Lecture on April 6, 2022
Sabina Leonelli (University of Exeter)
Trouble in the (Big) Data House
About the lecture [stream]
We live in a data-rich world, and yet diverse views on what constitutes reliable knowledge are proliferating and science is losing credibility as a source of verifiable, empirically grounded understanding of the world. On the one hand, we are witnessing a vertiginous innovation in the production, communication and analysis of data for research purposes, with artificial intelligence increasingly used to generate new knowledge by trawling through the vast digital blueprints generated by human interactions with technology. Scientists are increasingly drawn to access and search large datasets – so-called ‘big data’ – in order to plan research directions and verify their outputs. On the other hand, the reliability and legitimacy of scientific knowledge has come under fire in both the United States and Europe, not least due to the pliability of large datasets to multiple interpretations and the perceived lack of transparency in the research processes and skills used to analyze data. The promotion of ‘open data’, whereby data produced in the course of research are made widely and freely available through databases or data publications, is meant to remedy this lack of trust – and yet, its implementation remains confusing to scientists and non-scientists alike, and overtly clashes with the ways in which research is governed and assessed around the world. This talk considers these opposing trends by interrogating the role that big and open data can and should play in the production of scientific research, and more generally, as foundations for the development of empirical knowledge. I argue that both the overriding importance attributed to big data and the increasing contestation of well-established facts are linked to a problematic conceptualisation of the epistemology of scientific research, whereby data are conceptualised as mind-independent, value-free representations of the world, whose accumulation permits the extraction of knowledge. I show the fallacies in this approach and defend an alternative view of research as grounded on what I call investigative inferential reasoning: in other words, the material, social and conceptual ordering of data as a fundamental source of empirical insight.
About the speaker
Sabina Leonelli is Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Exeter, where she co-directs the Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences and leads the governance strand of the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. In 2021–22 she is a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She is also a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute and the Académie Internationale de Philosophie de la Science; Editor-in-Chief of History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences; Associate Editor of Harvard Data Science Review; and twice ERC grantee. Her books include Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study (2016), Data Journeys in the Sciences (2020) and Data in Society: A Critical Introduction (2021).
photo credit: University of Exeter
Wednesday, 6. April 2022, 18:15-19:45 (CEST)
Flügelbau West, 2. OG, Raum W221
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1
20146 Hamburg
Requirements for joining us at this on-site event:
- wearing an FFP2 mask without an exhalation valve (which must be worn in all Universität Hamburg buildings). Wearing a face visor is not sufficient.
- Persons who show symptoms (e.g. cough, fever, diarrhoea) that could indicate a COVID-19 infection are not allowed to stay at the University of Hamburg.
- No additonal proof of 3G, 2G or 2G+ needed!