Cognitive Science of Philosophy Symposium: Community Science

Welcome to the Brains Blog’s Symposium series on the Cognitive Science of Philosophy. The aim of the series is to examine the use of diverse methods to generate philosophical insight. Each symposium is comprised of two parts. In the target post, a practitioner describes their use of the method under discussion and explains why they find it philosophically fruitful. A commentator then responds to the target post and discusses the strengths and limitations of the method.

In this symposium, Karen Kovaka discusses community science and its place in social epistemology and philosophy of science, with Catherine Kendig providing commentary.

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Community Science and Philosophy of Science

Karen Kovaka

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The term “scientist” is younger than the United States of America. William Whewell first used it, famously, in 1833, to describe the mathematician and astronomer Mary Somerville. Before the invention of the term, empirical researchers were more often called “natural philosophers” or “men of science.” These researchers differed from the scientists of today in more than just name. “Scientist” has only been a salaried occupation for about one hundred and fifty years. Until late in the eighteenth century, science was an amateur pursuit, not a professional one, which meant that researchers had to finance their own projects, fundraise, or rely on wealthy patrons for support.

Today, however, scientific research conducted by non-professionals is the exception rather than the rule. Amateurs still conduct varied types of investigation, from surveying bird migrations to classifying space telescope photos to monitoring changes in air and water quality. But this kind of research, which I’ll call community science, accounts for only a tiny fraction of the contemporary scientific enterprise.

Despite this minority status, community science is also in the midst of a twenty-first century renaissance. People are waking up to its potential to extend both the quality and quantity of scientific research. Since the 1990s, community science has gone from a place of relative obscurity to having billions of dollars of financial investment, extensive popular support, and (ironically) multiple professional societies and academic journals dedicated to its study and advancement.

Philosophers of science, too, have turned their attention to community science, but more often as an object of analysis than as a method for generating philosophical insights in its own right. The most well-known philosophical treatments of community science focus on a mix of epistemic and ethical questions, such as how rigorous and objective community science is, and what research ethics in the context of community science look like (e.g. Elliott and Rosenberg 2019). My work in community science deals with such questions, but I also collaboratively design and implement community science projects. One lesson I have learned as a practitioner is that community science can do more than produce scientific knowledge—it can also help test, refine, and extend key ideas in social epistemology. This is because many of these key ideas rest on empirical claims about group knowledge production, and community science projects allow for investigation of these claims.

Here is an example drawn from a project I helped design. In 2016, I was part of a team that developed a protocol for teaching high school students in the Galápagos Islands to observe sea lions on town beaches and record data about their behavior. Using this protocol, teenaged community scientists spent three field seasons comparing sea lion behavior on different beaches. They found that sea lions showed less aggression towards humans but more aggression toward one another on beaches that have more of a human presence and where sea lions are forced to crowd together.

In developing this protocol, we were interested in two primary things. First, in sea lion behavioral ecology. We wanted to know how human presence and disturbance affects sea lion behavior. Second, in the educational outcomes for our participants. We wanted to test claims from the academic literature about how participating in community science research affects community scientists.

We’ll set aside the behavioral ecology (but, read about our results: Walsh et al. 2020) and focus on the educational outcomes instead. Proponents of community science have theorized that being part of a community science project can produce a variety of good outcomes for participants: they may gain scientific knowledge, increase their understanding of the nature of science, become more invested in environmental conservation, or strengthen their trust in science (see Brossard, Lewenstein, & Bonney, 2005; Crall et al., 2013; Fortmann, 2008). The actual evidence supporting these suggestions is somewhat limited, partly because many community science projects do not build assessment into their structure. Projects also vary so much in terms of the structure and participants that identifying which features are or are not efficacious in producing these hoped-for educational outcomes is a complex task.

Fortunately, it is possible and feasible to carry out community science projects that do measure educational outcomes. In our case, we administered a pre- and post-test composed of multiple-choice questions, Likert scale survey items, and open-ended questions to measure three kinds of outcomes—knowledge of the nature of science, knowledge about sea lions, and attitudes toward conservation. Between the pre- and post-tests, we found statistically significant increases in correct answers to questions measuring knowledge of the nature of science and knowledge about sea lions. We also found that participants’ views of nature became more pro-environmental over the course of a field season.

