Can computational methods be of use to integrated history and philosophy of science?

Colloquium lecture by Dunja Šešelja (TU Eindhoven), organized by the Department of Theoretical Philosophy

Agent-based models (ABMs) have in recent years become an increasingly popular method for the study of social aspects of scientific inquiry. A common feature of ABMs developed in philosophy of science and social epistemology is that they are simple, highly idealized representations of science. Nevertheless,  many of these models have been motivated by concrete episodes from the history of science, suggesting potential explanations of the given cases. The aim of this talk is two-fold. On the one hand, I will present a specific type of targeted robustness analysis, which helps in assessing the explanatory power of a given ABM with respect to a concrete historical episode. On the other hand, I will argue that such an analysis can reveal possible problems in received historical narratives about scientific episodes, leading to their re-examination. I will illustrate this point by a concrete episode from the history of medicine - the research on peptic ulcer disease, which has often served as a motivation for ABMs of science. Beside discussing simulations aimed to represent this case-study, I will show how digital textual analysis can serve as a complementary computational method, useful to the research in integrated history and philosophy of science.

The first part of the talk will be based on joint work with AnneMarie Borg, Daniel Frey and Christian Straßer; the second part will be based on joint work with Kim Naumann and Bartosz Radomski.