Bremen 2017 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 3: Symposium: Epistemology of Big Data in Physics I

AGPhil 3.3: Vortrag

Donnerstag, 16. März 2017, 15:00–15:30, GW2 B2900

Collaborative scientific practice, epistemic dependence and opacity: the case of space telescope data processing — •Jebeile Julie — Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium

A great part of scientific knowledge is the outcome of a collective enterprise supported by technologies, mainly instruments and computers. Astrophysical images, in particular, are today built from data whose measure and digital processing involve competent teams of astrophysicists, including instrumentalists, experts in computer programming and specialists in data analysis, as well as technologies, including telescopes and computers, at different steps of the processes. Here scientific knowledge crucially depends on the trust agents place on their co-workers and on the required technologies.

In such a scientific context, an agent cannot trust one another by merely appealing to her intellectual authority, contrary to what epistemologists sometimes suggest for more ordinary epistemic situations. The agent rather must have sufficient evidence for the trustworthiness of her colleague's inputs. However, based on the case study of Herschel space telescope data processing, I argue that such evidence is sometimes not accessible to her for several reasons on which I elaborate. In this case, she more or less opaquely depends upon her collaborator epistemically. Yet opaque epistemic dependence is certainly not desirable in the process of producing scientific knowledge. As I show, the same holds for the use of instruments and computers. The scientists who actually rely on instruments and computers do not all have access to evidence for the trustworthiness of the outputs.