from the breach of these norms. We illustrate and advertise our approach using examples from institutional grant review, neuroscience, and sociology. We show that the apokritic model can unify several indices of criticizability, that it can account for the importance of criticizing pursuits in scientific practice, and that it can offer ameliorative advice to erstwhile pursuers.

Creativity in the Social Epistemology of Science

Adrian Currie has introduced a novel account of creativity within the social epistemology of science. The account is intended to capture how conservatism can be detrimental to the health of inquiry within certain scientific communities, given the aims of research there. I argue that recent remarks by Carlo Rovelli put pressure on the applicability of the account. Altogether, it seems we do not yet well understand the relationship between creativity, conservatism, and the health of inquiry in science.

Scientific conclusions need not be accurate, justified, or believed by their authors

We argue that the main results of scientific papers may appropriately be published even if they are false, unjustified, and not believed to be true or justified by their author. To defend this claim we draw upon the literature studying the norms of assertion, and consider how they would apply if one attempted to hold claims made in scientific papers to their strictures, as assertions and discovery claims in scientific papers seem naturally analogous. We first use a case study of William H. Bragg’s early twentieth century work in physics to demonstrate that successful science has in fact violated these norms. We then argue that features of the social epistemic arrangement of science which are necessary for its long run success require that we do not hold claims of scientific results to their standards. We end by making a suggestion about the norms that it would be appropriate to hold scientific claims to, along with an explanation of why the social epistemology of science—considered as an instance of collective inquiry—would require such apparently lax norms for claims to be put forward.

Cooperative Division of Cognitive Labour: The Social Epistemology of Photosynthesis Research

How do scientists generate knowledge in groups, and how have they done so in the past? How do epistemically motivated social interactions influence or even drive this process? These questions speak to core interests of both history and philosophy of science. Idealised models and formal arguments have been suggested to illuminate the social epistemology of science, but their conclusions are not directly applicable to scientific practice. This paper uses one of these models as a lens and historiographical tool in the examination of actual scientific collectives. It centres on the analysis of two episodes from the history of photosynthesis research of the late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth centuries, which display a wide and coordinated intellectual diversity similar to Kitcher’s “division of cognitive labour” (1990). The concept, I argue, captures important aspects of the photosynthesis research communities, but the underlying process unfolded in ways that differ from the model’s assumption in interesting ways. The paper unravels how the self-organised interplay of cooperation and competition, and the dynamics of individual and collective goals within scientific communities were influential factors in the generation of knowledge. From there, some thoughts are developed on how historical and philosophical approaches in the analysis of science can productively interact.

Grounded theory and the PhD – notes for novice researchers

PurposeThis paper aims to consider the realities and problematics of applying a grounded theory (GT) approach to research, as a novice, within a mixed methods study during post graduate research. Its intention is to provide the novice user with a framework of considerations and greater awareness of the issues that GT can expose during research activity.Design/methodology/approachUsing empirical evidence and a comparative approach, the paper compares the efficacy of both the classic Glaserian and Straussian models. It observes the effects of a positivist academic environment upon the choice of approach and its application. This study was specific to design education; however, its reliance upon a social science epistemology results in findings beneficial to research novices across broader disciplines.FindingsGT presents the novice researcher with several potential pitfalls. Most problematic were the immutable, positivist institutional requirements, researchera prioriknowledge, the reliance upon literature for the research proposal and structure of the proposal itself. These include suspension of the notion that the purist use of either model can be applied in the current academic environment, the need for a close relationship with the data and toleration of a non-linear process with unexpected results.Originality/valueThe practicalities of GT research are often reflected upon by the academy, but use by novice researchers is little considered. The findings from this study provide a novel set of guidelines for use by those embarking on GT research and particularly where the requirements of formal education may cause a conflict.

