A Critical Reflection On Automated Science
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A Critical Reflection on Automated Science
This book provides a critical reflection on automated science and addresses the question whether the computational tools we developed in last decades are changing the way we humans do science. More concretely: Can machines replace scientists in crucial aspects of scientific practice? The contributors to this book re-think and refine some of the main concepts by which science is understood, drawing a fascinating picture of the developments we expect over the next decades of human-machine co-evolution. The volume covers examples from various fields and areas, such as molecular biology, climate modeling, clinical medicine, and artificial intelligence. The explosion of technological tools and drivers for scientific research calls for a renewed understanding of the human character of science. This book aims precisely to contribute to such a renewed understanding of science.
Science for a Fragile World
Author: Robert Northcott
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 2025-07-10
Imagine two worlds. In one, laws, causal relations, and mechanisms are stable. In the other, they are fragile and unreliable. Our actual world is a mixture of the two, but for many of the things we care about most, the relations that matter are fragile. Fragility means we cannot rely on a theory or model that worked in one case still working in another, so it requires us to re-establish what works each time. Science for a Fragile World offers a novel re-examination of theory and empirical investigation, opening up a new view, and path, for scientific expertise. Chapters 1 and 2 offer an introduction and definition of the concept of fragility, proposing that a relation is fragile if and only if it holds unpredictably enough. Following from this, Chapters 3 and 4 explore the importance of narrow-scope empirical investigations and the methodological need for a 'Case Worker'-as opposed to a Stability-Theorist-approach. Chapters 5-7 further reflect on the unique challenge posed by the ubiquity of fragility for scientific methodology and the philosophy of science. In the latter chapters, Northcott delves into the impact of fragility in key case studies: economics, big data, and epidemiological modeling in the Covid-19 pandemic. Cutting through the strictures of the classic scientific realist debate, the volume concludes with a reevaluation of the role of expertise in a fragile world. Warning against grand unified theories, Northcott makes a thorough case for a science which emphasizes practical know-how and informal knowledge as much as theory.
The Brain Abstracted
Winner of the Nayef Al-Rodhan Book Prize from The Royal Institute of Philosophy Winner of the 2025 Lakatos Award from the London School of Economics and Political Science An exciting, new framework for interpreting the philosophical significance of neuroscience. All science needs to simplify, but when the object of research is something as complicated as the brain, this challenge can stretch the limits of scientific possibility. In fact, in The Brain Abstracted, an avowedly “opinionated” history of neuroscience, M. Chirimuuta argues that, due to the brain’s complexity, neuroscientific theories have only captured partial truths—and “neurophilosophy” is unlikely to be achieved. Looking at the theory and practice of neuroscience, both past and present, Chirimuuta shows how the science has been shaped by the problem of brain complexity and the need, in science, to make things as simple as possible. From this history, Chirimuuta draws lessons for debates in philosophy of science over the limits and definition of science and in philosophy of mind over explanations of consciousness and the mind-body problem. The Brain Abstracted is the product of a historical rupture that has become visible in the twenty-first century, between the “classical” scientific approach, which seeks simple, intelligible principles underlying the manifest complexity of nature, and a data-driven engineering approach, which dispenses with the search for elegant, explanatory laws and models. In the space created by this rupture, Chirimuuta finds grounds for theoretical and practical humility. Her aim in The Brain Abstracted is not to reform neuroscience, or offer advice to neuroscientists, but rather to interpret their work—and to suggest a new framework for interpreting the philosophical significance of neuroscience.