How effectively communities of scientists come together and co-operate is crucial both to the quality of research outputs and to the extent to which such outputs integrate insights, data and methods from a variety of fields, laboratories and locations around the globe. This essay focuses on the ensemble of material and social conditions that makes it possible for a short-term collaboration, set up to accomplish a specific task, to give rise to relatively stable communities of researchers. We refer to these (...) distinctive features as repertoires, and investigate their development and implementation across three examples of collaborative research in the life sciences. We conclude that whether a particular project ends up fostering the emergence of a resilient research community is partly determined by the degree of attention and care devoted by researchers to material and social elements beyond the specific research questions under consideration. (shrink)

Arabidopsis is currently the most popular and well-researched model organism in plant biology. This paper documents this plant's rise to scientific fame by focusing on two interrelated aspects of Arabidopsis research. One is the extent to which the material features of the plant have constrained research directions and enabled scientific achievements. The other is the crucial role played by the international community of Arabidopsis researchers in making it possible to grow, distribute and use plant specimen that embody these material features. (...) I argue that at least part of the explosive development of this research community is due to its successful standardisation and to the subsequent use of Arabidopsis specimen as material models of plants. I conclude that model organisms have a double identity as both samples of nature and artifacts representing nature. It is the resulting ambivalence in their representational value that makes them attractive research tools for biologists. (shrink)

This paper aims to identify the key characteristics of model organisms that make them a specific type of model within the contemporary life sciences: in particular, we argue that the term “model organism” does not apply to all organisms used for the purposes of experimental research. We explore the differences between experimental and model organisms in terms of their material and epistemic features, and argue that it is essential to distinguish between their representational scope and representational target. We also examine (...) the characteristics of the communities who use these two types of models, including their research goals, disciplinary affiliations, and preferred practices to show how these have contributed to the conceptualization of a model organism. We conclude that model organisms are a specific subgroup of organisms that have been standardized to fit an integrative and comparative mode of research, and that it must be clearly distinguished from the broader class of experimental organisms. In addition, we argue that model organisms are the key components of a unique and distinctively biological way of doing research using models.Keywords: Experimental organism; Genetics; Model organism; Modeling; Philosophy of biology; Representation. (shrink)

Bogen and Woodward characterized data as embedded in the context in which they are produced (‘local’) and claims about phenomena as retaining their significance beyond that context (‘nonlocal’). This view does not fit sciences such as biology, which successfully disseminate data via packaging processes that include appropriate labels, vehicles, and human interventions. These processes enhance the evidential scope of data and ensure that claims about phenomena are understood in the same way across research communities. I conclude that the degree of (...) locality of both data and claims about phenomena varies depending on the packaging used to make them travel and on the research setting in which they are used. †To contact the author, please write to: ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society, University of Exeter, Byrne House, St. Germans Road, EX4 4PJ Exeter, United Kingdom; e‐mail: s.leonelli@exeter.ac.uk. (shrink)

This open access book provides the first systematic overview of existing challenges and opportunities for responsible data linkage, and a cutting-edge assessment of which steps need to be taken to ensure that plant data are ethically shared and used for the benefit of ensuring global food security – one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The volume focuses on the contemporary contours of such challenges through sustained engagement with current and historical initiatives and discussion of best practices and prospective future (...) directions for ensuring responsible plant data linkage. The volume is divided into four sections that include case studies of plant data use and linkage in the context of particular research projects, breeding programs, and historical research. It address technical challenges of data linkage in developing key tools, standards and infrastructures, and examines governance challenges of data linkage in relation to socioeconomic and environmental research and data collection. Finally, the last section addresses issues raised by new data production and linkage methods for the inclusion of agriculture’s diverse stakeholders. This book brings together leading experts in data curation, data governance and data studies from a variety of fields, including data science, plant science, agricultural research, science policy, data ethics and the philosophy, history and social studies of plant science. (shrink)

