The last years have brought a new wave of cross-disciplinary interest in research itself, often motivated by concerns about potential threats to scientific progress such as hyper-competition, fraud, questionable research practices, poor research documentation, publication bias, and insufficient cooperation within and between disciplines.

The goal of this seminar is to bring together recent work from epistemology and philosophy of science on scientific progress and meta-scientific perspectives from a broad range of areas like sociology, psychology, economics, complexity science, science studies and cultural and evolutionary anthropology, fostering an active exchange between disciplines and viewpoints.

Program

The 3-day program is organized around three themes (see below) and comprises invited talks from an interdisciplinary group of international speakers, structured discussion rounds between participants, and poster sessions. In addition to substantive contributions, a central aim of the seminar is to examine concepts and assumptions that are relevant across fields. We will discuss differences in the conceptualisation of core notions such as (for example) progress, knowledge, publication bias, and their operationalisation in empirical studies and simulation models.

Theme 1: What is scientific progress?

Theme 2: From individual to collective knowledge generation – funding, peer review, publication process, citation, retraction, canonisation

Theme 3: The interplay of individual and collective in scientific progress – competition, cooperation, team science

Speakers

Confirmed speakers include:

James Evans, Professor of Sociology, Director of the Knowledge Lab, and Faculty Director of Computational Social Science at the University of Chicago.

Roberta Sinatra, Associate Professor of Data Science at ITU Copenhagen

Daniël Lakens, Associate Professor in the Human-Technology Interaction group at Eindhoven University of Technology

Duygu Uygun-Tunç, Marie Curie Cofund Fellow at Middle East Technical University and visiting scholar at University of California, Irvine

Mike Thicke, Researcher in Philosophy of Science and Social Epistemology, MESH Research at Michigan State University

Felipe Romero, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Groningen

Leo Tiokhin, postdoc at Eindhoven University of Technology & Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Study.

This seminar is part of the research project ‘Epistemic Progress in the University‘ of the Abraham Kuyper Center, funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation.