 So it is my honor and privilege to introduce this fourth, fourth, fifth, first seminar of the year. And we have the pleasure to receive someone that we know well, Federica Rosso, that we'll discuss about on the Epistemic and Normative Benefits of Methodological Plurism. And after her talk, we will have a small five minute break, and after one of our own, Juliette Ferri Danini, sorry, I'm sorry, Juliette. We'll start the discussion with the group. So you have the floor. Thank you very much for having me here again. I guess the last time was five years ago. Yeah, time flies. And for me, it is always a pleasure to come back. I feel like coming back home, because I spent very many years in this building. So there is always kind of an emotional thing coming back in a different role. But there we go. I would like to talk about methodological pluralism. I'm going to argue that not only the fact that we have a plurality of methods in use in the sciences, but also that it is a good thing that we have this plurality of methods. And if anything, we should really fight to keep this plurality. That's really kind of the core of the argument. To build my argument for methodological pluralism, first I would like to make a shift in focus, something that has to do with philosophical methodologies, especially. And so to say that, to appreciate why it matters that we acknowledge this plurality of methods, we need to turn our attention to the practice of the sciences. So I will explain what this practice shift entails, because the background of this is a more traditional mode of doing philosophy of science, where we ask questions such as what is a theory, what is a model, what is an explanation. And then this seems insufficient until we really look at what happens in the practice. And from this, then to restart the discussion on methods. I will introduce briefly two episodes of what I call techno science, just to illustrate how different methods may be at work in different areas and within the same area. And then the second part of the talk will be to present my argument for methodological pluralism in a first stage of pretty descriptive character, and especially building on the work of Hacking and Ruffin. And then the second part goes more normative, trying to explain why this is important to counteract forms of methodological imperialism instead. And I will try to explain why I think normatively and epistemically, this is something we should really pay attention to. All right, so let me start then with the technoscientific practices. I would like to keep here the technoscientific, because a lot that goes on in the examples that I will use also depends on the use of technologies. But I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the technologies this time. Instead, it is going to be more about the idea of shifting focus from the concept of method or model to the practice itself. So for those of us who have been trained in this more traditional mode of philosophy of science, what is really common is to ask questions about what is theory, what is an explanation. And this has occupied a large part of the debate in philosophy of science in the past, 50, 60, 70 plus years. And instead, if we start not looking at the specific question of what the model is, but how scientists use models and methods, then the whole discourse is likely to change. Now, this is not just rephrasing the question in different terms. It is really a question of philosophical methodology. And this is for the following reason. If you keep asking the question, what is a model? Or what is a method? If you would like to be the more general, then most likely you will be trying to provide the definition of this and the definition that also holds a certain level of generality, okay? And as we have been trained in this Anglo-American way of doing philosophy of science, it means that it doesn't matter what the scientists do. It matters what us philosophers are able to provide as a definition of, okay? And this can work in abstraction of the practice. Now, what has happened as well is that many of these traditional philosophy of science questions have been set up in the context of the natural sciences. And this is where you start having these kind of clashes because what is a theory, what is a model? The majority of people will have in mind models and methods and theories from same physics and they struggle to understand how these things apply, say, to a social science domain or to biology or to a domain that is not the one that we inherited at the most legitimate ones from post-positivist kind of areas. But you may get to very different answers if you pay attention to the practice of what happens. The problem is the moment you try to look at the practice, there isn't just one way of doing it. And looking at the literature and not just in philosophy of science, but broadening the scope to also science and technology studies and philosophy of technology, then it won't take a lot of time to realize that there are at least three different practice terms that you may have to deal with. The first one is possibly the most famous one, the one in science and technology studies that is mostly associated with laboratory studies where we focus on science as practice. And in this area, people have been trying to show why contemporary practice matters and not just a kind of the historical reconstruction of these practices. And here clearly the big hero is Bruno Latoura, really kind of going into the labs and understanding what happens and reconstructing these dynamics. Large part of his work and of collaborators and also the people that came after him is really ethnography, sociology of science. And if you extend a bit what they have been done, there is also this flattening of epistemology and ontology. They are basically the same thing. And so the social and the reality are kind of on the same level, but the way we have to study them is really kind of being part of this process. Okay? And clearly for us in philosophy of science, this may be quite difficult because for one thing we are not trained to do this type of ethnographic work, but also because we have been used to have this distance, also this way of conceptualizing things in obstruction of the practice. At the same time, in philosophy of science, in the past 15 years, we have seen also this movement. In part, and this actually started earlier than the past 15 years, is a new experimentalism with authors such as Cartwright, Galison, et cetera, trying to say we have to analyze experiments not just because of their role in establishing theory X, but also because of the materiality that they carry with them. And this is part of the philosophy of science discourse. But also this attention to the practice has been proposed by the Society for Philosophy of Science in practice. And this has been perceived in the beginning as a bit of a tension, because if the philosophy of science is not looking at the practice, what it is that they are really looking at. But it is interesting, and this is more of a sociological point, to see how the philosophy of science in practice has really grown over the years. It is now an important and established place for discussion for philosophers of science. And it has become also a dominant part of philosophy of science associations proper, such as the European Philosophy of Science Association or the American counterpart. So something has happened in philosophy of science too. And at the same time, philosophy of technology has also seen this shift to the practice because part of the philosophy of technology has been really about understanding the nature of artifacts and this in abstraction of how we come to have these artifacts. So there has been also there some pressure to say, we have to look at the design process. It is not just about the nature of these artifacts, it is also about the practice of engineering. So this is to say all in all that the attention to the practice is something that has really come from different quarters. It does call for a lot of self-reflection at the level of use of philosophical methodology. And I would like to argue that here too, it is already an early moment in which we have to say, we have to be pluralistic. There shouldn't be just one way in which we look at the practices. If you just want to focus on philosophy of science, possibly the author that has, one author that has spent a lot of time and attention to making this shift is Asoc Chang in part because he has tried to show that we need to do history and philosophy of science together because we have to understand how even the kind of the most what we take for granted right now is the product of intellectual struggles and you have to be able to reconstruct these struggles over time, but the way in which you do it is really carrying out an activity-based analysis. This is probably not very readable at the bottom. We don't need all the details, but I'm going to give you some elements. He's focusing on activities, so what is being done in the practicing question, but also the aims. So we may want to look at the inherent purposes of the activity, but also whether there is some external function of these activities. We have to look at practice or even better said at systems of practices in the plural, already introducing an element of pluralism. We have to look at the agents. And this is very important with respect to this traditional mode of philosophy of science because we usually talk about the theory, the model, the explanation, but never about the scientist, the explainer, the modeler, who are these people? The attention to the people has been the object and of the attention of sociology and ethnography of science, but not of philosophers. But if we follow Chang, then understanding who the agents are is also part of the philosophy and history of science discourse proper. We have to understand the capabilities of what we are able to do with these systems of practices which may entail