Graduate teaching assistants: sharing epistemic agency with non-science majors in the biology laboratory

In teaching laboratories, scientific reasoning and argumentation are often taught in concert so students are provided opportunities to formulate a more nuanced understanding of science-as-practice and science as a social epistemology. Given recent calls to attend to the social aspects of science, we used Critical Contextual Empiricism, a social epistemology of science, as a framework for examining what features of a scientific community emerge in the introductory biology lab. In a case study of six graduate teaching assistants (GTAs), we explored how GTAs encouraged epistemic agency that encouraged their student’s efforts at knowledge construction in a community by collecting multiple data sources (e.g. audio recordings, students written work, focus group interviews) over a four-week sequence. Data analysis strategies were inductive, as a series of initial and focused coding were applied to select exchanges garnered from within the lab. Comparative analysis identified common occurrences across each respective case, which then revealed three overarching themes. We intended for GTAs to readily encourage epistemic agency to their students so insights regarding the social nature of knowledge production could be experienced and discussed. When epistemic shifts did occur, GTAs executed discursive moves targeting students’ experimental design practices (e.g. defining the dependent variable). Conversely, student’s efforts were also de-legitimized as GTAs provided specific directives to follow when challenges emerged for students. Finally, GTAs struggled to create a genuine community that modeled exemplary science-as-practice in the lab. Implications discuss how GTAs likely require more targeted support if community-driven learning is going to be successful in these uniquely challenging settings. Finally, working with non-science majors adds an additional layer of importance here given these lab-based experiences are limited and understanding the community’s role in generating scientific knowledge is a key component of being scientifically literate.

Agent Based Models and Complex Individuals: An Epistemological Analysis

In the relevant literature concerning Agent Based Models (ABMs), there seems to be agreement that they may replace the rational agent model of neoclassical economics. The question is whether this new, realistic, and complex model requires an equally complex concept of the individual. We propose the application of three major concepts in the epistemology of social sciences to advance the discussion of the concept of the complex individual, namely: i) Popper’s situational analysis; ii) Simon’s bounded rationality; and iii) Myrdal’s concept of circular cumulative causation. We argument that these are promising starting points for an analysis of human behavior, complex individuals and ABMs.

Narratives: the rhetoric of intentional action

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to clarify that narratives have a rhetorical dimension, whose study has to be considered an important part of rhetoric (this claim is not accepted by important scholars). The arguments are based on the properties that narratives are very persuasive and that they are implicitly involved in the three species of rhetoric (deliberative, judicial and celebrative) introduced by Aristotle in his Rhetoric. Second, narratives are strongly related to the concept of intentional action or human action that has a purpose, a mental project and the execution of the act, such it is defined in the classical paper by Alfred Schutz common-sense and scientific interpretation of human action (1953). This property relates narratives with phenomenology, epistemology of social sciences and management research and practice.Design/methodology/approachThis research is a theoretical work based on the study of central concepts of rhetoric, narratives, historiography and epistemology of social sciences and it uncovers the narrative aspects involved in intentional action. As a theoretical study, it does not include empirical studies, but it points out some kinds of management activities, such as creating projects and case studies.FindingsIt uncovers the relationships between rhetoric and narratives, and between narratives and intentional action. If offers a new conceptual frame that can be very productive.Originality/valueThis conceptual approach is new. It clarifies important misunderstandings about narrativity, facts, meanings and interpretations.

Methodological resources of the new epistemology of sciences

Introduction. Social epistemology of science is a modern field of research that is actively developing in the world, producing new approaches and generating heated debate. It did not arise from scratch and is a synthesis of several philosophical and special scientific concepts. In the post-Soviet space, this area of research is effectively and on an original conceptual basis developed at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where a new understanding of cognition as creativity has formed. The aim and tasks are to show the advantages of modern social epistemology of science, expanding the horizon of philosophy and methodology of science, to convince researchers to use a new arsenal of cognitive tools. Research methods used in the article are directly connected with the new concept of cognition: cognition is understood as a process that accompanies the activities and communication of people and performs the function of providing them in an ideal way. Creative knowledge gives rise to virtual worlds, creates the prerequisites for the creation and existence of cultural objects in general. Modern interest in virtualism is associated with methods of expanding the horizon of consciousness, creating the prerequisites for generating any cultural object. Research results. Cognition is a philosophical category that describes the process of constructing ideal plans for activity and communication, creating symbolic systems. Cognition is an independent reality that permeates all aspects of the human world and can only be distinguished from it in abstraction. Cognition deals with the content of collective activity and communication, which for their organization need ideal, i.e. possible, trial, approximate, variable models. The dynamics of the generation of knowledge is vectorial in nature, associated with a research, search setting to expand the scope of ideal constructs. The function of cognition is to superimpose a network of signs on the world - scientific formulas, moral norms, artistic images, magic symbols that allow a person to organize his being in the world and structure his psyche in such a way as to give it mobility and variability, thereby providing the possibility of activity and communication. The main feature of human cognition, unlike the analogous psyche of animals, is constructiveness. Discussion. Cognition is not copying of cognizable reality; it is an introduction of meaning into reality, the creation of ideal models that allow directing activity and communication and systematizing acts of consciousness. Conclusion. The article illustrates the innovativeness of the new approach in the framework of social epistemology, providing intellectual evidence for it, using examples of new categories.