Ten years after the Human Genome Project’s completion the life sciences stand in a moment of uncertainty, transition, and contestation. The postgenomic era has seen rapid shifts in research methodology, funding, scientific labor, and disciplinary structures. Postgenomics is transforming our understanding of disease and health, our environment, and the categories of race, class, and gender. At the same time, the gene retains its centrality and power in biological and popular discourse. The contributors to Postgenomics analyze these ruptures and continuities and (...) place them in historical, social, and political context. Postgenomics, they argue, forces a rethinking of the genome itself, and opens new territory for conversations between the social sciences, humanities, and life sciences. Contributors. Russ Altman, Rachel A. Ankeny, Catherine Bliss, John Dupré, Michael Fortun, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sabina Leonelli, Adrian Mackenzie, Margot Moinester, Aaron Panofsky, Sarah S. Richardson, Sara Shostak, Hallam Stevens. (shrink)

In _Aspects of Scientific Explanation_ (New York, 1965), Carl Hempel argued that the philosophy of science should focus on objectivist explanation and should not incorporate an account of pragmatic or subjective understanding. The stated aim of this collection of essays is to argue against Hempel's objectivist view by arguing for incorporating accounts of understanding into the philosophy of science and by giving a substantive account of the role of understanding in modeling and in scientific practice. The volume is ambitious and (...) wide ranging, including essays on economics, biology, psychology, and history, among other matters. The essays make a substantive contribution, not only to accounts of scientific understanding, but to debates about methodology in science and about methods in history and philosophy of science. The ambitious reach of the project raises inevitable questions, including a pressing one about the relationship between the subjective and the objective in science - how to distinguish substantive understanding from explanation. (shrink)

Leonelli (2016) suggested a relational view of data against a representational view by emphasizing data-centric biology rather than the theory-centric tradition in the philosophy of science. This is because the first view allows for data journeys across laboratories using public database resources, whereas the second does not. This paper examines Leonelli’s strategies to defend the relational view of data. Contrary to Leonelli’s intention, it indicates that her strategies led to unnecessary misunderstandings of the relationships among data, representation, (...) and evidential values. It will be argued that evidential values of data are inevitably based on a representational feature and that it is better to reconcile both views of data as complementary rather than contrasting. (shrink)

Ankeny and Leonelli propose “repertoires” as a new way to understand the stability of certain research programs as well as scientific change in general. By bringing a more complete range of social, material, and epistemic elements into one framework, they position their work as a correction for the Kuhnian impulse in philosophy of science and other areas of science studies. I argue that this “post-Kuhnian” move is not complete, and that repertoires maintain an internalist perspective, caused partly by an (...) asymmetrical emphasis on the scientists’ side of practice. If we compare “repertoires” to alternative frameworks, like “sociotechnical imaginaries” of Jasanoff and Kim, it is evident that repertoires are missing two specific things. First, I argue that the framework needs to include the role of audience, without whom the repertoires of science are unintelligible. Second, I suggest that the framework also lacks an explicit place for ethical and political imagination, which provide meaning for otherwise mechanical promotion of particular research programs. With these modifications, Ankeny and Leonelli’s framework might fulfill its post-Kuhnian potential. (shrink)

Contributors: Sabina Leonelli Nancy J. Nersessian Michel Janssen Jacob G. Foster James A. Evans Mark A. Bedau Marshall Abrams Gilbert B. Tostevin Salikoko S. Mufwene Massimo Maiocchi Joseph D. Martin Paul E. Smaldino Claes Andersson Anton Törnberg Petter Törnberg Beyond the Meme assembles interdisciplinary perspectives on cultural evolution, providing a nuanced understanding of it as a process in which dynamic structures interact on different scales of size and time. The volume demonstrates how a thick understanding of change in culture (...) emerges from multiple disciplinary vantage points, each of which is required to understand cultural evolution in all its complexity. (shrink)

Quine's Immanuel Kant lectures were delivered in English at Stanford University in 1980 under the title Science and Sensibilia. The English version of the text has never been published. An Italian translation by Michele Leonelli, La Scienza e I Dati di Senso appeared in 1987. These translations fill an important gap. Wissenschaft und Empfindung strikes me as the best presentation of Quine's physicalistic program.