also discussing the available technoscientific equipment available at any given time, freedom of choices. I mean, the list is long. What I think is important here is that this is a very useful list of aspects of practices we may want to pay attention to. I take Chang in no way to say that every single paper that we want to write has to pay attention to all these aspects simultaneously. So it is also a way of saying it is part of our job to say, this is the perspective I take now. This is the angle that I take now. This is why it is important for me to analyze more the equipment, more the agents, more the theoretical level, more the background. And then what happens is that what you see that really cuts across all these lists is conceptual, normative, historical, sociopolitical elements. I find it very important because for one thing it does help us get the STS approach proper closer to a philosophy of science proper and also closer to other fields such as philosophy of technology, but also ethics of science, which is kind of finally also on the agenda of philosophers of science. And so we can see how these questions are really intertwined. Now, with this theoretical background and with this proposed shift to attention to the practices, let me introduce briefly two episodes of techno-scientific practices, cases that have been studying for a while for various reasons, but here they had me illustrate the variety of methods that are at work. And I chose them from very different fields also to signal that it is not an accident that we find these instances of pluralism just in one area. It is quite pervasive. The first episode that I would like to talk about is exposure research. This is a field part of epidemiology and especially in the field of molecular epidemiology. It is an area in which they as epidemiologists they are still interested in understanding the relation between exposure and disease, the way in which they are going to study exposure really is different from the traditional epidemiology setup. For one thing, they increase the level of statistical power and analysis because they are dealing with very large data set combining them from different cohort across Europe and beyond. So there has been a lot of work at the level of statistical modeling. At the same time, they have re-analysed available biospecimens and collecting new ones. So what you have here is two things really. One is methods for collecting, storing, transferring these biospecimens, methods for the analysis of biospecimens and then transforming these analysis into numbers that feed the statistical analysis that I mentioned just a moment before and these things are intertwined. All this is possible only if you at the same time develop theories. For instance, if you suspect that the type of disinfectant used in the waters of a swimming pool may have an effect on some type of disease and you want to collect biosamples to check this, how are you going to check this? What is the biological theory that tells you that the chlorine that's used in the swimming pool will be visible in your body two hours, three hours, 24 hours after you have been in the swimming pool? So you see here that there is an element of iteration of making an experiment, having some hypothesis, it doesn't go well, you develop theory, theory tells you something, you go back. Problem is we don't have infinite possibilities of collecting all these samples but you see how here again you have an element of by then kind of go back and forth between the theory and the experiment and the statistical methods. They also use simulations. Of course, they've been relying on meta-analysis. The list could go on. And what I'm saying here somehow makes a summary of what has happened in some projects that are large consortia, but also across several projects and in larger consortia, but also in a single study. What I just mentioned like the waters in the swimming pool is called the Pishina study. It's one of the famous one that they have used for instance. The other example that I want to use comes from computational history of ideas. And I like to talk about this one because we tend to think that this question about methodological pluralism is something that happens in the labs, okay? And so this gives me an interesting contrast because here we are really talking about humanities, hardcore humanities that are at the same time, really at the forefront of innovating how you do methodology in a proper humanity, humanities context. I've been following very, very closely the work of my colleagues in Amsterdam, especially Arianna Betting in her series of project. And what they do in computational history of ideas is doing history of ideas. So understanding one concept and how this concept has changed across time or in large corpora. And what they have done is not just enlarging the corpora thanks to the digitalization of the texts. Certainly this is part of what they have done and this is part of their methodology. So already getting at producing this corpora, but also they have been using simultaneously methodologies for text parsing and text money, close reading. They have been developing ontologies and software to analyze this. And so, and at the same time also a theoretical framework. For instance, all the work of Arianna Betting and colleagues relies on a particular concept of concept that I don't have to go into this. But this is what they have been using to set up the algorithm that would do the searches on this corpora. But what I think is important to note is that one does not replace the other. And so they have been really using both the computational methods and the traditional close reading and this to get different types of understanding and insight into a given concept. So hopefully this gives you again an idea of how in the same field and even in the same project and even in the same study, you never have to do with just one method. I really struggle to find an area where this is the case that it is so monomethodological. And then you can say, well, this is just a descriptive claim. And yes, the first step of my argument is just descriptive to say, we have to acknowledge this. This is what happens. Shifting the attention to the practice and to the practices, this is kind of the picture that we get in front of us, a plurality of methods in the sciences, across disciplines, in the same field, in a single research project and domain. And now you could say, are you happy with that? No, I think I'm only halfway through because just recognizing that there is a plurality of methods at work is not enough. As a philosopher, we may want to make something out of this description. And this is where my second part begins. I want to be able to say why it is important, a good thing to have this plurality of methods and why we should really preserve this diversity. And I will be looking into epistemic reasons for why we need to preserve this diversity and to make this argument, I'm going to rely mainly on the work of Cromby Hacking and Rufi. And then there are also more normative oriented considerations. And for this, I want to look into the debate on methodological imperialism instead. So this is where the argument may make a very strong normative shift. So the Cromby Hacking styles of reasoning, maybe many of you will be familiar with this or will have heard about the styles of reasoning. This is pretty much a topos, especially in the more STS oriented literature. And most people know it because Hacking made them famously, but actually this come from Cromby before Hacking and Hacking built on that. Again, this is more visible than the one before. So we have here seven styles that have been identified. One that they call method of postulation that you can pretty much identify with Greek mathematics, experiments, hypothetical construction of analogical models, comparison and taxonomic reasoning, statistics and probability, historical derivation of genetic development, and then a lot of practices to isolate and purify phenomena. And by this Hacking means actually something more specific than the two. So experiments, okay. If you don't take these two too rigidly, then you'll see how a number of these have been in place in the two episodes that I mentioned before. Experiment, in some part also the method of postulation, because some element of axiomatization could be present in computational history of ideas. Hypothetical construction and analogical models, the whole of molecular epidemiology is built on that because they can't do otherwise. Statistics and probability all the way, historical derivation of genetic development, depending on how you understand this, but there is an element really of, also the development of the methods themselves that you may want to consider. So here what is important to bear in mind is what you can do with these types. So for one thing, what you should really refrain from is to try to give precise definitions of each style. This is clearly not what people like hacking were after, because if you try to pin down exactly, this is the label, this is the definition, this is the category of methods, you kind of fall back into the trap of analytic philosophy, and this is not what is going to help you in understanding the practices. So the point is they do not correspond to crystallized methods. There isn't such a thing as a crystallized method. Instead, this is to point that methods change across time and disciplines. So when we say statistics and probability, you can say, oh, but this is very vague. Yes, it is very vague. And in fact, the way in which statistics and probability methods are used across fields does change their assumption, the specific statistical methods, but that's okay. That is exactly what you have to specify whenever you look at one practice in detail. Also, they are often used in combination. And this is an important element to recognize because, again, these styles of reasoning do not work in isolation. So the very sophisticated