Susann Wagenknecht

Epistemic dependence in interdisciplinary groups

In interdisciplinary research scientists have to share and integrate knowledge between people and across disciplinary boundaries. An important issue for philosophy of science is to understand how scientists who work in these kinds of environments exchange knowledge and develop new concepts and theories across diverging fields. There is a substantial literature within social epistemology that discusses the social aspects of scientific knowledge, but so far few attempts have been made to apply these resources to the analysis of interdisciplinary science. Further, much of the existing work either ignores the issue of differences in background knowledge, or it focuses explicitly on conflicting background knowledge. In this paper we provide an analysis of the interplay between epistemic dependence between individual experts with different areas of expertise. We analyze the cooperative activity they engage in when participating in interdisciplinary research in a group, and we compare our findings with those of other studies in interdisciplinary research.

Facing the Incompleteness of Epistemic Trust: Managing Dependence in Scientific Practice

Based on an empirical study of a research team in natural science, the author argues that collaborating scientists do not trust each other completely. Due to the inherent incompleteness of trust, epistemic trust among scientists is not sufficient to manage epistemic dependency in research teams. To mitigate the limitations of epistemic trust, scientists resort to specific strategies of indirect assessment such as dialoguing practices and the probing of explanatory responsiveness. Furthermore, they rely upon impersonal trust and deploy practices of hierarchical authorship.

Hacking as Transgressive Infrastructuring: Mobile Phone Networks and the German Chaos Computer Club

This paper applies the theoretical lens of infrastructure to study hacking practices that take issue with large-scale communication networks. The paper analyzes a series of hacks targeting the Global System for Mobile Communications (i.e., networks for mobile telephony) carried out by a cluster of people affiliated or sympathetic to the German Chaos Computer Club between 2001 and 2014. These hacks aim at acquiring proprietary knowledge and facilitating the autonomous operation of local mobile phone networks for communities, independent of corporate network providers. The contribution of this paper is to show how hacking of this kind can be understood as transgressive infrastructuring, a way of engaging critically with infrastructure that, in the case of GSM hacking, relied on three strategies---reverse engineering, re-implementation, and parallel operation, all of which aim at appropriating the targeted network intellectually, legally, functionally, and/or operationally.

Beyond non-/use: The affected bystander and her escalation

The article proceeds from the observation that in everyday life we are surrounded by technology, most of which we do not use ourselves. Rather, we are, often involuntarily, subjected to the effects of others’ technology use. The article characterizes this condition as affected bystanding, a condition that comes with quotidian, often banal, experiences of passivity and marginality. The affected bystander is neither entirely included nor excluded by a technological system and the practices of its operation. For this reason, affected bystanding is not adequately accounted for by established categories of exchange, participation, collaboration, use, and non-use. Since affected bystanding is often an undesirable condition, the article discusses how the affected bystander may address her condition—escalate it—by positioning herself as bystanding affector.

Empirical Philosophy of Science: Introducing Qualitative Methods into Philosophy of Science

The book examines the emerging approach of using qualitative methods, such as interviews and field observations, in the philosophy of science. Qualitative methods are gaining popularity among philosophers of science as more and more scholars are resorting to empirical work in their study of scientific practices. At the same time, the results produced through empirical work are quite different from those gained through the kind of introspective conceptual analysis more typical of philosophy. This volume explores the benefits and challenges of an empirical philosophy of science and addresses questions such as: What do philosophers gain from empirical work? How can empirical research help to develop philosophical concepts? How do we integrate philosophical frameworks and empirical research? What constraints do we accept when choosing an empirical approach? What constraints does a pronounced theoretical focus impose on empirical work? Nine experts discuss their thoughts and empirical results in the chapters of this book with the aim of providing readers with an answer to these questions.

Debating Troy in the Mass Media - The Catalytic Impact of Public Controversy on Academic Discourse

The Troy controversy (2001–2005) illustrates the substantial impact of mass media on academic discourse among specialists. Triggered by a disputed exhibition, the controversy breaks out in the mass media and quickly escalates. In leading newspapers, Germany’s most renowned archeologists discuss findings and their interpretation in Troy research fiercely. The public Troy controversy is best characterized as an inter-specialist debate since lay people virtually have no say. The chapter provides an overview of the course that the public and the subsequent academic controversy take over time. This is followed by a detailed account of the public debate’s argumentative structure. The analysis shows that the public debate exerts a catalytic influence on academic discussion - not simply as a result of the mass media’s pervasiveness and their amplification potential but by virtue of the discursive configuration of the mass media controversy.

Theory Transfers?: Social Theory & CSCW Research

Finding time to present and discuss theories at CSCW events has proven a perpetual challenge. This workshop takes up this cause by facilitating an open-ended discussion about how diverse strands of social theory not only align with but support innovative CSCW research. The workshop will focus on three guiding questions: How, when, and to what end can social theory benefit CSCW research? What recent developments in social theory could be especially impactful for CSCW research today? What can CSCW research contribute to social theory? With an aim to building a new community of practice, the workshop will provide an open forum for scholars and practitioners to probing the merits and limitations of social theory for CSCW research. We welcome participants with diverse theoretical interests, ranging from organizational theory to intersectionality, social materiality to pragmatism, practice theory, and beyond.

The Planetary Science Group

The first group that I have studied empirically through observation and interviewing is the planetary science group, which is a small but long-standing interdisciplinary collaboration among senior researchers and their graduate and post-graduate students. The group examines extra-terrestrial surface processes and combines expertise from geology, physics, chemistry and microbiology. Having searched for interdisciplinary collaborations at Danish universities online, I contacted the group in 2010 and soon began to observe their weekly meetings on Tuesday mornings. Later I shadowed individual group members, following them through their professional days. When I had familiarized myself with the group, I set out to interview the five scientists that formed the group’s core at the time of my investigation.

Division of Labor

Research groups divide the kind of labor that it takes to create scientific knowledge among their members—cognitive labor, but also the manual labor of experimental practice and the social effort that it takes for a group member to interact. But how do groups divide labor? And hence, what does an epistemological approach to the division of labor in groups need to take into account? To answer these two questions, I begin by revisiting social epistemology’s existing discussion about the division of labor in science, a discussion primarily focused on scientific peer communities (Sect. 6.1).

Collaboration and Collective Knowledge

For the two research groups studied, Chaps. 6, 7 and 8 have described how research efforts are divided among group members, how such division of labor creates relations of epistemic dependence and how such dependence relations are facilitated by trust. It was shown that it takes more than an individual effort to create scientific knowledge. Now, given that knowledge creation in much of today’s natural sciences is the result of collaborative effort, philosophers need to explore whether or not scientific knowledge amounts to genuinely collective knowledge. And in fact, during recent years, diverse accounts of collective knowledge have been debated controversially (see, e.g., Andersen, 2010; Cheon, 2014; de Ridder, 2014; Fagan, 2011; Gilbert, 2000; Rolin, 2010; Miller, 2015; Wray, 2001).