Fuzzy epistemology: Decolonizing the social sciences

AbstractThis article first argues that the social sciences need to be decolonized, as the current epistemologies and research methodologies are too narrowly based on the European and North American experiences and hence unable to adequately capture non‐European experiences and realities. I then argue that decolonizing dominant social science epistemology means freeing it from its Aristotelian foundation. The next step undertaken is to discuss five non‐Western epistemologies from West Africa, China, Melanesia, India, and South America. Building on the work of Jimi Adesina (2002), I find that all five share a fuzzy perception of reality, allowing for statements that are non‐exclusive, non‐discrete, and hence fuzzy. I propose an operationalization of these fuzzy epistemologies by applying Charles Ragin's Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fscqa).

Do Biologists’ Conceptions of Science as a Social Epistemology Align with Critical Contextual Empiricism?

From literature on understandings of the “nature of science” (NOS), we know that sometimes scientists and others that participate in teaching and mentoring in the sciences lack an informed view of the philosophical underpinnings of their discipline. In this study, we ask whether biologists who are also teachers or mentors for college students agree with the tenets of critical contextual empiricism (CCE), a social epistemology of science that foregrounds the importance of a diversity of voices in knowledge-producing communities. We used a Q-sort methodology to examine beliefs about social knowledge construction that are related to teaching science inclusively. Overall, we found that biologists-teachers held viewpoints somewhat consistent with the tenets of Critical Contextual Empiricism. Although participants shared many beliefs in common, we found two significantly different groups of participants that were characterized under the themes “knowledge is constructed by people” and “the truth is out there.” Overall, although participants believed a diversity of cognitive resources aids scientific communities, they failed to recognize the more nuanced ways certain social interactions might impact objective knowledge production. For one group, outside of a belief that collaboration in science is valuable, other social influences on science were assumed to be negative. For a second group, the search for universal truth and the separation of rational and social aspects was critical for scientific objectivity. We use the results of our Q-sort to identify areas for professional development focused on inclusive science teaching and to recommend the explicit teaching of CCE to science educators.

Por una ciencia para y con los sujetos.

La metodología configuracionista para la investigación social reúne una serie de contribuciones elaboradas por De la Garza en el campo de la epistemología de las ciencias sociales. El texto es una tenaz defensa de la ciencia que batalla ecuánimemente contra los postulados del positivismo y la ciencia estándar (remontándose a los textos que De la Garza produjo en la década del ’80) y contra lo que el autor llama “antiepistemología” (o, dicho de otra forma, el impacto que el pospositivismo y el giro lingüístico ha tenido sobre la comunidad científica). El autor se ocupa, en los diferentes capítulos, de desarmar los supuestos ontológicos y epistémico-metodológicos sobre los que se apoyan estas perspectivas para, luego, sentar las bases de una nueva ciencia social.

Validity and challenges of the epistemology of social sciences in the second decade of the 21st century

Validity and challenges of the epistemology of social sciences in the second decade of the 21st century

O sociologické imaginaci

This article discusses the controversy of the sociological imagination as it was developed by Charles Wright Mills and its relevance for the current epistemology of social science. His notion of the sociological imagination has several problems due to the unreflected general prejudice distinguishing between structure and subjectivity, which creates from sociology a kind of social metaphysics. As a result, social context is conceptualised as an unproblematic domain used for the rationalisation of an actor’s behaviour and knowledge, and the sociological imagination gives the sociologist an absolute critical position which situates him paradoxically in the name of justice and freedom against humanity.