Quine's aim in this slim book is to "update, sum up and clarify variously intersecting views on cognitive meaning, objective referencce, and the grounds of knowledge." Only nine pages had previously appeared as the book came to print. It is based largely on unpublished lectures and informal discussions of the past ten years back to the Immanuel Kant Lectures given at Stanford in 1980. It does not, then duplicate Leonelli's Italian translation of the Kant lectures, La Scienza E I (...) Datti di Senso, which appeared in 1987. (shrink)

Philosophers of science are well aware that theories are underdetermined by data. But what about the data? Scientific data are selected and processed representations or pieces of nature. What is useless context and what is valuable specimen, as well as how specimens are processed for study, are not obvious or predetermined givens. Instead, they are decisions made by scientists and other research workers, such as technicians, that produce different outcomes for the data. Vertebrate fossils provide a revealing case of this (...) data-processing, because they are embedded in rock that often matches the fossils’ color and texture, requiring an expert eye to judge where the fossil/context interface is. Fossil preparators then permanently define this interface by chiseling away the material they identify as rock. As a result, fossil specimens can emerge in multiple possible forms depending on the preparator’s judgment, skill, and chosen tools. A prepared fossil then is not yet data but potential data, following Leonelli’s relational framework in which data are defined as evidence that scientists have used to support a proposed theory. This paper draws on ethnographic evidence to assess how scientists overcome this underdetermination of specimens, as potential data, in addition to the underdetermination of theories and of data, to successfully construct specimen-based knowledge. Among other strategies, paleontology maintains a division of labor between data-makers and theory-makers. This distinction serves to justify the omission of preparators’ nonstandard, individualized techniques from scientific publications. This separation has benefits for both scientists and technicians; however, it restricts knowledge production by preventing scientists from understanding how the pieces of nature they study were processed into researchable specimens. (shrink)

Debate about the epistemic prowess of historical science has focused on local underdetermination problems generated by a lack of historical data; the prevalence of information loss over geological time, and the capacities of scientists to mitigate it. Drawing on Leonelli’s recent distinction between ‘phenomena-time’ and ‘data-time’ I argue that factors like data generation, curation and management significantly complexifies and undermines this: underdetermination is a bad way of framing the challenges historical scientists face. In doing so, I identify circumstances of (...) epistemic scarcity where underdetermination problems are particularly salient, and discuss cases where legacy data—data generated using differing technologies and systems of practice—are drawn upon to overcome underdetermination. This suggests that one source of overcoming underdetermination is our knowledge of science’s past. Further, data-time makes agnostic positions about the epistemic fortunes of scientists working under epistemic scarcity more plausible. But agnosticism seems to leave philosophers without much normative grip. So, I sketch an alternative approach: focusing on the strategies scientists adopt to maximize their epistemic power in light of the resources available to them. (shrink)

This paper describes the scientific practices of the anatomists from the Société Anatomique de Paris (1803–1873) who were collecting anatomical and pathological specimens in Nineteenth-Century Paris and which led to the building of the anatomy and pathology Musée Dupuytren (1835–2016). The framework introduced by Robert Kohler to describe collecting sciences (2007) is useful as a tool to identify the set of diverse practices within pathological anatomy in nineteenth-century Paris. However, I will argue that anatomy and pathology collecting had specific features (...) compared to most collecting sciences. Two main collecting practices could be distinguished: first, “finding” anatomical specimens and second, keeping these specimens. The first kind of practices were at least rhetorically and explicitly motivated by Auguste Comte’s positive philosophy. But “finding” an anatomy or pathology specimen could not be completely compared to finding an object or making a simple observation, as dissecting as well as some experimental practices were also involved. Heterogeneous practices thus coexisted within collecting in anatomy and pathology. Epistemological as well as pragmatic tensions arose. On top of Kohler’s framework, I introduce Sabina Leonelli’s concept of “data journey” to offer a narrative of the diversity of collecting practices involved in the Société Anatomique de Paris and the Musée Dupuytren. I use the concept to analyse how this diversity of practices impacted knowledge production. (shrink)

