The Division of Cognitive Labor

Kitcher, Philip

doi:10.2307/2026796

Cited by 498 publications

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“…Here we follow Kitcher (1993) in claiming that finding out true things about the world is extremely easy-all the null results collected in every laboratory tell us true things about the world, but many of these null results are not very scientifically interesting. What scientists really care about are significant true things.…”

Section: Components Of the Epistemic Landscapementioning

confidence: 93%

“…In order to do so, they calculate their marginal contribution to the epistemic success of this project and also their potential reward, based on the reward scheme in place. The most well-known of these models, those proposed by Philip Kitcher (1990Kitcher ( , 1993 and Michael Strevens (2003), show that optimal distributions of cognitive labor can be achieved even if all scientists acted in self-interested ways, at least under a certain set of assumptions.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Much has been written on the more general topic of the social nature of scientific knowledge. A wide range of philosophers including Giere (1988), Hull (1988), Solomon (1992), Kitcher (1993), and Thagard (1993) have emphasized that science involves the coordinated cognitive effort of many scientists. Closer to our aims is Solomon's (2001) work on social empiricism, which argues that normative scientific epistemology requires the assessment of internal as well as social factors.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Epistemic Landscapes and the Division of Cognitive Labor

Weisberg¹,

Muldoon

2009

Philosophy of Science

225

194

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Because contemporary scientific research is conducted by groups of scientists, understanding scientific progress requires understanding this division of cognitive labor. We present a novel agent-based model of scientific research in which scientists divide their labor to explore an unknown epistemic landscape. Scientists aim to find the most epistemically significant research approaches. We consider three different search strategies that scientists can adopt for exploring the landscape. In the first, scientists work alone and do not let the discoveries of the community influence their actions. This is compared with two social research strategies: Followers are biased toward what others have already discovered, and we find that pure populations of these scientists do less well than scientists acting independently. However, pure populations of mavericks, who try to avoid research approaches that have already been taken, vastly outperform the other strategies. Finally, we show that, in mixed populations, mavericks stimulate followers to greater levels of epistemic production, making polymorphic populations of mavericks and followers ideal in many research domains. Disciplines PhilosophyThis journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/philosophy_papers/7 Because contemporary scientific research is conducted by groups of scientists, understanding scientific progress requires understanding this division of cognitive labor. We present a novel agent-based model of scientific research in which scientists divide their labor to explore an unknown epistemic landscape. Scientists aim to find the most epistemically significant research approaches. We consider three different search strategies that scientists can adopt for exploring the landscape. In the first, scientists work alone and do not let the discoveries of the community influence their actions. This is compared with two social research strategies: Followers are biased toward what others have already discovered, and we find that pure populations of these scientists do less well than scientists acting independently. However, pure populations of mavericks, who try to avoid research approaches that have already been taken, vastly outperform the other strategies. Finally, we show that, in mixed populations, mavericks stimulate followers to greater levels of epistemic production, making polymorphic populations of mavericks and followers ideal in many research domains.

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Section: Components Of the Epistemic Landscapementioning

confidence: 93%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Epistemic Landscapes and the Division of Cognitive Labor

Weisberg¹,

Muldoon

2009

Philosophy of Science

225

194

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“…As many authors have pointed out, scientists work with limited resources (Kitcher, 1990(Kitcher, , 1993, they are subject to biases (Ioannidis et al, 2014;Anderson, 2015, §5), and negative results are typically not published (Rosenthal, 1979). In the next two sections, I show quantitatively in the model how this reality theoretically a↵ects SCT*, and could practically a↵ect selfcorrection of social psychological research.…”

Section: Non-utopian Scenarios: Setupmentioning

confidence: 95%

Can the behavioral sciences self-correct? A social epistemic study

Romero

2016

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A

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Advocates of the self-corrective thesis argue that scientific method will refute false theories and find closer approximations to the truth in the long run. I discuss a contemporary interpretation of this thesis in terms of frequentist statistics in the context of the behavioral sciences. First, I identify experimental replications and systematic aggregation of evidence (meta-analysis) as the self-corrective mechanism. Then, I present a computer simulation study of scientific communities that implement this mechanism to argue that frequentist statistics may converge upon a correct estimate or not depending on the social structure of the community that uses it. Based on this study, I argue that methodological explanations of the "replicability crisis" in psychology are limited and propose an alternative explanation in terms of biases. Finally, I conclude suggesting that scientific self-correction should be understood as an interaction e↵ect between inference methods and social structures.

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“…This endangers cognitive diversity and we have to remember that science has benefited greatly from the few rational agents who due to stubbornness or self-confidence have insisted on less prominent rival theories who have proven to turn out accurate (cf. Kitcher 1990). A good example is Alfred Wegener, who after publishing his groundwork on plate tectonics 1912 spent the remaining time of his life fighting for support, disregarding the hostility with which his theory was received.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sharing in or Benefiting from Scientific Advancement?

Timmermann

2013

Sci Eng Ethics

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The intellectual property regimes we have currently in place are heavily under attack. One of the points of criticism is the interaction between two elements of article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the widely discussed issue of being able to benefit from scientific progress and the less argued for position of having a right to take part in scientific enterprises. To shine light on the question if we should balance the two elements or prioritize one of them, an exploration will be offered on how benefiting from scientific progress and the ability to participate in the advancement of science relate to securing human capabilities. A different perspective to the question will be gained by identifying the problem as an issue of misrecognition, especially the failure to recognize many willing collaboration partners in scientific research as peers. Lastly, I will argue that cooperative justice requires that if we have an innovation incentive system that disproportionally benefits one particular group, a certain duty to counterbalance this advantage exists when we are relying on mutual cooperation for the recognition of intellectual property rights.

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The Division of Cognitive Labor

Cited by 498 publications

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Epistemic Landscapes and the Division of Cognitive Labor

Epistemic Landscapes and the Division of Cognitive Labor

Can the behavioral sciences self-correct? A social epistemic study

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