Research in the Context of Practice: Strategies for Making Application-Oriented Science Epistemically Sound and Practically Beneficial

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Martin Carrier
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 414090831

The project seeks to identify research strategies that are likely to make science practically beneficial. At the same time, the nature of the knowledge produced in this way is assessed by epistemic standards employed in science. Thus, the question is which research heuristics in science promise to promote practical utility and to respect the epistemic aspirations of science. Various heuristic strategies proceed from the available knowledge or, conversely, from social demand. We want to explore whether and how such knowledge-driven or demand-driven heuristics succeed in achieving their goals. The knowledge produced in pursuing practical goals will then be assessed regarding its epistemic nature. These questions are supposed to be addressed by analyzing a pool of practically relevant research projects and comparing their goals and accomplishments. We intend to focus on projects that are driven by societal demand but aim to gain scientifically relevant knowledge in addition. Such „application-innovative projects,“ as made accessible by the Christian-Doppler Society, are supposed to be compared with more knowledge-driven research projects that are available from an earlier EU-project. Practical benefit, epistemic achievement and the relationship between the two is studied by invoking epistemic and non-epistemic standards or values (to use Kuhnian terminology). The notion of values, understood as defeasible benchmarks, is able to interconnect the heuristic and the evaluative wing of the project. Epistemic and non-epistemic values contribute to clarifying what scientific knowledge is like and how pathways of research are selected. The proposed project seeks to steer a middle course between individual case-studies addressing particular episodes in establishing relations between understanding and intervening and large-scale statistical surveys on the interrelatedness of publications and patents. The former kind of studies lacks a proof of generalizability, while the latter ignores the production of theoretical insights through practice-driven projects and disregards the mechanisms that make the science-technology relation productive in the first place. These lacunae can be filled by attending to an extended, but still manageable set of distinguished case-studies in which a productive relation of the kind mentioned can be expected to show up and which can still be subjected to philosophical analysis. This allows us to analyze various mechanisms for making research practically beneficial and epistemically respectable. In addition, the structure of models in application-oriented research is intended to be studied. The key question concerns the relationship between the nomological core of the models and the auxiliary principles they contain. The challenge is to clarify the relations between such conceptual features of models and their heuristic and justificatory potential.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants