University of Helsinki
At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 25.10., Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) will give a presentation titled “Public Engagement and Argumentation in Science” (joint work with Silvia Ivani). The seminar takes place in Zoom from 14:15 to 15:45.
Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.
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Abstract:
Public engagement is one of the fundamental pillars of the European programme for research and innovation Horizon 2020. The programme encourages engagement that not only fosters science education and dissemination, but also promotes two-way dialogues between scientists and the public in various stages of research. Establishing dialogues between scientists and different groups of societal actors is seen as crucial to attain both epistemic and social desiderata in science. However, whether these dialogues can actually help with the attainment of these desiderata is far from obvious. This paper discusses the costs, risks, and benefits of dialogical public engagement practices and proposes a strategy to analyse these argumentative practices, based on a three-tiered model of epistemic exchange. As a case study, we discuss the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy, arguably a result of suboptimal public engagement, and show how the proposed model can shed new light on the problem.
Author bio:
Catarina Dutilh Novaes is Professor of Philosophy and University Research Chair at the VU Amsterdam, and Professorial Fellow at Arché, St. Andrews. Her work spans over different areas of philosophy, including history and philosophy of logic, philosophy of mathematics, argumentation, and social epistemology, and is characterized by sustained engagement with other disciplines such as psychology, cognitive science, mathematics, computer science, history, and the social sciences. She is the author of numerous articles and three monographs, including Formal Languages in Logic (CUP, 2012) and The Dialogical Roots of Deduction (CUP, 2020). From 2018 to 2023 she is leading the ERC-Consolidator project ‘The Social Epistemology of Argumentation’, which aims at formulating a realistic account of the role of argumentation in processes of producing and sharing knowledge, which can be used to analyze concrete instances of argumentation in different domains such as politics and science.