Todayâs natural science has become a highly collaborative endeavor. To create scientific knowledge, scientists with specialized expertise observe systematically, analyze data and interpret combined experimental evidence to formulate a scientific knowledge claim. In so doing, most scientists depend deeply and immediately on their peers. Experiments have typically become too time-consuming and resource-intensive to be carried out by any one single scientist. Only in research groups can scientists accumulate the necessary expertise, labor, financial means and physical infrastructure to carry out cutting-edge research. For this reason, this book analyzes the collaborative creation of scientific knowledge in research groups, thereby addressing two questions that are continuously troubling philosophy: What is scientific knowledgeâis it genuinely collective? And how can it be created, particularly under the conditions of actual experimental scientific practice?
When answering these questions, I seek to add two factorsâone thematic, one methodologicalâto reflections upon collaborative knowledge creation. Thematically, I examine research groups. This examination proceeds âfrom withinâ research groups, studying the collaborative practices that constitute such groups and inquiring of research group members about their experiences with research group collaboration. Methodologically, I probe a way in which first-hand empirical insight, gained through qualitative methods, can inform philosophical reflections. My methodological approach reflects the difficulty that comes with my thematic focus. When collaborative scientific practice in research groups is the object of philosophical inquiry, then philosophers cannot solely rely upon intuition and imagination.
Drawing upon comprehensive empirical insight, I investigate different configurations of the within-group division of labor and the forms of epistemic dependence that they entail. I study how practicing scientists deal with epistemic dependence, how they come to trust one another, and how they individually relate to the scientific knowledge claim that they collaboratively create. To do this, the book is based on a comparative case study, drawing upon observations and interviews that have been carried out in two research groups, a small interdisciplinary group in planetary research and a larger molecular biology laboratory. The book is, hence, also about interdisciplinarity and the question of how interdisciplinary research collaboration compares to mono-disciplinary collaboration.
Based on these investigations, I argue for an inter-individual account of research group collaborationâan account that recognizes the role of individual knowing for scientific practice, but acknowledges the collective character of some of the scientific knowledge that research groups create collaboratively. With this account, I seek to make a contribution to two specialized fields of philosophical inquiry: social epistemology and philosophy of science. In particular, the book contributes to a âphilosophy of science in practiceâ (Ankeny, Chang, Boumans, & Boon, 2011; Soler, Zwart, Lynch, & Israel-Jost, 2014).
For a philosopher to inquire about âscience in practiceâ means to inquire about the practices in which scientific norms are interpreted, scientific methods applied and scientific knowledge made. It means to inquire about knowledge in-the-making, knowledge as it is created in processes of collaboration under contingent material, cognitive and social conditions (Rouse, 2002). This requires philosophers to give up âminimizing and externalizing the social dimensions of scientific knowledgeâ (Rouse, 1996, p. 168). It also requires empirical insight into how science is actually practiced. There are several ways to acquire such insight, one of which I exemplify when I mobilize first-hand qualitative data for philosophical reflection.
1.1 An Epistemology of Research Groups
In this book I study research groups, a thematic focus that is plain and novel at the same time. A philosophy of research groups is only now emerging, although both philosophy of science and social epistemology have long been interested in the âsocialâ character of science. But although most philosophers would agree that scientific knowledge creation involves âsocialâ aspects, precisely in what sense science should be understood as âsocialâ remains the subject of debate. So far, philosophy of science has focused on the role of peer communities, a focus for which research groups have been, at best, of peripheral interest. Social epistemology, in turn, is only beginning to develop pronounced interest in the domain of science.1
But while research groups are a relatively novel object of inquiry for social epistemologists and philosophers of science, they have been the undisputed norm in natural science for many decades. To find practicing scientists discussing research groups passionately and remarking upon their novelty, one has to go back to the mid-twentieth century when the prospect of large-scale technocratic research coalitions, later to be christened âBig Science,â2 sparked debate. Against those who were concerned by this prospect, David Green published a letter in the journal Science in 1954. In this letter, Green, at the time a leading biochemist, defends research groups as âone of the most powerful instruments yet devised for conducting experimental researchâ (Green, 1954, p. 445). As he argues, research groups bundle the increasingly specialized expertise of individual scientists and focus it on a selected set of research questions, questions that are too laborious and too daunting for any individual scientist to pursue without the support of committed group members. In sharing success and failure among group members, Green points out, research groups act as an âinsuranceâ against the epistemic risks of experimental science. Yet, Green admits, so little is known about the ways in which research groups work and adapt to the contingencies of scientific practice that such group themselves remain âan experiment in human relationshipsâ (Green, 1954, p. 445).
Over recent years, philosophy has slowly become more and more interested in research groups, triggered largely by the widespread reception of John Hardwigâs (1985, 1991) work on research groups and the application of Margaret Gilbertâs (1989, 2004) notion of collective belief to research collaboration (as, e.g., in Cheon, 2014; de Ridder, 2014; Wray, 2001). I will consider Gilbertâs notion of collective belief, but particularly Hardwigâs work which has been a major source of inspiration for me. Hardwig argues that contemporary natural science fundamentally relies upon trust and that â[âŠ] the alternative to trust is, often, ignoranceâ (Hardwig, 1991, p. 707):
In most disciplines, those who do not trust cannot know; those who do not trust cannot have the best evidence for their beliefs. In an important sense, then, trust is often epistemologically even more basic than empirical data or logical arguments: the data and the argument are available only through trust. (Hardwig, 1991, p. 693f.)
Trust becomes an obligatory element of experimental progress, Hardwig explains, when experiments are too labor-intensive to be carried out by one scientist, too costly to be repeated without serious doubts, or too complex to require just one field of expertise. Importantly, Hardwig points out that the relevance of trust does not concern merely the formulation of scientific knowledge claims, but plays out in their justification as well, since the logical and evidential justification for those claims is too comprehensive to be understood in deep detail by a single scientist (Hardwig, 1991, p. 696). When he first formulated these claims, Hardwig was bluntly challenging the ideal of the autonomous, individual knower that was (and in many respects, still is) underlying epistemology (cf. Fricker, 2006b). Against this ideal, Hardwigâs work calls for a new way of thinking about knowledge and scientific knowledge, a philosophical angle that is broader than an individualist focus :
[âŠ] we need an epistemological analysis of research teams, for knowledge of many things is possible only through teamwork. Knowing, then, is often not a privileged psychological state. If it is a privileged state at all, it is a privileged social state. So, we need an epistemological analysis of the social structure that makes the members of some teams knowers while the members of other teams are not. (Hardwig, 1991, p. 697)
In which sense knowing could be exactly understood as such a âsocial stateâ and features a genuinely collective character needs to be discussed. In any case, philosophical analysis of social structures and their role in scientific knowledge creation cannot be an armchair...