Collaborative Research: Investigating the Philosophical Commitments of University Scientists across Disciplines

合作研究：调查跨学科大学科学家的哲学承诺

• 批准号: 2218341
• 负责人: Aaron McCright
• 金额: $ 41.36万
• 依托单位: Michigan State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-08-01 至 2025-07-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2218341&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Investigating; Philosophical; Commitments

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.

该奖项支持科学哲学与社会研究哲学界面的合作研究项目。科学，社会学和人类学哲学家的研究人员将对各种科学学科的科学家的哲学承诺进行经验研究。人们经常认为这些承诺在每个科学学科中共享，它们在科学学科之间有很大差异，并且这些差异对参与有效的跨学科研究构成了严重的挑战。该项目将是对许多学科的大量科学家样本进行哲学承诺的首次研究。这项研究有两个基本目标：了解科学家的哲学承诺如何影响其科学实践的分析深度，并更深入地了解先前的科学家跨学科经历的程度。除了增强跨学科研究的效力外，该项目还将通过提供有关修改专家对科学理解专家的工具来调查非科学主义者对科学或科学思维的看法如何与他们对社会问题的看法有关的工具，从而增强科学的公共素养。哲学上的承诺是指科学家如何概念化世界及其科学研究，从而构架科学家如何理解和进行研究。这些哲学承诺具有三个维度：哪些方法可有效获取知识（认识论），哪些类别是基本的（本体论）以及哪些社会价值观很重要（Axiology）。该项目将首先采访大约50位科学家，以确定他们的哲学承诺以及他们如何在科学实践中表现出来。访谈将有助于开发调查工具，这些调查工具将在更大范围内用于衡量科学家的哲学承诺。然后，这些仪器将用于调查来自各种科学学科的大约3500名美国科学家的国家样本。然后，将对调查数据进行分析，以检验哲学承诺与科学学科保持一致的假设，并且当科学家具有先前的跨学科研究经验时，这种哲学承诺会有所不同。该项目中要开发的测量工具将是可推广的；随后，其他人可以将它们用于调查STEM领域内外科学实践的哲学维度，以告知科学教育以及促进跨学科研究的努力。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是值得通过基金会的知识分子和更广泛影响的评估来审查审查标准来通过评估来通过评估来支持的。