Investigating the Philosophical Commitments of University Scientists across Disciplines

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This award supports a collaborative research project at the interface of philosophy of science and social studies of science. Researchers in philosopher of science, sociology, and anthropology will conduct an empirical study of the philosophical commitments of scientists across a broad range of scientific disciplines. It is often thought that these commitments are shared within each scientific discipline, that they differ considerably between scientific disciplines, and that these differences pose a serious challenge to engaging in effective cross-disciplinary research. This project will be the first study of philosophical commitments to be conducted with a large representative sample of scientists across many disciplines. The study has two fundamental goals: to achieve an analytical depth of understanding of how the philosophical commitments of scientists influence their scientific practices, and to achieve a deeper understanding of the extent to which prior cross-disciplinary experiences of scientists shape their philosophical commitments. Beyond enhancing the efficacy of cross-disciplinary research, this project will serve to enhance public literacy of science by providing insights for revising the tools that experts in public understanding of science use to investigate how the views of non-scientists about science or scientific thinking relate to their views on social issues. Philosophical commitments refer to how scientists conceptualize the world and its scientific study, framing how scientists understand and conduct their research. These philosophical commitments have three dimensions: what methods are effective in acquiring knowledge (epistemology), what categories are fundamental (ontology), and what social values are important (axiology). The project will begin by interviewing approximately 50 scientists to determine their philosophical commitments and how they manifest in their scientific practice. The interviews will facilitate the development of survey instruments that are to be used on a much larger scale to measure the philosophical commitments of scientists. These instruments will then be used to survey a national sample of approximately 3,500 US scientists from a wide range of scientific disciplines. The survey data will then be analyzed to test the hypotheses that philosophical commitments align with scientific disciplines and that such philosophical commitments vary when scientists have had prior cross disciplinary research experience. The measurement instruments to be developed in this project will be generalizable; they can subsequently be used by others to investigate philosophical dimensions of scientific practice both within and outside of STEM fields, to inform science education, and efforts to facilitate cross-disciplinary research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.