Seminari iHC

Vincenzo Politi Beatriu de Pinós fellow (UAB-iHC)   "Social Moral Epistemology and Responsible Research"   Click here to join the meeting  

Abstract:

 Social responsibility', both as harm prevention and as socially responsible action, is at the centre of several emerging science policy frameworks, such as Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). It is important to stress that when we talk about 'responsible science' we are talking about a collective institution (that is, science) that contains different individuals with different skills, attitudes, and perspectives. Therefore, the concept of the 'social responsibility of science' is underlied by the philosophical problem of the relation between individual and collective responsibility. The concept of collective responsibility is much discussed in moral philosophy, but not in philosophy or sociology of science. The tension between individual scientists and the collective scientific community is analysed by so-called Social Epistemology of Science and by scholars in the Science and Technology Studies, but they are focussed on the mechanisms of 'knowledge production', thus missing a consideration of the ethical and moral issues surrounding scientific research. My idea is to make a synthesis between the two debates, using an approach that I call SEReS (Social Epistemology of Responsible Science). The approach is still developing and the next stage of my research will be a qualitative study on a scientific laboratory.

 

Vincenzo Politi is a philosopher of science. His main research areas are: the History and Philosophy of science, with a particular focus on scientific change, scientific progress, and the social, practical, and political dimension of science. He received his PhD in Philosophy of Science in 2015 from the University of Bristol (UK), where he pursued his research with the support of the prestigious Darwin Trust of Edinburgh for Philosophy of Science. He is currently a Beatriu de Pinos Fellow at iHC-UAB (2022-2025). 
Before joining iHC, he held postdoctoral research positions at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas at UNAM (Mexico City, 2017-2018); at the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique (Paris, France, 2018-2019), where he collaborated to the EU Horizon2020 project "Responsible Research and Innovation in Practice" (RRI-Practice); at the Institut de Recherches Philosophiques at the Université Lyon 3 (Lyon, France, 2019), for the nationally funded project PartiSCiP (“Citizen science: new epistemological perspectives on scientific objectivity”); at the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Oslo (Oslo, Norway, 2020-2022) where he worked on the RRI aspects of PINpOINT, an interdisciplinary research project on precision oncology.
He has published original research articles in international peer-reviewed philosophy journals such as Synthese, the European Journal for Philosophy of Science, Theoria, Journal for the General Philosophy of Science, and International Studies in the Philosophy of Science. In 2019, he was the guest editor of “Questions about Science”, a special issue of the journal Theoria.