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PratiScienSWe organize a conference entitled: FROM PRACTICE TO RESULTS IN LOGIC AND MATHEMATICS: A CONFERENCE ON THE ROLE OF LOGICAL AND MATHEMATICAL PRACTICES IN SHAPING THE RESULTS. The conference will take place in Nancy, France, 21-23 June 2010. See the presentation and call for papers.
The research group 'PratiScienS' has been created in January 2007, by Léna Soler, at Nancy (France).
The “practical turn” in philosophy of science has produced a multitude of case studies whose general trait is the insistence on the local character and heterogeneity of scientific practices, and, correlatively, on the contingency of stabilized results. However, there have been few attempts to draw a global and systematic account from this rich patchwork of specific analyses. This is precisely the final goal of this research.
More specifically, to achieve this aim it is necessary:
1. To carry out an in-depth study of the procedures, tools, teachings, difficulties and new questions arising from the “practical turn”.
It is possible to classify the variety of approaches developed for the description of scientific practices in general and, in particular, of the know-how and of and the tacit aspects of knowledge?
How can we analyze a scientific practice and its dynamics? What are its constitutive elements and what constituted their unity? Are the different existing models compatible? It is possible to develop a general model of scientific practice or is it necessary to differentiate the analysis on the basis of the particular discipline under investigation?
What has been achieved so far by adopting the paradigm of the scientific practices? In what way our knowledge of the real nature of science has progressed? In what way the questions of traditional philosophy of science have been dissolved or modified by the study of scientific practices? What new problems emerged?
2. To further the investigation of the most important among these new questions:
The role of tacit know-how in the constitution of scientific results;
The nature and function of measurement in the empirical sciences;
The experimental strategies for the establishment of robust results; the model-building activities (the role of images, the elaboration by analogy…);
Epistemological status and modalities of intervention of simulations;
The values underlying the practitioners’ judgments and taking part in the constitution of objectivity;
The degree of contingency that should be attributed to what is taken to be a scientific result.
On the basis of these elements, the efforts will focus on the characterization of the intuition that science is a specific human activity showing an outstanding degree of operationality and successfulness.
A presentation of the group is available in this pdf file, but will be included in the project website published very soon.
For any further information, please contact Léna Soler (l_soler [at] club-internet.fr).