Methodological norms are seen as rules defining a competitive game, and it is argued that rational recognition-seeking scientists can reach a collective agreement about which specific norms serve better their individual interests, especially if the choice is made `under a veil of ignorance', i.e. , before knowing what theory will be proposed by each scientist. Norms for theory assessment are distinguished from norms for theory choice (or inference rules), and it is argued that pursuit of recognition only affects this second (...) type of rule. An inference rule similar to `eliminative induction' is defended on the basis of such a possible agreement. According to this contractarian approach, both the explanation and the justification of scientific norms only need to refer to the preferences of individual scientists, without assuming the existence of `collective' points of view. (shrink)

Being scientific research a process of social interaction, this process can be studied from a game-theoretic perspective. Some conceptual and formal instruments that can help to understand scientific research as a game are introduced, and it is argued that game theoretic epistemology provides a middle ground for 'rationalist' and 'constructivist' theories of scientific knowledge. In the first part , a description of the essential elements of game of science is made, using an inferentialist conception of rationality. In the second part (...) , some ideas for the reconstruction of case studies are introduced, and applied to one example: Latour's analysis of Joliot's attempt to build an atomic bomb. Lastly, in the third part , a formal analysis of the constitution of scientific consensus is offered. (shrink)

I examine the epistemic import of collaborative research in science. I develop and defend a functional explanation for its growing importance. Collaborative research is becoming more popular in the natural sciences, and to a lesser degree in the social sciences, because contemporary research in these fields frequently requires access to abundant resources, for which there is great competition. Scientists involved in collaborative research have been very successful in accessing these resources, which has in turn enabled them to realize the epistemic (...) goals of science more effectively than other scientists, thus creating a research environment in which collaboration is now the norm. (shrink)

A philosopher once asked me: “Paul, how do you collaborate?” He was puzzled about how I came to have more than two dozen co-authors over the past 20 years. His puzzlement was natural for a philosopher, because co-authored articles and books are still rare in philosophy and the humanities, in contrast to science where most current research is collaborative. Unlike most philosophers, scientists know how to collaborate; this paper is about the nature of such procedural knowledge. I begin by discussing (...) three related distinctions found in philosophy and cognitive science: knowledge how vs. knowledge that, procedural vs. declarative knowledge, and explicit vs. implicit knowledge. I then document the prevalence of collaboration in the sciences and its scarcity in philosophy. In order to characterize the sorts of procedural knowledge that make collaborative research possible and fruitful, I discuss how scientists collaborate, how they learn to collaborate, and why they collaborate. Contrary to some recent suggestions by philosophers, I will argue that knowledge how often does not always reduce to knowledge that, and that collaboration has many purposes besides the pursuit of power and resources. The relative scarcity of philosophical collaborations might be explained by the nature of philosophy, if the field is viewed as inherently personal or a priori. But I argue against this view in favor of a more naturalistic one, December 2, 2005 with the implication that the main reason why philosophers do not collaborate more is that they do not know how. My account of collaboration is based on my own experience, published advice by practicing scientists, and interviews with a group of highly successful scientific collaborators who are members of the Social Psychology area of the University of Waterloo Psychology Department. For the past two decades, Waterloo’s social psychology program has flourished, both in collaborative publication and in graduate training: their former Ph.D.. (shrink)

This paper argues that collaboration in scientific and other fields requires a substantial amount of procedural knowledge about how to collaborate. It discusses how scientists collaborate, how they learn to collaborate, and why they collaborate. Knowledge how does not always reduce to knowledge that, and collaboration has many purposes besides the pursuit of power and resources. The relative scarcity of philosophical collaborations can be overcome by more naturalistic approaches to philosophy and by philosophers learning how to collaborate.

