History of Science

1
History of Science
Breakout session on

• Lead Jordi Cat
• Participants
• Alex Pang
• Osvaldo Pessoa, Jr.
• Andrea Scharnhorst
• Chris Sula

2
General Considerations

• Incremental maps (even with smaller or flawed
  datasets) in sequence can provide
  historycontribute evidence/ empirical power with
  long-term patterns and insights
• Relevance of history of philosophy
• to HPS Sci philosophy, esp speculative
  metaphysics, has contributed questions that later
  become the subject of natural philosophy
• to philosophy determines conceptual and social
  credit space
• special problems not shared with history of
  science?
• pluralism/relativism of HPHIL suggests different
  ways that HPS can be mapped (Popperian vs
  Kuhnean)
• PHIL HPS can offer possible ways that HS can be
  mapped, seen to evolve, modeled (i.e., they offer
  hypotheses to be tested)

3
Associated Challenges and Opportunities

• Pragmatic challenges about grain of data sets
• Choice of objects for encoding (Solloways
  psychological profiles)
• Philosophical theories may be too global to fit
  periods of scientific microsystem
• Need to provisionaly accept models
• Revisability/Extendability of HS datasets

4
Proposed Solutions

• Collaboration over tool development
• More annotation of digital collections data
  (Web 2.0)
• Explicit classification/interpretation of
  materials (this itself becomes data for mapping)
• Managed trading zone for data