statistical analysis used in molecular epidemiology are not independent of the conceptualization of health and disease and of this way of understanding exposure and also of the type of data that they manage to generate and analyze, et cetera. So you see that these things are interconnected. And also these methods really undergo ups and downs in their success of use. And this is very interesting, not only historically and sociologically, but also philosophically, because then you can see how methods have been traveling from one field to another. You can see why certain approaches to mathematical modeling, now they are really on the rise in finance, for instance. Why are mathematicians employed in banks, you know? Well, it is because these things travel to some extent. And so we have to be open to the idea that a method that has been designed for some specific area, at some point, may make it into another area for better or for worse. And I will discuss later the example of randomized control tires as well, you know, and how they have become the methodology for establishing causal relations. But from a descriptive point of view, they have been traveled from one area to another. So this is how one has to think about the styles. It is not just descriptive. Hacking has four pieces about the styles. One is that we have to focus on what these styles allows us to achieve. For instance, introducing new objects of styles, new laws, new explanations. So again, not about crystallizing, this is the style and that's it. But what can we do with this style now that it's used in this way rather than another? Also, this has to do with what you are able to establish as true or false depending on the styles, you know? And this is what may help us reframe some of the discussions. Do we always need experimental evidence to establish causal claims here and there or not? It depends. So you can see what you are able to establish given style, but also given the research question you are interested in. And so the way in which they stabilize may be different and we cannot expect all of these styles to follow the same path. We have to be open to these differences. But finally, the other important point is that styles are grounded in our cognitive capacities. And I like this point because it connects to one of the elements of Chang, paying attention to the agents. These styles do not fall from the sky and then we just use them, but maybe they are also a product of what we are able to do at any one given time and this may change. And these cognitive capacities have somehow intellectual components, but also very much embodied components, sociocultural components, and we have to be prepared to look at these nuances. The work of Stefanie Lofi, I find it very interesting because it builds on hacking, but it goes significantly further than this. As I read it, the work of hacking remains after all descriptive about these styles qua epistemologies, but Lofi, with the idea of foliated pluralism, tries to do something more. She tries to say something about ontology, but let me make a step back. She builds on the styles of reasoning and then she has three specific thesis she wants to argue for with this idea of foliated pluralism. One idea is of transdisciplinary. A style of reasoning does not belong to one discipline or domain only. Sounds like a platitude, but it is important to have it clear on the table and then you see that statistical analysis will be an excellent case in point here. They do not belong to one field. They are really used across fields. Non-exclusiveness and synchronicity, several styles of reasoning can be combined at any given moment or in any given study. Of course, it takes quite a lot of work to argue for the legitimacy or the plausibility of this combination, but this is what we actually do. And then the cumulativeness, the use of multiple styles of reasoning leads to enlarging the basket of styles rather than superseding one of them. And this is where it starts getting interesting. It is not just cumulative in the sense that now we have more, the previous one gets off the list and then I have another one and there is an element of a kind of linear progression, not at all. It is much messier than that. Sometimes even for the worse perhaps because we are making things more complicated, less clear and a good case in point here would be opaque AI models that are nested as they are used in climate science. There is this element of cumulativeness and as a result, we don't know the elements in between and then we have a result and we have no idea how we got to it. But that's what it is. But what do we do really with this? This is the interesting point about ontology that I take from Luffy. The reason why we need this pluralism is because with different methods we enrich the ontological space of whatever we study. So the idea here of using styles in combination is not equivalent to triangulation. The idea of triangulation has been used in a number of fields to say if I get to this result in this study and in this study and in this study, they converge and the result must be true. But that's not what we are trying to understand with foliative pluralism. The idea is that if you study a scientific object through a statistical analysis, through a qualitative study, through a simulation, through an experiment, what you get is actually epistemic access to an object that is multilayered complex in its sense. And so you get some of it from different angles and perspective. Of course you can say, and how do I reconcile them? That's exactly the beauty and the complexity of the sciences. The beauty and the complexity of the sciences. But to just argue that one method will give you the one privileged entry point into the scientific object from the perspective of Luffy is to misunderstand the nature of a scientific object in itself. There isn't just one thing out there to which we get access. In part, if you want, this is pretty much in line with STS arguments for a form of construction in constructivism, but I would like to argue more for forms of constructionism, perspectivism, and we can discuss this later. But the point is it is really about having more of the ontology rather than less. Now, two examples that I would like to use to illustrate how this foliated pluralism may work in practice are the following. One is the use of mixed methods research in the social sciences. I don't know how familiar you are with mixed methods research, but already the label indicates that the nature of these class of methodologies is to use quantitative and qualitative methods in a single study. There is no hierarchy. There are various ways in which the qualitative and qualitative methods may be combined. There is a rich literature and debate within this field also to come up with protocols for this type of questions. It is better to do first qualitative than quantitative or the other way around or in a different iteration form, et cetera. If you are interested in qualitative QCA, qualitative comparative analysis is a very interesting subset. I mention it because you have a star of QCA here in UCL and it is been one of you from the social sciences. One person that has been really pushing the agenda of this methodology and for the pluralistic nature of this methodology. And so the question is, what each method give us information about? And this is exactly what you have to justify in the setup of your study, but also in the conclusion. Why to study a certain problem, you would go qualitative first and quantitative next or the other way around. What it is that you are getting from studying qualitative and quantitatively, this is exactly what we have to explain what we have to justify, not to claim that the privileged entry point would be safe, just the quantitative because numbers will give us the truth kind of thing. Another example that I want to give to illustrate this, the idea of the fallacious pluralism is evidential pluralism that has been discussed extensively in medical methodology now because by and large medical methodology and especially evidence-based medicine has tried to sell the idea that randomized controlled trials will tell us the truth about interventions and their effectiveness. And there has been a very rich literature coming from philosophy of science to show that first of all, it is not true that a randomized controlled trial is just a randomized controlled trials. It encapsulates a lot of information that comes from biology, social science, evidence of mechanisms. So even if you want to sell it as this is pure statistics and just with the statistical test, I pin down the relations, this is not true. So a proper philosophy of science exercise should show that it is inherently pluralistic in the RCT methodology. But secondly, that you have to go even a step further and consider other types of evidence that you may use alongside the one that is generated by RCT. A good place to look for this would be the methodology of the IAC, the International Agency for Research on Cancer especially in their preamble where they are really trying to see how different baskets may give you different types of evidence and then collectively or in the amalgamation may lead you to how you classify a given carcinogens, okay? The metaphor that has been used to explain evidential pluralism is that of reinforced concrete. For those who know a bit of engineering, reinforced concrete has really two elements, the concrete but also the steel and why it works better because the two materials perform better under different types of stress. And so it is to gather that they are better, not in isolation and they actually in a very complementary way. All right, this looks like a beautiful story. We should all be happy and a happy family of a methodological pluralist. But I think what the reality is is that it is a battlefield and I very much dislike these war metaphors in philosophy and elsewhere but I think it is fair to say that methodology in the