*PSA 2016, symposium on “Data in Time: Epistemology of Historical Data” organized by Sabina Leonelli, 5 November 2016* *See published version: "Radiocarbon Dating in Archaeology: Triangulation and Traceability" in Data Journeys in the Sciences (2020) - link below* Archaeologists put a premium on pressing “legacy data” into service, given the notoriously selective and destructive nature of their practices of data capture. Legacy data consist of material and records that been assembled over decades, sometimes centuries, often by means and for (...) purposes long since discredited or superseded. The primary strategies by which archaeologists put the data to work for new purposes are, I argue, secondary retrieval, recontextualization, and experimental modelling. I focus here on a particularly telling and complex example of secondary retrieval: the extraction of new data from old by means of radiocarbon dating. This is by no means a straightforward process of retrieving physical samples from legacy data to which 14C techniques can be applied that can, on their own, decisively settle chronological questions. When Libby’s post-war radiocarbon revolution got under way, it was expected to establish an absolute chronology that would render obsolete the local and relative chronologies on which archaeologists had long relied. Transformative though it has been, bringing these tools of physical dating to bear on archaeological problems has been a long, tortuous process, now described as proceeding through two subsequent radiocarbon revolutions. The second was an extended process of calibration by which 14C chronologies were corrected and refined, often against the very lines of evidence they were meant to displace. The most recent, a “pragmatic Bayesian” approach to archaeological dating, is motivated by concern that, no matter how much it is refined, radiocarbon dating cannot on its own resolve the chronological problems that archaeologists address; the challenge, its advocates argue, is to ‘fully integrate archaeological information with 14C dating in order to address archaeologically relevant timescales and episodes’. This is a genre of “robustness” reasoning that illustrates its epistemic risks as well as its appeal. As recent philosophical debate makes clear, it depends on appeals to the convergence of independent lines of evidence that may have more rhetorical than epistemic force and that may be spurious. Drawing on this philosophical literature I identify a set of conditions that must be met if these risks are to be avoided, all of which are an explicit focus of debate in cases of contestation about and reconciliation of chronologies based on legacy data. (shrink)

What is the future of science and technology? Will academic research become a commodity like so much else? Will technology and science become ever more intertwined? Such questions concern anyone to whom science and technology matter. A philosophical approach can shed light on them, as Hans Radder has amply shown. This volume contains essays by colleagues and friends that highlight the wide variety of topics he has addressed in his work. Whether it is the interaction between science, technology and society, (...) the nature of scientific experimentation, or the scientific realism question, Radder's approach is always acute and committed. 0With contributions by Henk van den Belt, James Robert Brown, Kai Eigner, Andrew Feenberg, Steve Fuller, Makoto Katsumori, Peter Kirschenmann, Christian Krijnen, Peter Kroes, Chunglin Kwa, Sabina Leonelli, Loet Leydesdorff, Alfred Nordmann, Pieter Pekelharing, Arthur Petersen, Henk de Regt, Angela Roothaan, László Ropolyi, Frits Schipper, and Astrid Schwarz. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophical discourse has deeply problematized the possibility of absolute existence. Hegel’s Foundation Free Metaphysics demonstrates that by reading Hegel’s Doctrine of the Concept in his Science of Logic as a form of Absolute Dialetheism, Hegel’s logic of the concept can account for the possibility of absolute existence. Through a close examination of Hegel’s concept of self-referential universality in his Science of Logic, Moss demonstrates how Hegel’s concept of singularity is designed to solve a host of metaphysical and epistemic paradoxes (...) central to this problematic. He illustrates how Hegel’s revolutionary account of universality, particularity, and singularity offers solutions to six problems that have plagued the history of Western philosophy: the problem of nihilism, the problem of instantiation, the problem of the missing difference, the problem of absolute empiricism, the problem of onto-theology, and the third man regress. Moss shows that Hegel’s affirmation and development of a revised ontological argument for God’s existence is designed to establish the necessity of absolute existence. By adopting a metaphysical reading of Richard Dien Winfield’s foundation free epistemology, Moss critically engages dominant readings and contemporary debates in Hegel scholarship. Hegel’s Foundation Free Metaphysics will appeal to scholars interested in Hegel, German Idealism, 19th- and 20th-century European philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, and contemporary European thought. (shrink)

