Epistemology & Philosophy of Science

Natalia Kuznetsova and Lada Shipovalova, in the editorial article “On the Usefulness and Harmfulness of History for Contemporary Science,” examine the significance of research in the history of science for contemporary science. Drawing on F. Nietzsche’s ideas, the authors discuss various ways of addressing the past, identify the limitations of presentism and antiquarianism, and substantiate the need for their complementarity.

The panel discussion is built around Harry Collins’s essay “The Bath School and the ‘Strong Programme.’” Collins writes about the genesis of the Bath School of the sociology of knowledge, the history of its interactions with the Edinburgh School and D. Bloor’s “Strong Programme,” and reveals their similarities and differences. The author pays particular attention to the empirical study of scientific practice and the philosophical foundations of the sociology of knowledge, warning against the substitution of scientific knowledge by political processes in science and technology studies. The opponents (C. Thorpe, T. Sokolova, A. Filatova) discuss the connection between the sociology of science and historical epistemology, the features of hybrid expertise, and the possibilities of applying Collins’s ideas to artificial intelligence research.

Olga Stoliarova, in “Background Knowledge in Scientific and Technological Practices: The Dialectics of Determination and Freedom,” explores the role of tacit knowledge in scientific activity. She examines how background presuppositions simultaneously constrain researchers’ actions, shaping their beliefs and actions, and leave room for independence, creating opportunities for professional intuition and innovation.

Konstantin Frolov, in “De-anthropocentrism as a Conceptual Alternative to Anthropomorphization in the Epistemology of AI” analyzes the possibility of ascribing epistemic states to AI: knowledge, belief, understanding, etc. The author proposes considering such properties of AI from the standpoint of its ability to act as a normative epistemic agent, thereby calling for abandoning ideas of human exceptionalism as the bearer of knowledge.

Pavel Grishin, in “Towards New Approaches in Machine Consciousness Research,” examines contemporary methodological difficulties in researching machine consciousness. He analyzes how justified the transfer of notions of biological consciousness to computational systems is, and discusses alternative approaches to this problem.

Petr Abramov, in “D. Bohm’s Realism and Holism: The System of Metaphors and Differences from the Lines of N. Bohr and W. Heisenberg,” reconstructs D. Bohm’s system of complementary metaphors, through which he revealed ideas about the wholeness of the world, the implicate order, and the role of active information in organizing reality. The author compares the conceptions of D. Bohm, N. Bohr, and W. Heisenberg, identifying in various interpretations of the foundations of physical reality their connection with alternative epistemological and metaphysical positions.

Daniil Turkenich, in “Scientific and Technological Utopianism as a Way of Thinking of Science Alternatives. Notes towards the ‘Utopian Method,’” proposes overcoming the “utopophobia” in epistemology that goes back to K. Mannheim and, drawing on the idea of the “utopian method” in R. Levitas’s sociology, proposes considering utopian imagination as an instrument for criticizing institutional constraints and designing alternative trajectories for the development of science and technology.

Anna Sakharova, in “Objectivity in the Mirror of Language: From Linguistic Analysis to Epistemological Interpretations,” examines how the concept of objectivity is used in the language of natural science publications. An analysis of scientific texts allows the author to connect linguistic features with scientists’ epistemological ideas.

Maxim Vinarski, in “Adaptive Response: The Reception of F. Engels’s Views on Heredity and Anthropogenesis by Soviet Biologists (1920s–1950s),” examines Soviet scientists’ interpretations of Engels’s views on human origins. Using archival sources, the author shows how adherence to Marxist texts was combined with selective citation, reinterpretation, and suppression of certain positions. This strategy is interpreted by the author as an adaptive response of the scientific community to ideological pressure.

Ulyana Belyaeva, in “Thinking with Machines: Automatism, Autonomy, and the Historical Epistemology of Intelligence,” turns to David W. Bates’s book. The author reveals the epistemological significance of Bates’s thesis that the opposition between natural and artificial intelligence is historically derivative. It is argued that the book’s ideas allow cognition to be viewed as a history of material, bodily, and technical models of thought.

Anastasia Lisenkova and Darya Bilyeva, in “Science in the Digital Age: How AI Is Changing the Understanding of Scientific Knowledge and Its Creation,” trace the evolution of philosophical ideas about AI’s role in science – from a data-processing tool to a nontrivial epistemic participant – and point to significant conceptual and theoretical limitations of existing epistemological approaches to interpreting AI’s cognitive capacities.