Keynote Speaker
Kazimierz Dolny, Poland
Science is usually considered the paradigm of knowledge. Naturally, it has long been the subject of philosophical inquiry. Having moved away from abstract consideration of the epistemic conditions necessary for knowledge, naturalistic philosophical inquiry into science focuses more on the interplay of cognitive and cultural processes that generate scientific knowledge. Indeed, the sophisticated cognition that science involves requires the underpinning of rich social, cultural, and material environments—as Nancy Nersessian observes. Science is studied therefore as both a social and cultural phenomenon, not just an individual psychological achievement. Owing to the complex nature of processes that underpin scientific knowledge production, their study has to be interdisciplinary—with a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches being made use of—and integration of various perspectives remains an open problem.
The workshop will bring together relevant work from a number of these perspectives, including developmental cognitive psychology, evolutionary explanations of human behavior, cognitive science, philosophy of science, and history of science.