An analysis of group justification enables us to understand what it means to say that a research group is justified in making a claim on the basis of evidence. I defend Frederick Schmitt's (1994) joint account of group justification by arguing against a simple summative account of group justification. Also, I respond to two objections to the joint account, one claiming that social epistemologists should always prefer the epistemic value of making true judgments to the epistemic value of maintaining consistency, (...) and another one claiming that the notion of joint commitment implicit in the joint account is epistemically unacceptable. (shrink)

In “How to Collaborate,” Paul Thagard tries to explain why there is so much collaboration in science, and so little collaboration in philosophy, by giving an epistemic cost-benefit analysis. In this paper, I argue that an adequate explanation requires a more fully developed epistemic value theory than Thagard utilizes. In addition, I offer an alternative to Thagard’s explanation of the lack of collaboration in philosophy. He appeals to its lack of a tradition of collaboration and to the a priori nature (...) of much philosophical research. I claim that philosophers rarely collaborate simply because they can usually get the benefits without paying the costs of actually collaborating. (shrink)

I examine two challenges that collaborative research raises for science. First, collaborative research threatens the motivation of scientists. As a result, I argue, collaborative research may have adverse effects on what sorts of things scientists can effectively investigate. Second, collaborative research makes it more difficult to hold scientists accountable. I argue that the authors of multi-authored articles are aptly described as plural subjects, corporate bodies that are more than the sum of the individuals involved. Though journal editors do not currently (...) conceive of the authors of multi-authored articles this way, this conception provides us with the conceptual resources to make sense of how collaborating scientists behave.Keywords: Collaborative research; Authorship; Multi-authored articles; Responsibility; Reward system; Plural subject. (shrink)

What would something unlike us--a chimpanzee, say, or a computer--have to be able to do to qualify as a possible knower, like us? To answer this question at the very heart of our sense of ourselves, philosophers have long focused on intentionality and have looked to language as a key to this condition. Making It Explicit is an investigation into the nature of language--the social practices that distinguish us as rational, logical creatures--that revises the very terms of this inquiry. Where (...) accounts of the relation between language and mind have traditionally rested on the concept of representation, this book sets out an alternate approach based on inference, and on a conception of certain kinds of implicit assessment that become explicit in language. Making It Explicit is the first attempt to work out in detail a theory that renders linguistic meaning in terms of use--in short, to explain how semantic content can be conferred on expressions and attitudes that are suitably caught up in social practices. -/- At the center of this enterprise is a notion of discursive commitment. Being able to talk--and so in the fullest sense being able to think--is a matter of mastering the practices that govern such commitments, being able to keep track of one’s own commitments and those of others. Assessing the pragmatic significance of speech acts is a matter of explaining the explicit in terms of the implicit. As he traces the inferential structure of the social practices within which things can be made conceptually explicit, the author defines the distinctively expressive role of logical vocabulary. This expressive account of language, mind, and logic is, finally, an account of who we are. (shrink)

Scientific research is reconstructed as a language game along the lines of Robert Brandom's inferentialism. Researchers are assumed to aim at persuading their colleagues of the validity of some claims. The assertions each scientist is allowed or committed to make depend on her previous claims and on the inferential norms of her research community. A classification of the most relevant types of inferential rules governing such a game is offered, and some ways in which this inferentialist approach can be used (...) for assessing scientific knowledge and practices are explored. Some similarities and differences with a game-theoretic analysis are discussed. (shrink)

1. MARIO BIAGIOLI--Introduction 2. KAREN BARAD--Agential Realism: Feminist Interventions in Understanding Scientific Practices 3. MARIO BIAGIOLI--Aporias of Scientific Authorship: Credit and Responsibility in Contemporary Biomedicine 4. PIERRE BOURDIEU--The Specificity of Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason 5. ROBERT M. BRAIN and M. NORTON WISE--Muscles and Engines: Indicator Diagrams and Helmholtz’s Graphical Methods 6. MICHEL CALLON--Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fisherman of St. Brieuc Bay 7. SANDE COHEN--Reading Science (...) Studies Writing 8. H. M. COLLINS--The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks 9. LORRAINE DASTON--Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective 10. ARNOLD I. DAVIDSON--Styles of Reasoning, Conceptual History, and the Emergence of Psychiatry 11. PETER GALISON--Trading Zone: Coordinating Action and Belief 12. IAN HACKING--Making Up People 13. DONNA J. HARAWAY--Situated Knowledge: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective 14. ROGER HART--On the Problem of Chinese Science 15. THOMAS P. HUGHES--The Evolution of Large Technological Systems 16. LILY E. KAY--In the Beginning Was the Word?: The Genetic Code and the Book of Life 17. EVELYN FOX KELLER--The Gender/Science System: or, Is Sex to Gender as Nature Is to Science? 18. ROBERT E. KOHLER--Moral Economy, Material Culture, and Community in Drosophila Genetics 19. BRUNO LATOUR--Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World 20. BRUNO LATOUR--One More Turn After the Social Turn... 21. TIMOTHY LENOIR--Was the Last Turn the Right Turn?: The Semiotic Turn and A. J. Greimas 22. GEOFFREY LLOYD--Science in Antiquity: The Greek and Chinese Cases and Their Relevance to the Problems of Culture and Cognition 23. MICHAEL LYNCH and JOHN LAW--Pictures, Texts, and Objects: The Literary Language Game of Bird-Watching 24. DONALD MACKENZIE--Nuclear Missile Testing and the Social Construction of Accuracy 25. EMILY MARTIN--Toward an Anthropology of Immunology: The Body as Nation State 26. ANDREW PICKERING--The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science 27. THEODORE M. PORTER--Quantification and the Accounting Ideal in Science 28. PAUL RABINOW--Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality 29. HANS-JORG RHEINBERGER--Experimental Systems: Historiality, Narration and Deconstruction 30. BRIAN ROTMAN--Thinking Dia-Grams: Mathematics, Writing, and Virtual Reality 31. JOSEPH ROUSE--Understanding Scientific Practices: Cultural Studies of Science as a Philosophical Program 32. SIMON SCHAFFER--Late Victorian Metrology and Its Instrumentation: A Manufactory of Ohms 33. STEVEN SHAPIN--The House of Experimentation in Seventeenth-Century England 34. SUSAN LEIGH STAR and JAMES R. GRIESEMER--Institutional Ecology, "Translation," and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39 35. SHARON TRAWEEK--Pilgrim’s Progress: Male Tales Told during a Life in Physics 36. SHERRY TURKLE--What Are We Thinking about When We Are Thinking about Computers? 37. ALISON WYLIE--The Engendering of Archaeology: Refiguring Feminist Science Studies. (shrink)

"Legend is overdue for replacement, and an adequate replacement must attend to the process of science as carefully as Hull has done. I share his vision of a serious account of the social and intellectual dynamics of science that will avoid both the rosy blur of Legend and the facile charms of relativism.... Because of [Hull's] deep concern with the ways in which research is actually done, Science as a Process begins an important project in the study of science. It (...) is one of a distinguished series of books, which Hull himself edits."—Philip Kitcher, Nature "In Science as a Process, [David Hull] argues that the tension between cooperation and competition is exactly what makes science so successful.... Hull takes an unusual approach to his subject. He applies the rules of evolution in nature to the evolution of science, arguing that the same kinds of forces responsible for shaping the rise and demise of species also act on the development of scientific ideas."—Natalie Angier, New York Times Book Review "By far the most professional and thorough case in favour of an evolutionary philosophy of science ever to have been made. It contains excellent short histories of evolutionary biology and of systematics (the science of classifying living things); an important and original account of modern systematic controversy; a counter-attack against the philosophical critics of evolutionary philosophy; social-psychological evidence, collected by Hull himself, to show that science does have the character demanded by his philosophy; and a philosophical analysis of evolution which is general enough to apply to both biological and historical change."—Mark Ridley, Times Literary Supplement "Hull is primarily interested in how social interactions within the scientific community can help or hinder the process by which new theories and techniques get accepted.... The claim that science is a process for selecting out the best new ideas is not a new one, but Hull tells us exactly how scientists go about it, and he is prepared to accept that at least to some extent, the social activities of the scientists promoting a new idea can affect its chances of being accepted."—Peter J. Bowler, Archives of Natural History "I have been doing philosophy of science now for twenty-five years, and whilst I would never have claimed that I knew everything, I felt that I had a really good handle on the nature of science, Again and again, Hull was able to show me just how incomplete my understanding was.... Moreover, [Science as a Process] is one of the most compulsively readable books that I have ever encountered."—Michael Ruse, Biology and Philosophy. (shrink)