While discovery of error provides personal gain for the entrepreneur, does this process automatically allocate value equitably among all stakeholders? We argue that the entrepreneurial process can be used to generate or maintain an entrepreneur’s personal wealth through the exploitation of a stakeholder group. Thus entrepreneurship can be both an equilibrating and a disequilibrating process and that both the visible hand of government and the decisions of an entrepreneur can speed or slow our movement toward value equilibrium. Speed toward value (...) equilibrium is likely to be important to a victimized stakeholder group and deserves further scholarly attention. (shrink)

While Weber’s distinction between ‘ideal’ and ‘material’ interests is one of the most enduring aspects of his theoretical legacy, it has been subjected to little critical commentary. In this article, we revisit the theoretical legacy of interest-based explanation in social theory, with an eye to clarifying Weber’s place in this tradition. We then reconsider extant critical commentary on the ideal/material interest distinction, noting the primarily Parsonian rendering of Weber and the unproductive allegiance to ‘generic need’ readings of Weber’s action theory. (...) We reconstruct the basis of the ideal/material interest distinction in the work of Rudolph von Ihering and provide a sounder basis for its analytic role in Weber’s ‘grand’ project. (shrink)

Research papers, chiefly on ancient Indic philosophy, and a few on Indian civilization.

On the method of Saint Giovanni Bosco, 1815-1888, in guidance and counselling.

There are three questions associated with Simpson’s paradox (SP): (i) Why is SP paradoxical? (ii) What conditions generate SP? and (iii) How to proceed when confronted with SP? An adequate analysis of the paradox starts by distinguishing these three questions. Then, by developing a formal account of SP, and substantiating it with a counterexample to causal accounts, we argue that there are no causal factors at play in answering questions (i) and (ii). Causality enters only in connection with action.

Work on Mimamsa philosophy; includes Āśutoṣiṇī commentary and Hindi translation.

Explanation of terms in Mimamsa, an orthodox school in Hindu philosophy.

Explanation of terms in Mīmāṃsā, an orthodox school in Hindu philosophy.

This groundbreaking, open access volume analyses and compares data practices across several fields through the analysis of specific cases of data journeys. It brings together leading scholars in the philosophy, history and social studies of science to achieve two goals: tracking the travel of data across different spaces, times and domains of research practice; and documenting how such journeys affect the use of data as evidence and the knowledge being produced. The volume captures the opportunities, challenges and concerns involved in (...) making data move from the sites in which they are originally produced to sites where they can be integrated with other data, analysed and re-used for a variety of purposes. The in-depth study of data journeys provides the necessary ground to examine disciplinary, geographical and historical differences and similarities in data management, processing and interpretation, thus identifying the key conditions of possibility for the widespread data sharing associated with Big and Open Data. The chapters are ordered in sections that broadly correspond to different stages of the journeys of data, from their generation to the legitimisation of their use for specific purposes. Additionally, the preface to the volume provides a variety of alternative “roadmaps” aimed to serve the different interests and entry points of readers; and the introduction provides a substantive overview of what data journeys can teach about the methods and epistemology of research. (shrink)

Even though since 1965 the Great Cultural Revolution was basically an internal struggle in Mainland China, it coincided with a high tide of criticism toward Russian revisionism and therefore constituted a struggle for defining the ideological line of the Chinese Communist Party. As an internal struggle, the Great Cultural Revolution subjected all phases of cultural activity and personnel to a severe political grinding down so that a more uniform political consciousness of Maoism was generated as the guiding principle of the (...) nation; as an attempt to repudiate Russian revisionism and to assert the ideological identity of Maoism, the Great Cultural Revolution has helped in practice to provide a model of continuing revolution for a genuinely pursued Marxist society. In his long article, Chou Yang, who himself later became a target and victim of the Great Cultural Revolution, spelled out the latter message and hinted at the former possibility. What is even more significant is that he stressed repeatedly the importance of the role philosophy workers and social science workers must play in waging an ideological struggle against both Marxist revisionism and capitalism, on the one hand, and the importance of political leadership in the studies and works of philosophy and the social sciences, on the other. (shrink)