Social Dynamics of Science
Another of my major research areas is the social dynamics of science. Here, I focus on creativity and speculation in research, as well as on the role of broader socio-cultural factors in a socially-embedded science. Below, articles are organized by most recent.
Creativity in the Social Epistemology of Science
[Philosophy of Science, preprint here: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/18481/]
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.
Priority and privilege in scientific discovery
[with Hannah Rubin, SHPS, preprint here: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/18840/]
The priority rule in science has been interpreted as a behavior regulator for the scientific community, which benefits society by adequately structuring the distribution of intellectual labor across pre-existing research programs. Further, it has been lauded as an intuitively fair way to reward scientists for their contributions, as a special case of society’s “grand reward scheme”. However, we will argue that the current formal framework utilized to model the priority rule idealizes away important aspects of credit attribution, and does so in a way that impacts the conclusions drawn regarding its function in scientific communities. In particular, we consider the social dynamics of credit attribution in order to show that the priority rule can foster structural disadvantages in socially diverse science, as well as drive the distribution of intellectual labor away from optimal.
Promoting diverse collaborations
[with Hannah Rubin and Cailin O’Connor, in The Dynamics of Science: Computational Frontiers in History and Philosophy of Science; earlier preprint here: http://www.hannahrubin.net/s/Promoting_Diverse_Collaborations.pdf]
Philosophers of science and social scientists have argued that diverse perspectives, methods, and background assumptions are critical to the progress of science. One way to achieve such diversity is to ensure that a scientific community is made up of individuals from diverse personal backgrounds. In many scientific disciplines, though, minority groups are underrepresented. In some cases minority members further segregate into sub-fields, thus decreasing the effective diversity of research collaborations. In this paper, we employ agent-based, game theoretic models to investigate various types of initiatives aimed at improving the diversity of collaborative groups. This formal framework provides a platform to discuss the potential efficacy of these various proposals. As we point out, though, such proposals may have unintended negative consequences.