• 16 April   Patrick Landon Ferree  (University of Copenhagen) 

     Make your own map: Cell atlas construction in big and small biomedicine

Cell atlases are promoted as “comprehensive” cell-resolution maps of tissues and organisms. While large-scale consortia are constructing them for broad foundational or standardization purposes (e.g., the Human Cell Atlas), many smaller-scale research groups continue building and using their own localized reference atlases. This paper asks why it is that scientists prefer to make their own maps. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the single-cell omics community and prolonged engagement with a particular research group studying the regulation of energy homeostasis in the brain, I argue against the idea that cell atlases are convenient experiments and show how local preferences in epistemic aims and values (such as completeness and accuracy) interact and influence practice. I contrast these aims, values, and practices with those embodied in larger-scale (open science) atlas projects centered at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Overall, this work has implications for how we understand the present relationship between big and small biomedicine.

• 30/04  Mirco Schoenfeld and Oliver Baumann, University of Bayreuth  

  From Serendipitous Discoveries to Balanced Perspectives: Knowledge Graphs for Semantic Recommendations

  Oliver Baumann, Mirco Schoenfeld

Today’s recommendation systems often optimize for accuracy and engagement at the cost of diversity, transparency, and balance of recommendations. But what if users want to discover a catalogue? What if they seek an equitable presentation of a topic? 
This talk explores how knowledge graphs - as structured, semantically rich representations of entities and their relationships - can reshape recommendation paradigms to support both discovery and perspective diversity enabling users to uncover unexpected yet meaningful connections across large knowledge spaces. We outline methods for leveraging graph embeddings, semantic similarity, and contextual reasoning to produce recommendations that go beyond surface-level correlations and instead reflect deeper conceptual linkages. Furthermore, the talk discusses potential for mitigating bias and filter-bubble effects by integrating multi-perspective signals directly into the graph structure. Ultimately, we show how knowledge-graph-based recommenders can promote balanced information exposure, improve user trust, and foster more exploratory, meaningful interactions with digital content ecosystems. Ultimately, this work highlights the potential of semantic technologies to shift recommendation systems from opaque predictors to transparent guides for informed discovery.

• 07/05  Federica Bocchi  (University of Copenhagen)

  When no one's an expert: scientific expertise and wicked problems

  (Work in collaboration with Mason Majszsak)

The lack of pre-established epistemic communities, pluralism, and socio-technical values that characterize science dealing with wicked problems challenges most accounts of expertise that still treat it as a feature of an individual. In response, we advance a notion of expertise (and validation thereof) as an emergent feature of collectives, moving it out of the individual’s head and into the hands of the group.Our approach better reflects how science tackles wicked problems and supports standpoint diversity. In addition, our view discourages narratives of epistemic heroism or discipline imperialism that enable technocratic governance, instead promoting genuine co-production. By understanding expertise as an emergent group feature, we aim to advance the social epistemology of expertise. 

• 14/05 Charles Pence (University of Leuven)

      What Does Disciplinary Structure Tell Us About Science?

      The Case of Cultural Evolution

Charles H. Pence (presenting) and Andrew Buskell

The study of cultural evolution has long been understood to be an unusual one. In particular, it has never been clear what exactly it is (if anything) that unites the study of cultural evolution, other than a commitment to “biological” or “Darwinian” explanations for the spread or distribution human cultural traits. A recent bibliometric analysis of the literature in cultural evolution revealed a fragmentation of the field into relatively distinct clusters, corresponding to biological anthropology and archaeology, mathematical modeling and dual-inheritance theory, cognitive linguistics and experimental cultural evolution, cross-cultural and phylogenetic studies, computational biology and cultural niche construction, evolutionary psychology, and behavioral ecology and birdsong (Youngblood and Lahti 2018). Such a conclusion seems to indicate profound splits with regard both to content and to methodology.

What lesson should philosophers of science take away from this fragmented landscape? The discussion of a connection between the structure of the literature in a field, the underlying nature of the discipline that structure indicates, and the epistemic characteristics of the resulting knowledge finds some precedent in the literature. Particularly notable examples include Alan Love’s (2014) study of textbooks in developmental biology, and Truc et al.’s (2023) exploration of the (lack of) interdisciplinary indicated by the central journals in economics. Sometimes (like in Love’s analysis) this seems to give us indication that there is something, after all, which unifies the field (like Love’s proposed erotetic structure for developmental biology); other times (like in Truc et al.’s case) apparent unity might come with significant epistemic costs.