sciences is a place where the game is played and it is a constant attempt to impose one method over the other and also across disciplines. There is a subfield now in philosophy of science that is dedicated to the study of these imperialistic cases. In some cases, scholars have shown that it has begun as an ethical case of genuine interdisciplinary exchange, eminent examples are economics and neuroscience but then at some point one method depends to take over and flatten anything else that is used in peripheral areas of the field. And RCT is another good example, the way in which the authorities governments have been pushing for using RCTs in the social sciences or in domains such as education, you can also see it as a case of imperialism. But why is it bad? Okay, I'm going to give you two examples to illustrate why it is bad and hopefully convince you that we should really try to avoid these cases. One example that I have comes really from the social sciences and especially sociology that has been a very interesting controversy published in a prominent social science journal that originated in a study of Buccotti and Goltorp. Goltorp is a very famous sociologist based in the UK and what they did was a study on social class returns due to higher education, observational study, trying to understand not so much how much more people would earn if they had a higher education but what would the return be in terms of social class? And in the same journal that had been a very harsh critique to say, look, this is not good because your study was observational. You didn't use the potential outcome models. Potential outcome models are a special type of statistical models that are based on the idea of counterfactuals and so in a sense also experimental but especially they are used to study the effects of causes. So you think you know what the causes are and then you try to establish what the effects are. And the reply was your critique is not quite right because my question was about causes of effect. Also the whole theoretical setup and the data I had were not well suited to use potential outcome models. I really needed more traditional observational studies and this has gone on for a couple of replies, et cetera. So you can see here the pressure. A study that in and of itself where you say, oh, that's actually pretty good. Solid, well conducted, well run, blah, blah, blah. It is attacked at the level of methodology and not because they say, you have not done things right in this method but to say you shouldn't use this method because this method is inherently superior to that one. You see the problem. Now you can say, oh, come on, this is a quarrel. Maybe this goal did not get along with this other guy Clark and it is a self-contained thing. I think that what goes on in this kind of quarrels is prepared by other types of imperialistic forms. And the second example I have comes from epidemiology this time. So the two are effectively disconnected but you can see how one may lead to the other down the road. So what has happened is that it was probably 2014 World Congress of Epidemiology and planetary speech of the president Miguel Hernán who is a very prominent epidemiologist and one of those who has been working decades to promote the use of this causal inference approaching epidemiology, which is this potential outcome that I just mentioned essentially. And the thing is he clearly said black or white in the planetary speech but also in his publications, causal questions are well-defined when interventions are well-defined. And this is the method to be used in epidemiology. Now, what do you do about ethnicity? What do you do about social class? What do you do about gender? So epidemiology, demography, many of the social sciences take interest in these types of variables but go figure how you can have a well-defined intervention on gender, race, ethnicity. Okay, so what do you do? Either you say these are not causes or you say whatever you do will never reach the standards of and make it into the realm of the good science. You see why this is dangerous? A dangerous move to make. Yeah. Just a question about the potential outcome. Yeah. It's just post-stratification. Have you gone through afterwards just for example that you assume your population is a female and it can become a cultural experiment? Yes, you could do that but it also depends on the kind of question that you are interested in. The potential outcome model and any elaboration of it will work nicely if you are interested in understanding effects of causes, not the causes of effects. So you try to establish what would be the effect of having a certain type of higher education and then you restratify, you do matching strategies. There is a lot that you can do, fine. But in some cases you are not interested in kind of having the causes fixed and see what happens down the road. You have a dataset and you want to understand what may be the causes of this. So what you hold fixed, so to speak, is the effect. And then you try to reconstruct using certain methodologies what the causes are. If this is your question, then no matter how you refine and you adapt to the data, the potential outcome model, it is simply the method that is elsuited to your question. So to say that it is the approach that allows you to be scientific is pronounced on the wrong idea. That is the point. But you are right. There is another you can do in the follow up also to adapt to the type of data that you have. But I think what you are asking is a slightly different concern. Okay, let me get to the final point about epistemic diversity. Why is this a good thing? It is a good thing because methodological pluralism, it is not just about more methods. It is also about having more voices. And so it is very much in line with feminist epistemologies and for the need of a large scope of a visible and legitimate verses and of standpoints, okay? The two things really go together. I don't have hard numbers, but I think it is not difficult to imagine that these methodological mainstream are also mainstream that have kind of specific connotations in terms of who is doing the science. And so the point about epistemic diversity is that it is good for methodological reasons, epistemological and normative because we really need these different points to get a better understanding or at least different understandings that we have to try and confront with them. And I'm closing now. So clearly questions of methods are at the core of philosophy of science. They have always been and they will remain. How to ask questions of methods may however make a difference. So there is here an interesting point to be made about how you want to ask questions about methods and the way in which I tried to ask again questions of methods was from a specific practice perspective. So shifting the focus to the practice to me makes it super visible that multiple methods are used across fields in a single field, in a single study. And then from this descriptive claim, I've been trying to give reasons for why this is a good thing that we have the methodological pluralism. For one thing it has to do with understanding also the what we study the scientific object as a multi-layered and complex issue kind of object. And this is the reason why it is in need of multiple methods, but also, and this is where it goes more normative, it may have bad effects on the practice of science and introduce mainstreams or kind of constraints that are normatively bad. And this is where I would like to make a link with the usual claim of feminist epistemology about positionality and the need of different voices and so on and so forth. If you want to know more about how I am locating methodological pluralism, this is where you get kind of the full story, the attention to the practices and how this has also effect on how we think of truth, knowledge, evidence, et cetera. And thank you for your attention. Let us now take a five minute break before the general discussion. So see you in five. So now let me give the first Juliette Ferrie-Denis that will start the discussion by a comment of the talk of Federica Boussoud. Okay, so now we are going to do a comment and I'm just going to ask two big questions. So thank you for sending me the chat points, but I'm going to focus on one of the questions that we are about to talk about. So first is about this, but I understand from your chat, but also this talk is that pluralism is great. And the answer is that. And in a way I agree, and this is going to be me trying to, because I'm not sure exactly why I'm in a comfortable position when I listen to you talking about that. Because if you do think there are cases where the relationship could be good and fruitful and could even protect knowledge from some harmful practices, because if the metaphor of this is war, there could be a good war, or just war, or not just bad imperialistic wars, and so on. And I'm thinking in some instances in medicine where I feel like there are cases that we can think about where you have all these mechanistic agents that are not good, you have poor quality studies and all of these things what you call for so evidential purism, all these could lead people totally astray in some cases. And I think in the least sense we can find some examples of that. Sometimes it is, but maybe purism sometimes can be bad. I do agree with that, but I think it's always good. And I think it's always good and I'm thinking maybe that's the maybe she's not about the language, maybe imperialism and war is not the best metaphor. And for example, also the reinforced concrete might also... I'm sure if we try to think of a concrete that is like evidential prism, then it's not just too bright and then it can be a huge mess and then the building collapses because it's not so good. And so maybe a better metaphor which I'm just suggesting would be that you don't have the idea that some methods can have a... regulating and dominating and some power over other