These results support the idea that participation in community science can have educational benefits across different epistemic and psychological domains. And, compared to many community science projects, where participants are already highly knowledgeable about or invested in science, our project engaged adolescents with limited education about and exposure to science. Of course, establishing general claims about community science and educational outcomes requires far more data than a single project can provide. The point of the example is to illustrate the sorts of empirical claims community science projects can investigate, and how this investigation can happen in practice. The list of claims we might investigate using community science also extends far beyond this example. In addition to claims that community science affects participants’ attitudes toward or knowledge of science, we might assess claims about the following:

• Epistemic rigor: How reliable can the results of community science be? What features make them more or less reliable? How should we assess the reliability of community science?
• Co-creation of projects: How do projects that are co-created between professionals and amateurs differ from projects that are designed by professionals, who then instruct amateurs on how to carry out specific elements of the project, such as data collection? Are there particular goods or benefits of co-creation? Are there particular challenges or downsides? Under what circumstances is co-creation likely to be successful?
• Epistemic diversity: Are there benefits of epistemic or cognitive diversity in community science contexts? What are they? What structures and arrangements make these benefits more or less assessible?
• Research ethics: What ethical concerns arise in the context of community science? What structures and arrangements can address these concerns?

Answers to these sorts of questions are, it turns out, directly relevant to key ideas in social epistemology. One such idea is the controversial “diversity trumps ability” theorem. More precisely, the idea is that a group of epistemically diverse agents can outperform a group of more homogenous agents, even when this latter group has expertise relevant to the task in question (Hong and Page 2004). Philosophers and social scientists have investigated the claim that diversity trumps ability using agent-based models, and Hong and Page’s model has been the locus of a lively debate for nearly two decades. But think of the further insights about this idea that we might obtain from community science. We might identify further benefits of epistemic diversity, or we might discover particular conditions that promote or detract from the benefits of epistemic diversity. We could also learn more about the scope of the basic claim: in what sorts of contexts or groups should we expect to observe the diversity trumps ability phenomenon?

I will briefly mention one further example, the idea that science ought to be more democratic. Typical defenses of this idea claim that democratizing science will make scientific research align more closely with public values, and possibly even increase the public’s trust in science as a consequence (e.g. Douglas 2005; Kitcher 2011). Whether this defense succeeds depends on the details of particular democratization proposals, many of which can be modeled as community science projects with different kinds of structures. Using such projects as a model would allow researchers to probe whether the hypothesized benefits of democratizing science materialize, and if so, under what kinds of arrangements.

As the profile of community science continues to grow, the reasons for philosophers to engage with this method become more and more compelling. This is a model for doing science that is developing, changing, and gaining influence as a research method and as a way of organizing knowledge production. Not only can philosophers help to craft epistemic and ethical best practices for doing community science, and we can generate insights about core ideas in social epistemology at the same time.

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Commentary

Catherine Kendig

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Who is a scientist and how do we decide who qualifies as one and who does not? While the English term ‘scientist’ was indeed dubbed by William Whewell to describe Mary Somerville, there surely must have been many who fit the description well before its first use in English. Aristotle, aka, the ‘father of biology’ ‘the grandfather of zoology’ and the ‘godfather of embryology’ might seem a natural choice on which to confer retrospective scientist status. Of course, Aristotle’s ontology of formal, final, material and efficient causes which he used to understand these fields of natural philosophy lie outside of what is currently understood to be institutionally accepted science. If not Aristotle, perhaps Galileo, given his focus on experiments and observation in physics like those laid out in Two New Sciences (1638), or perhaps Felice Fontana who conducted extensive and repeated experiments with poisonous snakes and venom detailed in his Treatise on the Venom of the Viper (1782). At least one thing that might be a common characteristic of those individuals, communities of practitioners, or research groups we might have referred to as scientists had the name been in use back in the 17^th and 18^th century, might be one who repeats and retests experiments. To be cautious, we might just say that retesting experiments is an activity that scientists perform. Insofar as one is performing this activity, one is at least acting like a scientist, even if we might not want to say that they are embodying what it means to be a scientist at all times—for instance, when they are ordering pizza—but of course the same could also be said of real card-carrying scientists as well.

In some respects, and as Karen Kovaka points out, a scientist is someone who practices science, who engages in the activities of science research, and is part of a network or community of researchers. This intentionally open-textured definition would include the large-scale amateur projects devoted to biogeographical birdwatching as well as many other community science projects. In these, participants perform science but in a way different from those who perform science institutionally. Community science provides a mode of science with different cultural values, different objectives, and different epistemic objects from those within institutionalized science (Mahr and Dickel 2019).