What could such an analysis teach us about cultural evolution? Here, empirical methods would have to look farther afield, as there is no body of textbooks or of central journals to which we can appeal. In this paper, we propose to explore the impact of cultural evolution’s fragmented structure on work performed under its banner. A study of a corpus of articles both within and beyond cultural evolution allows us to speak toward existing efforts to articulate a unified framework for cultural evolution (e.g., Mesoudi 2011). It also, we claim, will allow us to explore how this structure influences the relationship between cultural evolution and allied fields, as well as whether the “archipelagic” structure (following Panofsky 2014) that Youngblood and Lahti saw among cultural evolution’s authors is duplicated in the field’s conceptual content. More broadly, the case can teach us lessons about how to diagnose theories that, like cultural evolution, are actively in the process of being formed, debated, and changed.

• 21/05  Paul Trauttmansdorff  

     Making the imaginary of the medical face

This paper draws on Ludwik Fleck’s notion of “proto-ideas” to trace how the vision of the medical face is built and embedded in contemporary face recognition technologies in the field of genetic disease detection. In recent years, automated face recognition and patient image analysis have been increasingly tested and deployed to assist the diagnosis of rare diseases. Machine-learning algorithms thereby seek to identify relevant facial anatomical features of patients and automatically match them to known genetic disorders—creating what is known as a genotype-phenotype link. The paper would like to examine how these practices, along with the collection, sharing, and analysis of facial data, construct a new imaginary of the patient face that feeds into wide-spread promises about the sociotechnical future of diagnostic medicine. At the same time, it seeks to understand how this vision is anchored in long-standing proto-ideas, i.e., vague, pre-scientific beliefs from the past that perceive the face as a privileged source of knowledge about an individual’s health or sickness. 

• 28/05 Kim Hajek + Mike Dietrich  

• Kim Hajek

    “Magic words or missing words? Reproducing suggestive psychotherapy in Hippolyte Bernheim’s case-writing, 1880-1900.”

When the term ‘psychotherapy’ gained cultural currency towards the end of the 19th century, it was effectively as a synonym for verbal suggestion, especially as practised by Hippolyte Bernheim (Carroy, 2000). Bernheim set out his understanding of (hypnotic) suggestion and how it applied to therapy not only in the form of a medical treatise and set of clinical lectures, but also, remarkably, by publishing around 200 clinical observations (or ‘cases’) as the second half of his major works De la suggestion (1888 [1886]) and Hypnotisme, Suggestion, Psychothérapie (1891). This paper approaches the history of psychotherapy from the perspective of case-writing and asks what Bernheim’s observations did for medico-psychological knowledge-making. The cases may be read as texts in their own right and also as serving several intersecting functions: they gather data on how to treat a given condition, document Bernheim’s therapeutic manoeuvres in practice, provide convincing evidence in favour of his method (and ability), and guide aspiring psychotherapists to reproduce expertise with suggestion. My analysis interrogates the ways these epistemic and pedagogical functions articulate with the textual and narrative dynamics of Bernheim’s case-writing, through a focus on the words of suggestive therapy. For, despite apparent ease with which such verbal interactions could be transcribed in a written text, detail on the precise content of Bernheim’s therapeutic utterances is omitted or elided in many accounts. Ultimately, by investigating Bernheim’s psychotherapy through its textualized cases, I aim to enrich our understanding of both the early history of psychotherapy and of (psycho)therapeutic cases as epistemic instruments.

• Mike Dietrich   

    Trends in Research Biodiversity:  Assessing the Impact of Model Organisms

Most biologists will admit that their choice of research organism has important consequences for work and their findings. Given that organism choice matters, should we be concerned that the range of organisms used in biological research has been narrowing?  From 1970 to 2015 most of the fields in modern biology have shown a decline in the number of species that they consider in their research.  This presentation will address both how to characterize this decline and how to explain it.  We will give special consideration to how preferences for model organism use and preferences for human-based research with medical translations contributed to specific organismal preferences and to reductions in research biodiversity.

