Project

Discipline

Scientific imagination; Cognitive science of science; Epistemology of science; Philosophy of science; Sociology of science

Lead
Scientists imagine when inventing and exploring hypotheses, designing experiments, interpreting data, and justifying theoretical conclusions. Interview and observation-based research will be carried out in two laboratories (biology, Geneva; climate science, Bern) to identify the roles played by imagination, the attitudes scientists have to imagination, how imagination is taught, and what different kinds of imagination are used. The data gathered will be used to produce a more general account of how imagination contributes to new scientific understanding.
Lay summary
Personne n'a jamais étudié comment les scientifiques utilisent leur faculté d'imagination dans leur travail quotidien. Mon projet cherche à répondre aux questions suivantes : quels rôles l'imagination joue-t-elle dans la science, qu'est-ce que les scientifiques pensent au sujet de l'imagination, comment est-elle enseignée, quand peut-on lui faire confiance et comment les scientifiques en tirent-ils de nouvelles connaissances ? En général, l’objectif est de parvenir à une compréhension de l’imagination scientifique comparable au niveau de compréhension dont nous disposons déjà pour l’expérience, la représentation et la mesure scientifiques. Le projet a des aspects à la fois empiriques et théoriques. Du côté empirique, une étude ethnographique des scientifiques travaillant dans des institutions suisses sera réalisée pour répondre aux questions susmentionnées. L'aspect théorique créera le cadre conceptuel de l'étude empirique et applique ensuite ce que cette étude découvrira aux problèmes épistémologiques normatifs. Le travail comblera de grandes lacunes dans notre compréhension actuelle du fonctionnement de la science, de l’apprentissage des méthodes scientifiques, et du fonctionnement de l’imagination en science. Ces questions ont une importance générale dans les domaines de l'histoire, de la philosophie et de la sociologie des sciences, ainsi que dans l'épistémologie et des sciences cognitives. En outre, elle renforcera l'imagination en tant que sujet légitime pour la recherche scientifique et philosophique et introduira de nouvelles possibilités méthodologiques et collaboratives en montrant comment la recherche empirique sur les routines quotidiennes des scientifiques peut jouer un rôle dans les arguments philosophiques.

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Last update: 27.11.2018

Active participation

Communication	Title	Media	Place	Year

Title	Year

No one is now, or has ever, studied how scientists imagine in their daily work. Perhaps this is because imagination does not play a large role in science. After all, science is supposed to “stick to the facts.” But a moment’s reflection reveals how important imagination is for the scientific enterprise. To obtain a hypothesis we must imagine that there are several different ways the world might be. We evaluate these by imagining what else would be true if they were. To test the hypothesis, we take the real world system we are interested in and recreate it inside our minds, laboratories, or computers by imagining analogous systems that can be investigated practically. Finally, even though our idealized experiment removes confounding real world factors, we imagine that the natural world also instantiates the regularities observed in the model in order to develop or refine our theory. Each of these uses of the imagination demands a mental departure from reality, and each appears necessary for scientific progress.I want to answer at least some of the following questions: what roles does imagination play in science, how do scientists think of imagination, how is it taught, when is it trusted, and how do we learn from it? The proposed project has two overlapping aspects: one empirical and theoretical. Empirically, an ethnographic study of scientists working in Swiss institutions will be carried out to address the above-mentioned questions. The results will be both "semantic" and "latent," that is, they will reflect what the scientists themselves say they do, and also what they actually do. The theoretical aspect first creates the conceptual framework for empirical study, and then applies what that study finds to epistemological, normative, and pedagogical issues. The empirical part of the study will employ the methods of qualitative social science, the theoretical part will employ methods of epistemology and philosophy of science. For the empirical part, we begin with participant observations and interviews. Two research laboratories will be studied for at least three terms - roughly one year and a half each. From each lab, several members will be selected to maximize the breadth of our sample size (so we have researchers of different genders, career stages, etc.). Each participant will be interviewed at least 9 times, or three times per term. In addition, lab meetings, conferences, colloquia and other meetings will be attended and observed. These data will be analyzed using both theory-driven thematic analysis and inductive thematic analysis. That is, we derive theoretical questions from the literature on imagination and use these to shape initial interview topics. The data that come from these interviews is then used to create the codes and themes for analysis, which focus follow-up interviews. For the theoretical part of the study, the empirical results are used to draw epistemological conclusions about the aspects of science that contain imagination use. For example, we want to know how crucial imagination is to these processes: is imagination necessary, important, or incidental? We want to know how the use of imagination affects the outcome of methods that rely on imagination: do certain uses of imagination make those methods better or worse, and if so, how and why? Questions like these can only be answered by careful argument drawing on previous work in epistemology. Their answers depend on how we conceive of important notions such as knowledge, justification, understanding, reliability, and evidence.A number of papers will be written, individually and jointly with the project partners (and perhaps scientific collaborators from the studied laboratories). These will be published in the fields of philosophy of science, sociology (of science), cognitive science, epistemology, metaphilosophy, or general philosophy. In addition, the results will be useful for scientists and teachers of science.