Creativity, conservativeness & the social epistemology of science

The special issue Creativity, Conservatism & the Social Epistemology of Science collects six papers which, in different ways, tackle 'promotion questions' concerning scientific communities: which features shape those communities, and which might be changed to promote the kinds of epistemic features we desire. In this introduction, I connect these discussions with more traditional debate in the philosophy of science and reflect upon the notions of creativity which underwrite the papers.

Telaah Epistemologi Positivisme dan Fenomenologi (Sebuah Perbandingan)

Epistemology is begun based on the need of philosophy used to recite social-cultural events. Nowadays, development of epistemology is fast enough as a proof of a thinking way which is growing in academic and reasearch, especially in social-cultural science. The growing epistemology are positivism, materialism, structuralism, hermeneutics and phenomenology. Epistemology does not appear explicitly in reasearch yet it is always there. Scientists and researchers should be aware what epistemology is to use. It gives the benefit in the strenghth of the research. This article delivers about growing epistemology in social sciences. The two kinds of epistemology discussed in this article used comparison approach; that is comparing both to find out the similarities and the differences. Positivism is epistemology used in many social-cultural researchs while phenomenology responds positivism and shows critic on it.

Tendencias investigativas para pensar la relación entre las ciencias sociales escolares y la epistemología de las ciencias sociales en Colombia

El artículo presenta la revisión bibliográfica realizada como base para la problematización y el desarrollo de una tesis doctoral que indaga sobre de la configuración de las ciencias sociales escolares durante el siglo xx y su relación con las epistemologías de las ciencias sociales. Esta muestra avances sobre las tendencias teórico-metodológicas en el campo de conocimiento de la historia de la educación y de la epistemología de las ciencias sociales, que permiten estudiar de manera compleja la configuración histórica de una disciplina escolar: las ciencias sociales en relación con las llamadas “ciencias de referencia” y con las epistemologías que circularon, se apropiaron y resignificaron en el transcurso del siglo xx en Colombia. Además, evidencia una dispersión de temas frente a este objeto de estudio que fueron agrupados en tres tendencias o núcleos en este documento: historia de las disciplinas y de los saberes escolares, didáctica de las ciencias en relación con su estatus epistemológico y epistemología de las ciencias sociales.

PP123 Triangulate, Converge, Assess, And Recommend (TCAR): Evaluation Method

Introduction:Methods to assess evidence and to use that evidence to inform practices and policies are under developed in the area of social services. Although health professions have developed robust methods in recent decades to collect, analyze and synthesize scientific evidence and to inform clinical recommendations, the use of these methods often remains difficult in social services. A taskforce was implemented to address this and to propose a method that may be more appropriate for the social sciences.Methods:The project was comprised of four steps: (i) performing a qualitative review of discussions between experts, (ii) designing a cognitive map of the data, (iii) conducting a systematic literature search, and (iv) comparing the data from the meetings with experts with the scientific literature. These steps were completed using the grounded theory approach. In order to test the method developed, focus groups were then conducted and four case studies were used to assess the evidence and provide recommendations for youths with mental health problems and for elderly care.Results:Although robust scientific data remain crucial when developing recommendations for practice, results showed that these data are incomplete if considered alone, and that contextual (circumstances in which the intervention is delivered) and experiential data (how the intervention is perceived by stakeholders) must also be taken into consideration. A method to triangulate these three types of data is proposed. Using this technique, the value of the data is established by means of various measurements that converge towards the same result or that provide a consistent overall picture or some important nuances that need to be considered, as illustrated by the four case studies.Conclusions:The proposed method can be used to address the limitations that are inherent to the use of techniques and procedures drawn from the medical field when assessing evidence and developing recommendations for the social sciences. The case studies that the proposed method is not only a viable option to methods drawn from medicine, but also adds to the quality of the recommendations that are made and is more congruent with the epistemology of social sciences.