methods. So I feel like the power in others and the domination is what is the most problematic and maybe not just the war situation. So say again what the metaphor would be in one now. Just for any idea as well. Poglianism and its domination. I'm thinking because those are vocabulary that we have in politics which is what she mentioned like that. So yeah, my question is do you think prism is intrinsically good or is it most of the time good and are you thinking it's something a little bit more like freedom and sometimes prism is political science and it's used as freedom. So that would be my very original question. That's a big question, Judith. I also dislike the war metaphor, etc. and I was borrowing the imperialism from this literature and especially from Scalimarchi working on this. Maybe there is something more nuanced to be said and also we could search for a better metaphor than just these two. But I think what is really at stake is that for me methodological pluralism is not just equal to freedom in Scalimarchi and anything goes and the more the merrier and it doesn't matter what... Which to me describes a little bit more the case that he presented. The issue is not that people disagree it's that they're trying to silence... I think there is an element of trying to silence others or to impose the certain methods which may have effects down the road of who you hire in the department, who gets the grants. So I think that the stakes are not just properly epistemological and what you are able to establish. They have kind of spillover effects on the politics of research and of academia. Now, even if you think in terms of how you would like to set up a curriculum in your department and you have the whole department just teaching that line, that method is it good that we expose students to just one area? You can do the same exercise the same reflection for philosophy. The department where only analytic philosophy is taught for instance or do you have to give space to others but then how do you build this pluralistic approach? Do you have the means? Do you have the tools? So for me, this is where it is case by case that you decide whether it is fair enough that here it is a mono method or plurality of methods but as a general take I would say it is important that whether then we make it concrete in different places or in the same that is something that may depend also the capabilities of the group that is carrying out the research. Also, it may depend on the context because we may have important protocols. So now clearly it is important that in medicine we do use RCTs, say for drug approval. It's not that all of the Southern say oh and narrative is medicine is fantastic so we will now take to have the same weight what patients say about what it felt to use this drug that is in the experimental phase. Of course not. But we may have to make this exercise of how we weight the evidence generated by this different method. Maybe we do get interesting information from a narrative medicine approach that that may lead to do an extra RCT to test other aspects of this drug but if you just shut down the voice of the narrative medicine basically you block the road for having this extra information but then you quickly go into what is scientific and what is not and so clearly it becomes another mind field but I think as a general general stance I would like to argue that it is good how good it is and how you implement it then we have really to discuss depending on the field on the objective who is potentially benefiting or being harmed by this and then we can see how to implement it. Yeah. And then I have this other question that is even more more general but I was curious about that because so there is a book and can I just say that you have a thought coming through? This has been by, it is out. It is out. Sorry, a book I didn't write. It's clearly thought that my impression is that it was clearly written that not only is it about self in the field but I feel like because a huge part of your argument is normative you also potentially talk to scientists themselves in a very broad sense and I know a lot of scientists they will never understand not just your book but the main thesis because the idea that you have one method is so much out there just implicit is there in their mind so I guess it's a little bit an interpretation of the question. How would you present your argument or present to scientists as compared to what you just presented and the way you use it in the book? Another very good question. Thank you. I don't think it is an unfair question. I think it is a very relevant because I think the short answer is pick your battles and also I think the question is try to find your allies so I have been working I have been privileged to work with scientists that are very philosophically minded and so I think they understood what I was trying to say about this pluralistic approach but also about other non-conventional philosophical ideas about causation etc. and then I have been working a lot lately with scientists in this mixed methods area and they are pluralists of course and then I think the conversation really changes because the conversations we had were not about should we adopt pluralism version 1 or version 1a1b etc but were about for instance how do you teach this how do you train students how can you help junior scholars making transitions from domains that are really dominated by one method how do you become a multi-method scholar so honestly I have no interest in convincing Miguel Hernán if he ever reads my chapter but I am much more interested in working with those who are already trying in their area to promote the forms of pluralism and see what can be done especially to improve the methodology to be used next so I have actually a reply to this because if the issue about some kind of science is that we have this pluralism within science and the methods after like if we take the comparison of the metaphor of Elfar what we usually do to find this is like politics and diplomacy and that kind of thing do you think that that would be a goal for you to do that to find this idealism or who do you think should do that scientists themselves I am trying to take the metaphor of Elfar because it kind of makes sense that if there are imperialistic methods of science that means that scientists have to be activist in a way of their own methods I think you can do that at different levels and there are different areas and the strategies that you may want to deploy may be very different so you may think of how you can diversify a module that you teach when I was editing the European Journal for Philosophy of Science with Philly Cillari we have been when I was editing the European Journal for Philosophy of Science with Philly Cillari we have been trying to diversify the audience one way we did it was having these subcategories that did not match always kind of the mainstream philosophy of science also to give a signal to the community that we were welcoming papers in this area that was not previously recognized as such you may work with scientists who may know better how to promote these type of things in their own fields and it takes to have a key publication in a medical journal to argue for human health complexity and this methodological pluralism so there are different ways in which you can promote this and they are different and it's not that you have to be active in all of them so you can also choose that going really to the front line with these difficult publications with scientists is not your thing and therefore you try to do more in the teaching maybe you are super good with social media I mean go for it if this is how you think you could promote it and explain to a larger audience what it is different strategies there so your answer is methodological pluralism yeah I think the question is whether yes, go ahead as you wish so the floor is open I want to turn the camera towards you following our tradition that you can protect your personal data yes thanks I have a double question about the methodological pluralism so your focus everybody at base for this philosophy of science in practice where people often make descriptive claims about science and then they illustrate these examples or sometimes the examples are some kind of evidence so my first question is what is actually the role of these examples like their evidence it's just one of the data forms which is the most ultimate project if it's not evidence then what is it that's the first question created to that do you think that philosophy of science in practice maybe misses some of the some of the more quantitative works we have these three kinds of practice works philosophy of science there is a fourth one philosophy of science where people do large research on science and I often feel that philosophy of science in practice really misses this perspective like there's lots of big empirical claims about science like methodological pluralism in this method and so on but philosophy almost always use case studies towards your we think that the case should be more important or what is actually the role of the case very nice question thank you so to begin with I don't think I was using textbook examples because if you look at how textbook examples are used typically in philosophy of science they are kind of the typical example from a science textbook so in the literature on mechanisms the typical example is protein synthesis so they oversimplify what this mechanism of protein synthesis is and then the reason around and that's not what I was trying to do clearly what I presented here is simplified and pulling kind of the elements that were most interesting for me for the purpose of this talk I mean, sorry, I've been in the methods of using examples to be straight for all game I agree with your example when we met that it's a textbook to use examples to illustrate or support roles so in that sense yes, you can consider them as textbook because in the book