Hanne Andersen, Principal Investigator
Previous studies of knowledge created in interdisciplinary fields have focused on the relation between theories of different fields, ignoring their distribution among the participating scientists. Philosophers of science have analyzed the integrative pluralism of multiple theories that together explain complex phenomena with multiple interacting causal processes (Mitchell, 2002; 2009), or how special interfield theories are necessary when multiple fields share an interest in explaining different aspects of the same phenomenon or when in a given field questions arise that are not answerable using the concepts and techniques of that field (Darden & Maull, 1977). However, neither of these approaches considers the social distribution of the theoretical resources within the scientific community working on a given problem. Similarly, previous studies of how groups of scientists create knowledge have focussed on processes of commitment and expressions of consent, ignoring differences in theoretical backgrounds among the group members. Analyzing how groups arrive at new knowledge, social epistemologists have analyzed how new knowledge is established by groups (Gilbert, 1987; Beatty, 2006; Bouvier, 2004; Rolin, 2008; Wray, 2007), but these approaches do not consider how the different conceptual and theoretical resources that the individual group members draw on affect the knowledge-creating process.
The aim is to bridge this divide between studies of epistemic structures and studies of social processes by analyzing how consensus as a social phenomenon arise among scientists whose epistemic resources are distributed in a complicated network of criss-crossing conceptual and theoretical structures. This includes analyses of
