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Computers, scientific visions, and trust: a Kantian perspective| old_uid | 8357 |
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| title | Computers, scientific visions, and trust: a Kantian perspective |
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| start_date | 2010/03/15 |
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| schedule | 14h-15h30 |
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| online | no |
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| summary | Computational techniques permeate current scientific practices of observation, data gathering, analysis and interpretation, and theory. Important shifts in science are being brought about by the potentialities of computational technologies. For example, data-intensive science, or the so-called ‘fourth paradigm’ in science, is entirely predicated upon the new possibilities offered by high performance computing. The introduction of new techniques and methods also bring challenges regarding accepted criteria of evidence and warrant and new alignments between researchers of different disciplines and outlooks. In fact, these two aspects – reconfiguring which people are involved in research and reconfiguring which methods are used – are inextricably intertwined. Trust is at the centre of the resulting constellation of people and technologies; or rather, it is the essential element that holds it together.
Against this background, this presentation focuses on one particular area of the emerging computationalised sciences – computational biology – and one particular area of the related scientific practice – the computational visualisations that render in visual form the results of modelling and simulation. Computational visualisations co-exist – not always comfortably -- with experimental observations in the inter-disciplinary alliances required for computational biology. They become trust enablers or trust prohibitors. This presentation is part of a larger project to account philosophically for their ability to do so, drawing on a variety of philosophical perspectives. Here, I show how Kant’s account of aesthetic judgements – in particular the image-building capacity of imagination and the sensus communis – in the Critique of Judgement can be deployed to explain this role of computational visualisations in science. However, Kant’s theory is also challenged by these computational artefacts, and we will need new ways of thinking of imagination as not bound by human cognitive faculties in its socio-technological actualisation. |
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| responsibles | Varenne, Kupiec |
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