I use them at the same time as motivation and as illustration of philosophical claims so it was a way of saying the reason why I set up the questions in this way it is because I see something in the practice of science in fact look at this, this, this and then I do the philosophical analysis I try to go in depth and then I go back to the example and I analyze in more depth aspects of this which is clearly not what I have done in the talk but that's what I was trying to do in the book I chose to look at five or six examples, I can't remember now exactly from different areas because I was interested in making a pretty general claim in this case about methodological pluralism but of course you could decide that in a different type of study then you have one or two and you go much more in depth and this is where you draw the difference between this type of statistical analysis and how they have been really innovating or not in setting up this meeting in the middle methodology in molecular epidemiology so you can say other things that are also different in scope but here I was more interested in trying to establish a pretty general claim and so I needed more examples in less depth and it doesn't mean that I have put in the talk or in the in the book of what my analysis was but I was clearly making a selection of the relevant elements your other point about these quantitative approaches to studying science and I think you hear you really mean scientometrics, I'm not sure why you don't consider it as part of philosophy of science in practice because to me is part of I don't mean scientific metrics just to be preventive so that's one of the older fields that there's this new trend it's very high quality of education, science and nature they do but how much do they reach philosophical conclusions about science most of the time they still make either descriptive claim this is the trend now or they make prescriptive claims what we have to do where we have to go I agree some of my colleagues do, I mean for instance Matteo Andreoletti in the philosophy of medicine has been using and also doing a bit of himself this kind of quantitative analysis to support his claims about evidence in medicine, blah blah blah more than I did, it is also a question of skills, I don't think I am able to do it but I don't have an objection to use it if anything it really has an important complementary role so I see the fact that it's not in my analysis doesn't mean that it should not be used I think it is changing you see this way because even when if I think of when I started doing philosophy of science there was a lot of these proper textbook examples or even toy examples and very little about the proper scientific cases unless you were doing history of science and this has shifted gradually whether you would like a quicker shift I would be happy to hear your reasons for why we should be doing it more and more often but I do see it as in progress On the other hand it is exactly what you are trying to solve in your postdoc and in your Tegre you put your money where your mouth is other questions yeah Peter great talk so I wanted to ask a question about individuation of methods that's a more specific question so it seems to me that in many cases it's not so clear what a method is and now we can say that there are many methods or just one because you cannot if methods are consistent to some extent you cannot always sort of put that together and say make it into a constructive method but if you want to reach that kind of conclusions use that method if you want to reach that kind of conclusions use that method so if you condition them and then the totality of things will no longer be thoroughly pluralistic in combination of those methods but just like one method that is not unifying but does not cause sort of trouble that methods that actually are disagreeing in the war metaphors don't work anymore the situation where you are for this purpose that method so on so it seems to be relevant to some extent into the kind of pluralism that one might consider as positive whether you want to get at a pluralism where there's fundamental contradiction involved and where a domain like not just using different methods for different purposes but really says well these methods they really disagree but we will hire two people in our group that both work out these tools they cannot talk to each other because then explosion or something but but the discussion among them is interesting and so we let it go on and so on and of course there's not a big method that we see above the two specific methods that because they contradict you cannot hold it I guess that's also part of the question I guess whether we can still be able to hold that a bigger method the one that includes the two that are thoroughly compacted and have different opinions and it relates also a little bit to the case that you mentioned about the social research where there was this agreement about whether you should use the contractual method or not contractual there was also the response like yeah but my purpose is different I want to say something about this so they could live happily better afterwards there was also the response like yeah but my purpose is different I want to say something about this so they could live happily better afterwards because they might agree that if they want to look for causes better that method but like that we already have found a sort of peaceful way of living together and constructing the science together while I imagine in many cases like there's deep disagreements that align these methods so where how do you individuate one method and how does it affect your own? Yes Peter I think you have actually two big questions in here and somehow I hear the logician in you speaking about the unavoidable so let me start with the individuation of methods so I guess this is the warnings that Hawkins had against trying to pin down exactly what a method is and you may want to be more or less precise depending on why you would need this precision so clearly at the level of description that I gave about my cases today statistics and probability was enough to say that these are used by the epidemiology and to some extent also in computational history of ideas but clearly if you want to look at the details of what they have actually done that it may matter whether they have used statistical method X statistical method Y statistical method Z or whatever and it may matter and this is where I get to the second part of your question because yes I think we have to specify the purpose because specifying the purpose is part of the justification of why statistical method X rather than statistical method Y so in the quarrel that I was reporting about Goldtorpe and Bucody and the social earnings I think that the critique that they received was really wrong they had specified the purpose and they had a good justification for why potential outcome was not the right method now you could still have points about their method and you could say in the range of observational statistical methods that you used this one was better suited than this one your variable was not well defined your data was not good enough the theoretical framework that you used was not appropriate and so basically you shift where the disagreement is about and so clearly I'm not for happy family strategy where if we specify the purpose then we are just happy but I want this to be a constructive criticism that should also help improve it is clear that in that case it was very much ideological and that's why I think it is dangerous ill suited and potentially harmful in a sense but it is not so that's part of the thing and then you have a point about combining and unifying them I don't think this is really going to happen precisely because they are fuzzy sets so you will not have a total unity and also some of these methods may shift it is very interesting if you look at the history of statistics and see how for instance structural equation modeling as we understand it now really originates in path analysis that was used in some type of kind of genetics in the in the first years but some ideas remained some of the things are totally different are they the same method or are they very different methods I think I would like to hear from somebody like you whether it is very useful to have a clean taxonomy of these things or even a cladistic approach to see how they branched out and developed for my purpose this is not terribly useful but for my purpose maybe if you want to do history methodology maybe yes because then you could show how things have changed over time and how we went this way or another way etc so again there the purpose of your philosophical question about methodology may determine how precise you want to be about defining these these methods and I would like to hear from you what would be the interesting there it was not in my approach but it doesn't there isn't another question for which it is useful she asked you a question well if you have any questions about that I would like to hear that of course fair enough so we may have a project to write fair enough other questions so I can ask one during the time you think about so it's a little bit related to the question of Shuhia because if you buy that pluralism is good in the normative claims for all kind of reasons feminist studies are the kind of studies you're doing what will become of disciplinary matrix because disciplinary matrix are quite important in formation, community building identification of research expertise if we buy this pluralist pluralist utopia or for good reason for normative reason I have no idea how it will work I think you open Pandora's box Alexander but I think this is not the problem of the future this is exactly the problem that we have right now because any one of us working in a interdisciplinary multi-method way when we submit a paper or a funding proposal these are most of the time organized by disciplines and we