Call for abstracts: The science of evolution and the evolution of the sciences
Call for abstracts: The science of evolution and the evolution of the sciences
We
invite submissions for papers to be presented at a two-day conference
on The science of evolution and the evolution of the sciences, which
will be held in Leuven, Belgium on the 12th and 13th October 2016.
Submissions
should take the form of a 500-word abstract. Submissions on any aspect
of the evolution of scientific theories are welcome, but contributions
with a clear link to digital humanities are especially encouraged.
Aims and scope of the conference:
One
of the longstanding debates in history and philosophy of science
concerns how the sciences develop. Thomas Kuhn famously emphasized the
role of scientific revolutions and so-called paradigm shifts. Other
philosophers, including Karl Popper and David Hull, have offered a
Darwinian account of the process of science. In their view, scientists
create conjectures about the way the world works, and these conjectures
undergo a process of selection as they are tested against the world.
This is analogized with biological evolution: mutation and recombination
creates novelty in the biological world, which then undergoes natural
selection, driving adaptive evolution. In this conference, we will
reexamine these ideas using new tools from cultural evolutionary theory
and the digital humanities.
This conference
explores recent attempts to move beyond mere qualitative theorizing
about scientific cultures and their evolution and centers on the the
question of the extent to which we can make quantitative predictions,
extract quantitative data, or build quantitative models of and about
scientific evolution over time. In addition to numerical models of
cultural evolution drawn from the evolutionary sciences, quantitative
data are also being extracted in the digital humanities. Cultural
products like academic journal articles can be algorithmically mined in
order to understand this body of work in a new light, offering data to
help test hypothesis about scientific changes. By bringing together
researchers with a common interest but with different disciplinary
backgrounds and toolboxes, we hope to inspire cross-fertilization and
new collaborations.
Questions addressed at this conference include:
* What novel predictions do Darwinian accounts of science offer?
* How can we test these predictions?
* Can new work in the digital humanities, such as the automated mining
and analysis of the scientific literature, shed light on Darwinian
accounts of science?
* Do formal evolutionary models or
(quantitative) textual analyses permit a systematic approach to
empirical issues in the realism-instrumentalism debate?
Keynote speakers:
Charles Pence (Louisiana State University)
Kimmo Eriksson (Mälardalen University and Stockholm University)
Mia Ridge (British Library)
Simon DeDeo (Indiana University & the Santa Fe Institute)
Abstracts must be received no later than June 7. Inquiries
and abstracts should be directed to the conference organizers, Andreas
De Block and Grant Ramsey, at the following addresses:
The conference receives financial support from the Institute of Philosophy (KU Leuven) and the FWO (Flemish Research Council).