• 11/06  Carola Sachse Universität Wien

     Uyghurs in the spotlight of evolutionary and forensic genetics.

The end of a long-standing German-Chinese scientific collaboration.

At the end of 2020, the Max Planck Society quietly withdrew from the CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai. This institute had been a  joint venture with the Chinese Academy of Sciences since 2005. The final trigger for this was a collaborative project at the intersection of evolutionary anthropology, DNA phenotyping, and forensic microbiology. Most of the test subjects came from the Uyghur ethnic group. In 2019, the New York Times not only exposed the link between the Chinese principal investigator and the Chinese Ministry of Public Security. The article clearly highlighted the role of Western research institutions and companies in enabling China's upgrading of its biotechnological surveillance apparatus  in Xinjiang.

Questions discussed include the relationship between science and politics, basic and applied research, and the (non-)compliance with ethical standards of scientific research (including informed consent) in international collaborations, especially with partner institutions in authoritarian countries.

• 18/06  Emma Cavazzoni, TUM

     Data Bearing Fruit: Technologies, Communities, and Models in Pest-Plant Interaction Research

Over the past three decades, digital methods and technologies capable of producing, storing, analysing, and disseminating large-scale data across diverse research contexts have become fundamental in scientific research. Their convergence with regulatory frameworks and institutional arrangements has prompted a reconfiguration of research priorities, with significant implications for what counts as scientific knowledge and how it is produced, validated, and used. In this paper-based dissertation, I examine how data-intensive digital technologies are developed, used, and exert influence within scientific research, focusing specifically on pest-plant interactions. My analysis proceeds along three interrelated dimensions, each giving rise to distinct philosophical arguments: the material setting in which research is embedded, the social environment and its relations, and the broader societal contexts with its institutional and infrastructural structures. My reflections draw on ethnographic work and collaborations with the Haly.Id project, a multidisciplinary initiative that produced large datasets through innovative data-intensive digital technologies for the sustainable management of invasive pests across both lab and field settings.

• 25/06  Caitlin Wylie, Virginia Tech 

    Our knowledge? Ethics, epistemologies, and practices of research collaboration

Collaborative research across many kinds of academic and public knowledges is touted as necessary for studying and solving the world’s problems. But this teamwork is very difficult to achieve in practice. Taking collaboration for granted, as an assumed and tacit part of scientific practice, overlooks the complexities of how people work together, in terms of ethics, epistemology, and social structures. It can thereby obscure injustice and exclusion in how collaborators treat each other and approach their shared work.

Here I ask how practices of collaboration shape knowledge, based on ethnographic analysis of an interdisciplinary, community-engaged project on climate-resilient infrastructure in Arctic Alaska. I propose a framework for both studying and practicing research collaboration centered around ground truth, a widely used but diversely defined scientific concept for judging “good” data. Values and practices of data verification vary across disciplines and cultures, and yet they are the foundation for how people construct knowledge. To work across disciplinary and cultural boundaries, therefore, collaborators must articulate and align their own versions of how they judge and argue for credible data, as a starting point to aligning their values and norms of ethical collaboration practices.

• 9/07   Sabina Leonelli, Technical University of Munich

     Framing Environmental Intelligence

I explore the philosophical foundations of Artificial Intelligence and propose a new framing explicitly addressed to using technology to support planetary health, encompassing a specific view of intelligence itself (as distributed and embodied/enacted) as well as the nature of life on the planet and the role of technology therein. The framing builds on a combination of philosophy of biology, philosophy of technology and philosophy of cognitive science, and I look forward to all feedback since I am completing a book manuscript on this topic (which I shall circulate to those registered before the meeting in case anybody can generously spare the time to read it and give me precious and much appreciated feedback).  

• 23/07   John Dupre

     From process ontology to process epistemology.

After briefly summarising the reason why we should think of biological phenomena in processual terms (process ontology) I shall survey some recent areas of biology in which process thinking has recently been applied, and has provided important new perspectives and insights (process epistemology). These range from ecology and archaeology to cell biology, virology and neuroscience. These cases give grounds for optimism that process philosophy will have a growing influence on biological practice.