have different standards also for evaluation therefore a narrative CV in which you explain your achievement in a narrative way because clearly any quantitative assessment of your CV may or may not make sense including the role of multi-autored papers for instance so I think we really have a problem I don't see other solution right now other than listening to what it means to have a good result in philosophy of science or in medicine and what is the role of that in the trajectory of the career you have so far I don't have a better answer other than that we have to discuss this because it has very important practical implications when we evaluate other colleagues especially if I can pursue for the authority of science because if I could imagine someone that is arguing that it is such interdisciplinary that it cannot be evaluated by none of the people and this is pure new research and you don't have the means to evaluate the quality because you are from this discipline this discipline and it is already difficult among ourselves people in academia but from outside I don't know how it will but we have to find a way I suppose among research there is good ones and bad ones I don't know so I think here we may try to work on different areas of cases and how the answer may be different so one conversation that I had not long ago with colleagues with whom I am working on this human health complexity approach which is multi-method in public health and one problem that they had was but my study is multidisciplinary then I try to send it to a mainstream journal saying epidemiology and reviewers get back to me and they say I don't know to evaluate whether your results are valid because I am used to evaluate whether your RCT is good enough there I think the answer is from a philosophical perspective we have to offer them other ways of assessing validity of studies that encompass this multi-dimensional there I don't think we had it ready yet but I think I can point to the direction of where we have to go so there is a lot of work for us philosophers of science to help them not only in the production of this pluralist approach in science but also to the assessment now you ask how do we assess colleagues I have the sense that some of these achievements across fields should be able to be appreciated especially from a person who is not from a disciplinary perspective so I have been wondering if I write a narrative CV to try and explain what I have done it should not be the job of a peer colleague in a very specific field to evaluate that then should be really the project officer of the funding agency to establish whether I am on a path that could be useful and therefore merits not for the object of the project but at least for my capabilities okay and so I wonder whether there is a different level of assessment that is of course not disciplinary and therefore does not have this kind of bias or if it does then it takes a lot of work and of self-reflection of how you have to undo your disciplinary idiosyncrasies and appreciate what the other person has done how progress we have done in that direction very little I think so I think you have a big point which I want to take with me and I think we should discuss it also from a philosophical perspective. I have a follow up but I will do it later we are organized science by discipline and for discipline for the researcher we are dividing discipline and also for the journal also for the production for the evaluation the assistant of research but the example of health was interesting so maybe we should define now by subjects by scientific objects or fields of inquiry and not divided by discipline independently of the field of inquiry I don't know exactly how it could work but I suppose that if you are already in this health studies you can evaluate more multidisciplinary health studies than if you are working on another subject but I don't know how we will cut the different scientific fields I think this is the other big question on how this translates exactly in the organization of research and of teaching as you say some institutes have made this transition of getting rid of faculties by some disciplinary subject and going by problem and then this translates in very different ways of teaching as well and also to set up the research I wonder whether we need to keep a bit of both after all because there is also something to be said about the value of multidisciplinary specialism because when you can really go deep into that then you have something to offer from a multidisciplinary perspective so for me maybe the point is not that we have to become all of a sudden all multidisciplinary multi-method etc but we have to avoid the imperialistic attitude and so kind of to recognize that there is also value in the the specialized approach if at some point it goes into dialogue with more proper multi-method multidisciplinary approaches and I have seen it with students they have different types of faculties students that have been trained in philosophy from the bachelor when they get to the master they are super sharp they are able to analyze problems in a certain way craft an argument in a certain way etc and then societal relevance very little when I work with students who have been trained more in this kind of liberal arts type of training they are clearly less sharp at the philosophical level they know much less about history of philosophy but the way in which they are able to connect the philosophical questions to science science and policy science and society it goes much quicker which one is best I think they both have values for one thing you have to be clear about what kind of training do you offer and what they may get out of this training and I'm not going to judge them by the same standards either so I again I think it is a very delicate conversation to have because it quickly has this still over effects on anything else that we do in the organization of the sciences so yes thank you I don't want to say something else so I have a question if I'm a scientist and I want to avoid being in a period what can I do because sometimes you just see methods for which you're doing their work and sometimes all of you can use those methods should be then not write the kind of paper that people in the example would because clearly they must have reasons for thinking that there was something wrong in those methods and that's relevant and that they have these better I suppose that only the writers of science do that people write those kinds of papers with their reasons and then I don't want to be a scientist I don't want to be a periodist but I still want to I suspect that when this happens the reasons behind are not so much scientific and methodological there may be other types of drivers that are more political vested interest and things like that and this is where I think it gets very complicated in philosophy we have this tendency of criticising one another and so this is also part of what we want to do to publish a paper to show that also this is also part of what we want to do to publish a paper to show that author X was wrong in chapter of their book in arguing for this and we take value in this I see this in a sense less in the science of trying to redress that what has happened more often instead is to criticise a field for being methodologically flowed and often when they do it the problem is not so much the method itself but other types of interest that come in and the question is not methodological anymore it's really understanding what is going on behind the scene um Jason please focus the idea of the perspective of the scientists themselves they don't think that it's like that guy in the right finger thinking it's a cultural issue it's actually a need that it's a science it's hard to use the word material but no you can't really separate them I mean you can to some extent it is a conceptual exercise that you can make but at some point they again convergent they are intertwined one good example that I have for this is regularly the IRC the international agency for research and cancer undergoes hard attack whether they it is from epidemiologists who have collaborations with big pharma for instance or with other big companies some chemical products and then they have to defend themselves against these attacks sometimes these attacks happen in scientific journals few years ago there was this series of papers on epidemiology as junk science because they established pretty much anything, anything is correlated with anything else just pick the one you want and they will find data and correlations that go in all directions and then when I talk to those who were kind of attacked and they were trying to defend the field I it was not about science it was about the other connections sometimes they do it in the in the open another famous example is when the IRC was attacked after they published the results of Liphosate you know and there again they pitched it as a problem of method but the problem was not the method see so I wonder myself what is our role as philosophers in this in this forums and I guess this is why I take so much interest in the details about the methods that's why I want to be able to make a difference between defending pluralism and yet being able to criticize a methodological approach for its own merit or weaknesses but making this distinct from you should only use potential outcome approach kind of thing these are distinct I think this is what I can do as a philosopher I can learn from these course that really get outside the scientific field proper and I can defend the reasons why we should not put everything in the same basket and when these distinctions matter that's why I was interested in the question of Peter because maybe there are moments in which we have really to split and this is not the same as the other ones and some moments where no we can put them as being part of the same I don't have a better answer than this I know this is very disappointing