A pragmatic approach to scientific change: transfer, alignment, influence

Abstract

I propose an approach that expands philosophical views of scientific change, on the basis of an analysis of contemporary biomedical research and recent developments in the philosophy of scientific change. Focusing on the establishment of the exposome in epidemiology as a case study and the role of data as a context for contrasting views on change, I discuss change at conceptual, methodological, material, and social levels of biomedical epistemology. Available models of change provide key resources to discuss this type of change, but I present the need for an approach that models transfer, alignment, and influence as key processes of change. I develop this as a pragmatic approach to scientific change, where processes might change substantially depending on specific circumstances, thus contributing to and complementing the debate on a crucial epistemological issue.

How tracking technology is transforming animal ecology: epistemic values, interdisciplinarity, and technology-driven scientific change

“…Movement ecology therefore mirrors similar shifts towards inter-and transdisciplinarity in genomics, systems biology, and other data-centric disciplines in biology and biomedicine (MacLeod & Nersessian, 2013;Richardson & Stevens, 2015). More generally, the changes taking place in movement ecology support the argument that understanding scientific change requires attention to scientific collaborations and the conditions under which these collaborations take place (Andersen, 2016;Ankeny & Leonelli, 2016;Canali, 2022). As in previous studies of interdisciplinary collaborations, studying collaborations in movement ecology reveals iterative processes of integration, alignment and interlocking (Andersen & Wagenknecht, 2013;MacLeod & Nersessian, 2016).…”

“…Iterative collaboration enables researchers to gradually deal with a major challenge inherent in interdisciplinary research: how to combine perspectives, methods, concepts, standards, theories, technologies, and so on from different disciplines into a single research project or field (Andersen & Wagenknecht, 2013;MacLeod, 2018;MacLeod & Nersessian, 2013). Philosophers of science have pointed to the need for exchange, alignment or interlocking in interdisciplinary collaboration, which are extended processes in which participants communicate their own assumptions and disciplinary backgrounds, learn about or acquire some aspects of other disciplines, and build up a shared scientific repertoire (Andersen, 2016;Ankeny & Leonelli, 2016;Canali, 2022;Grüne-Yanoff, 2016;MacLeod, 2018). In the next section I examine how biologists and ecologists in movement ecology perform these sorts of activities when processing, analysing and interpreting animal tracking data.…”

Editors with multiple retractions, but who serve on journal editorial boards: Case studies

“…The risk is even more acute when such individuals occupy editorial positions in journals that are part of an ethics brand, such as COPE, but also in journals that have more suspicious scholarly conduct, such as those in the OMICS brand (Manley, 2019). However, there are extremely high risks of accusations of slander, public humiliation, and/or unscholarly conduct caused by "person-shaming", or the claimed association with predatory journals (Ruiter-Lopez et al, 2019), so the use of such information needs to be carefully considered and weighed before use, possibly as a form of exposome for science reformation (Canali, 2022). Even more so because-when the volume of retractions continues to rise, resulting from incidences of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism of evidence-this has spurred the intensified study and quantification of such incidences (Zuckerman, 2020).…”