The article provides a brief overview of the philosophical and methodological problems of modern collaborative research. Collaborations – distributed organizations with variable membership, consisting of a large number of participants – are common in experimental high-energy physics studying microcosm objects, elementary particles arising in collisions of beams of accelerated particles and nuclei at collider accelerators, as well as in biomedicine and climatology. The central issues are authorship, epistemic ownership and dependence in collaborations, the division of epistemic labor in interdisciplinary research, (...) as well as related issues of scientific organization – peer review and distribution of credit in a team. Formally, the author, conceived as a list of persons appearing as authors of a collaborative scientific work, seems to be defined by the specific participants of the collaboration core, i.e., is a construct. However, the question can also be understood as “What does it mean to be the author of a scientific work?”, and then the answer becomes much less certain. Authorship of thousand-people articles is justified psychologically as the desire for regular performance of a ritual, which allows demonstrating joint belonging to a certain tradition, such as a long experiment, affiliation with the “workshop” of scientists studying phenomena of the microworld, which allows scientists, despite of their daily preoccupation with technical routines, to distinguish themselves from non-epistemic communities. However, specific rules that determine exactly who and why are worthy of being included as co-authors have been undergoing changes in recent years. In addition to theoretical significance, many of the problems discussed are related to actual practical issues of scientometry and the organization of scientific research, and therefore approaches to their solution can be directly embodied in scientific policy. (shrink)

Verification and validation of computer codes and models used in simulation are two aspects of the scientific practice of high importance and have recently been discussed by philosophers of science. While verification is predominantly associated with the correctness of the way a model is represented by a computer code or algorithm, validation more often refers to model’s relation to the real world and its intended use. It has been argued that because complex simulations are generally not transparent to a practitioner, (...) the Duhem problem can arise for verification and validation due to their entanglement; such an entanglement makes it impossible to distinguish whether a coding error or model’s general inadequacy to its target should be blamed in the case of the model failure. I argue that in order to disentangle verification and validation, a clear distinction between computer modeling and simulation needs to be made. Holding on to that distinction, I propose to relate verification to modeling and validation, which shares the common epistemology with experimentation, to simulation. To explain reasons of their intermittent entanglement I propose a weberian ideal-typical model of modeling and simulation as roles in practice. I suggest an approach to alleviate the Duhem problem for verification and validation generally applicable in practice and based on differences in epistemic strategies and scopes. (shrink)

This paper seeks to examine the roles and identities of engineers constituting one of the fundamental, but a completely indescribable community in modern big science with particle accelerators. Large communities of accelerator and detector specialists, which replaced experimenters and instrumentalists of the middle of the last century, themselves exhibit a complex structure and are divided. However, this division is in turn grounded on the division of those whose activities focus on the phenomena of nature considered independent of human beings and (...) those who design processes and phenomena of an artificial, technical nature. Nevertheless, in terms of their modus operandi and identity, the kinship between engineers and experimental scientists is considerable. I argue that such exclusion of the engineering community from epistemic practices can serve as an example of participatory injustice. As one of the ways to transcend participatory injustice, I suggest that the communities should be encouraged to work together in epistemically tantamount roles while structural hindrances to the mobility between communities need to be alleviated. (shrink)

Verification and validation of computer codes and models used in simulations are two aspects of the scientific practice of high importance that recently have been discussed widely by philosophers of science. While verification is predominantly associated with the correctness of the way a model is represented by a computer code or algorithm, validation more often refers to the model’s relation to the real world and its intended use. Because complex simulations are generally opaque to a practitioner, the Duhem problem can (...) arise with verification and validation due to their entanglement; such an entanglement makes it impossible to distinguish whether a coding error or the model’s general inadequacy to its target should be blamed in the case of a failure. I argue that a clear distinction between computer modeling and simulation has to be made to disentangle verification and validation. Drawing on that distinction, I suggest to associate modeling with verification and simulation, which shares common epistemic strategies with experimentation, with validation. To explain the reasons for their entanglement in practice, I propose a Weberian ideal–typical model of modeling and simulation as roles in practice. I examine an approach to mitigate the Duhem problem for verification and validation that is generally applicable in practice and is based on differences in epistemic strategies and scopes. Based on this analysis, I suggest two strategies to increase the reliability of simulation results, namely, avoiding alterations of verified models at the validation stage as well as performing simulations of the same target system using two or more different models. In response to Winsberg’s claim that verification and validation are entangled I argue that deploying the methodology proposed in this work it is possible to mitigate inseparability of V&V in many if not all domains where modeling and simulation are used. (shrink)

In this article, the collective experimenter, arising in scientific projects from those modeled on the Alvarez group to megascience, is studied in the framework of the model of trading zones, as well as Actor-Network Theory. The collective experimenter is defined as a network of actors whose forms are trading zones, including the core – the empirical collective subject of cognition – and the peripheral part. The multitude of actors of the collective experimenter includes the core, as well as the community (...) of intentions and the external actors that are part of the periphery of the collective experimenter. Attention is focused on the differences between the author of epistemic claims, the subject of cognition and scientific collaboration. A classification of collective experimentalists is proposed that includes four types of ontologies. The classification is applied to JINR scientific projects, and within its framework projects of the Alvarez type, big science, proto-megascience and megascience are distinguished. Ways of developing projects to the megascience-level through the formation of cores-communicative communities in the structure of the collective experimenter are proposed. Premised on the results obtained, recommendations are formulated for the development of the JINR experiments program. (shrink)