Kovaka rightly points out that when it comes to its appearance in philosophy of science discussions, community science is usually that thing that is talked about rather than something that is used in the practice of philosophizing about science. While discussion over community science as a particularly interesting epistemic object or process is indeed valuable, I agree with her that it also provides an innovative way through which students and others can think together and a mode of research to better understand how groups generate knowledge. The design and protocol she describes with reference to the high school students’ community science project in the Galápagos Islands provides a wonderful example of how philosophers of science can use community science projects to examine not only what knowledge is generated through the activities of community science, but also—and importantly for this symposium—what are the effects on those participants. Her suggestion, that the designers of community science projects consider building into their projects assessments that can capture information about educational outcomes as well as how the beliefs and attitudes of the participants changed as a result of the project, is one that I hope will be widely taken up in future research.

What is particularly interesting about Kovaka’s approach is the focus on how community science affects the people who engage with it and measuring how their perspective changes as a result. Her use of community science as a tool for inquiring into the cognitive science of learning takes seriously a philosophy of science in practice approach that centers the epistemic products of research, the methods and processes by which the research was pursued and made, but also the practitioners themselves. Investigating what practitioners perceive to be their role, what their attitudes are to the subject matter, how they have changed through the course of the project, and what are their beliefs about what they have learned and how they have been incorporating (or not) the knowledge generated through the project into their worldviews have been the focus of study within STS and Sociology of Science, but it can and should also be studied within philosophy of science. Crafting experiments that test hypotheses about participants’ attitudes or their knowledge or drafting open-ended questions or Likert scale survey items may not pick out all of the ontological commitments, beliefs, and attitudes a participant may have, but it is a very good start. Kovaka and her colleagues have shown that a great deal of knowledge about student attitudes, especially about their views of nature, can be gleaned from these data. I would also add post-project interviews and reflective discussions to these data collection methods. These proved especially valuable following an HPS complementary science project I planned where undergraduates collected local samples of water from university ponds, described the morphology and behaviors of the organisms within the samples, and drew and classified the live samples (of mostly) species of water flea they found (Kendig 2013).

Appropriately conceived and developed community research projects can be used to investigate different kinds of empirical claims but also provide the means by which we can examine how these research activities proceed in practice. Building on those that the Galápagos project investigated, Kovaka provides further examples of claims that could be studied through the use of community science projects, including: epistemic rigor of community science, the design of co-created projects, and the benefits of epistemic diversity, as well as questions concerning the democratization of science. There are of course many other claims that can be studied and socioepistemic values in practice that can be researched using community science. I’ll add two further loci of research:

1. Inviting participants: In particular, the social negotiation processes that are involved in inviting participants to be amateur scientists, and considering the positions of power, authority, and privilege and how these codify the ‘expert’ –‘amateur’ dichotomy on which it is based and how these are felt by those invited.
2. Sovereign or self-governed collective research: Research pursued in community but that which has not been invited or has actively been ‘uninvited’. Research knowledge of this type has been discussed within ethnobiology, Indigenous science studies and the philosophy thereof and provides another route into discussions of both community science as well as the role ontologies and values play in knowledge generation and knowledge sharing.

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References

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Brossard, D., Lewenstein, B., & Bonney, R. (2005). Scientific knowledge and attitude change: The impact of a citizen science project. International Journal of Science Education, 27(9), 1099–1121.

Crall, A. W., Jordan, R., Holfelder, K., Newman, G. J., Graham, J., & Waller, D. M. (2013). The impacts of an invasive species citizen science training program on participant attitudes, behavior, and science literacy. Public Understanding of Science, 22(6), 745–764.

Douglas, H. (2005). Inserting the public into science. In Democratization of expertise? (pp. 153-169). Springer, Dordrecht.

Elliott, K. C., & Rosenberg, J. (2019). Philosophical foundations for citizen science. Citizen Science: Theory and Practice, 4(1).

Fortmann, L. (Ed.). (2008). Participatory research in conservation and rural livelihoods: Doing science together. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Hong, L., & Page, S. E. (2004). Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101(46), 16385-16389.

Kendig, C. 2013. Integrating History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences in Practice to Enhance Science Education: Swammerdam’s Historia Insectorum Generalis and the case of the water flea. Science & Education 22(8): 1939-1961.

Kitcher, P. (2011). Science in a democratic society. Prometheus Books.

Mahr, D., Dickel, S.2019. Citizen science beyond invited participation: nineteenth century amateur naturalists, epistemic autonomy, and big data approaches avant la letter. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 41(4).

Walsh, J. T., Kovaka, K., Vaca, E., Weisberg, D. S., & Weisberg, M. (2020). The effects of human exposure on Galápagos sea lion behavior. Wildlife Biology, 2020(4).