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

该项目寻求确定可能使科学在实践中受益的研究策略。同时，以这种方式产生的知识的性质是由科学中采用的认识标准来评估的。因此，问题是，科学中的哪种研究启发式有望促进实用并尊重科学的认识论愿望。各种启发式策略都来自于现有的知识，或者相反，来自社会需求。我们想要探索这种知识驱动或需求驱动的启发式方法是否以及如何成功地实现他们的目标。在追求实际目标的过程中产生的知识将根据其认识性进行评估。这些问题应该通过分析一批实际相关的研究项目并比较它们的目标和成就来解决。我们打算将重点放在由社会需求驱动的项目上，但目标是获得与科学相关的知识。这类由基督教多普勒会提供的“应用创新项目”，应该与欧盟早期项目中提供的更多知识驱动的研究项目进行比较。通过引用认知和非认知的标准或价值观(使用库恩术语)来研究实践利益、认知成就以及两者之间的关系。价值的概念被理解为不可行的基准，能够将项目的启发式和评估性部分联系在一起。认识论和非认识论的价值有助于澄清科学知识是什么，以及研究的路径是如何选择的。拟议的项目力求在个别个案研究和关于建立理解和干预之间关系的具体情况的个案研究和关于出版物和专利的相互关联性的大规模统计调查之间采取中间路线。前一类研究缺乏概括性证明，而后一类研究忽视了通过实践驱动的项目产生理论见解，忽视了最初使科技关系产生的机制。这些空白可以通过关注一组扩展的、但仍然可以管理的杰出案例研究来填补，在这些案例研究中，可以预期出现所提到的那种生产关系，并且仍然可以接受哲学分析。这使我们能够分析各种机制，使研究在实践中有益，并在认识论上受到尊重。此外，还对面向应用的研究中的模型结构进行了研究。关键问题涉及模型的法理核心和它们所包含的辅助原则之间的关系。挑战在于澄清模型的这些概念特征与它们的启发式和正当性潜力之间的关系。

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.