and I think the question you're asking is very relevant because it has to do with just to add your point about the difference between philosopher and scientists in conflicts and judgments there's an interesting book by the Michel Lamont sociologist of Harvard called How Professors Think and in all her graph she said professional philosopher are the exceptional philosopher are the exception in the scientific in all their studies of conflict discussion philosopher always the exception because because philosopher are trained to be two philosophers in a committee will systematically argue against each other two philosophers we are trained to argue, attack arguments details arguments and other discipline they could have other ways to interact and discuss and it's more especially in multidisciplinary committee when judgment of different discipline but philosophers are special cases and it's empirically proven by in her book that's very interesting because I think this connects with the point about a systemic diversity that I was trying to make at the end it is true that philosophy this is what has been for a long time especially the analytic tradition this is what we take a good paper of a student to be whether they can make a sharp point tradition this is what we take a good paper of a student to be whether they can make a sharp point but you can also say that this is something that we have to unlearn as philosophers and to understand what is the healthy way of disagreeing in a way that also advances the debate which is another Pandora Box to open I have a question from someone listening at home but it's in French so how I have a question from someone listening at home but it's in French so how I have a question from someone listening at home since the experimental economy is at ease in the work of this transposition the experimental economy has transposed what it considers as a physical method and so what is when is it for the pluralism but there is another question is it an interdisciplinary complexity or do we have to adopt what goes the point if I haven't ah no no definitely not no so definitely not the anything goes so for me the idea of pluralism is clearly not that anything is fine I think it requires to justify why one method over another why it is justified to transpose methods from one field to another I think that is part of the question especially the first part I think one would need to go into the details of these methods and how they are used and for me there is always an element of multi-method because for instance those who argue strongly for quantitative methods there is always an element of qualitative elements also in quantitative methods and the other way around so I think the argument is really against the purity of a method and instead understanding how these intertwine I think I would need to go into the details of this transposition from one field to another to answer in more detail to this to this question but it's not a way of arguing for the anything goes so not fair no no no it's a bit a question of curiosity I guess so I'm wondering how you think what you think about the old fashioned state in the context of discovery in the context of justification in relation to pluralism specifically because in the context of discovery we are in general much more open to be pluralists because it's we don't have to show it to the outside we do a certain research I'm thinking now for politicians trying to come to a proof they might do a lot of tests with the computer and they would quite need to see which theorem I hold but then they cannot present this in the journal unless very thoroughly but that's not what the final part about the center is there's something to do with proof from reactions and so on and try to get at that but in the process of discovery there's much more techniques maybe use methods to some different methods that are not necessarily the the simple outcome of it and then there is some kind of a degree that seems to be related to an example in the moment the aspect of what you said the imperialism works much better if it's about the product you produce the way you justify stuff it can affect you on that it's much more difficult to attack discovery methods if the end product is justified in all the ways of society that is a power accepts what is behind it is hidden there's more freedom there does that mean maybe we should break open this thing still exists it doesn't make sense at all or is it a matter of being more explicit about discovery methods used and then maybe be less critical about what you actually did in the case of the the control trials I mean there's a lot of other things going on that you just don't present today because that won't get into a very intensive paper so where do you see the importance of the distinction it's a very long question thank you I think it is interesting that you bring up mathematics as an example and I'm going to come back to mathematics in a moment but the distinction is not endorsed at the moment and it hasn't been for the past couple of years the distinction is not endorsed at the moment and it hasn't been for the past couple of years I think it is interesting to go back to the distinction because when it was proposed the idea was as philosophers of science we can properly talk about justification but not about because in the discovery there are all these kind of human unpredictable elements and this is not for the reconstruction of this universal logic of science blah blah blah right now if you take this practice shift properly kind of seriously this is one way in which you could see that this distinction is blurred because from the perspective of Hazok Chang it does matter how they came to understand what temperature is also analyzing who these scientists were so maybe we will never exactly understand what was this ha ha moment of whoever had the brilliant idea of making that experiment in that moment but still you can pin down some epistemic material conditions that were part of this discord in many of the cases that I look at maybe artificially you can separate oh this is more about discovery and this is more about justification but in fact it is much more iterative and intertwined than we tend to think so a very good example here is the very first randomized controlled trial in Britain the one on streptomycin is sometimes used to show that this what they wanted to prove was in fact also a moment of learning because they stopped it and patients developed again pneumonia blah blah blah and so they learned about time lapse that they should observe before stopping the trial so it is clearly the randomized controlled trial is a moment of justification and yet in the process you learn a lot if you observe how the trial unfolds and this happens kind of all the time so again what is the use of making this distinction neat and clean it may in some cases for instance if you want to establish what kind of background knowledge was available at that time and what was not but in general they are really more intertwined than then we tend to think with the naive way of looking at science that is why I see value in having this practice approach and this is why I now go back to your example of mathematics and this is really a field I know little about but what I know is that those who are looking at mathematics from a practice perspective at some point they get much closer to understanding mathematics as many other fields than what we have now typically philosophy of mathematics is this a part thing in the philosophy of science because mathematics works differently I don't know if science because mathematics works differently but I don't know typically this is what it is but that's why I wonder whether your reconstruction at some point may get a different narrative if we do it from a practice perspective and not from the perspective of this is the theorem this is the proof so from the perspective of the object rather than from the perspective of the agent performing it question mark and I would be curious to see what the answer is so the old researcher is there a question of our two master students because Federica is here she's ready to engage it's almost the end in Brazil any difference between doing any boundaries between doing philosophy of science and science or philosophy I have probably to distinguish you as a philosopher or as a scientist excellent question so for a long time and this goes to the point of Alexander before so I was not scientific enough to be a scientist and I was not philosophical enough to be a proper philosopher now it doesn't matter to me it doesn't matter I think that we can say what a philosophical question is quite distinctively and also say why it is relevant for the practice to me it is less relevant but of course it is relevant for more junior people that have to publish and get a job you see so this goes back to the question of Alexander really so my advice to the more junior people at the moment is that if you need to get a job publish your three papers that will get you a job in a field and then do your multidisciplinary stuff and then it doesn't matter whether you are a more scientist or a philosopher etc so if you have a clear target then you can try and present your profile as being part of that box because this is how we judge people but then maybe at some point it doesn't matter to me it doesn't matter anymore so I'm very happy when I have these collaborations with the scientist and I am able to make my philosophy relevant to them am I still a philosopher or am I a scientist? to me it's not the point but I do understand why it may matter to you and it is a conversation that you need to have not because it has to define essentially who you are but because it may have kind of effects later on so you may want to be more strategic that I have been in the past as Martin just to say it bluntly last question it's the call of the sun and the traditional beer after the cinema so let's thank our speakers