Online research in philosophy

A cultural economic perspective focuses on values as they affect behavior, the valuations in various spheres as well as the valorization, that is, the enhancement or the changing of values. The pragmatic view focuses on the way values function in everyday life and in particular on the deliberations in which they are formed and expressed. Values matter; the challenge is to render them susceptible to analysis in economic contexts. The illustrations are derived from the economics of the arts.

As so many other activities nowadays, modern science revolves around the competition for attention. Unlike in so many other attention games, in science those who seek attention are more or less the same people who are giving it. An important characteristic is the skewness of the distribution of scientific attention. We discuss the effect these characteristics have on scientific institutions. An important thesis of ours is that scientists converge in clusters of likeminded scientists. Given the character of scientific organization and (...) communication we expect that the digitalization of scientific communication will not affect the basic scientific institutions as the principles upon which the Internet functions coincide more or less with the way science functions. However, violation of these principles can in principle disrupt science and fundamentally change its character. Diversity, the key element of scientific conversation, may be destroyed. (shrink)

Whereas methodological discussions of scientific publication frequently occur in an institutional vacuum, in the sense that they take little account of the process whereby scientific contributions are published, this symposium illuminates the urgency of focusing on the increased dominance of commercial considerations in scientific publication in particular and science in general. It stresses the importance of embarking upon a multi-disciplinary evaluation that starts from a contextual perspective, looks at developments in sciences other than just economics, and goes beyond attributing everything (...) to technological changes. (shrink)