[Iris] APSE talk by Remco Heesen + reading group

Dear all, we are delighted to invite you to the next installment of the APSE talks series, as well as to the accompanying reading circle prior to the talk. The talk will be given by Remco Heesen (LSE). When: Thursday, 10.04.2025, 15:00 - 17:00 Where: HS 3A, NIG (Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien) The Division of Cognitive Labour under Poisson Productivity When a community of academics faces a research problem and multiple methodological approaches to solving it, how much effort should they devote to each approach to maximise their chances of solving the problem and minimise the time to a solution? This problem is known as the division of cognitive labour (DCL). More specifically, Philip Kitcher, Michael Strevens, and Kevin Zollman have asked whether and to what extent academics' expectations of credit for solving the problem can act as an invisible hand to produce an efficient DCL without a need for top-down planning. Here I revisit this question using a modelling framework (key ingredient: academic productivity follows a Poisson distribution) that has more empirical support than Kitcher's, Strevens', and Zollman's, and is also more flexible in that it can be used to address broader questions about credit incentives. The somewhat surprising finding is that in this framework the DCL problem becomes essentially trivial. I'd like to discuss implications for how we think about the model and/or the DCL problem. Reading Circle (1:15-3 PM): When: right before the talk - Thursday, 10.04.2025, 13:15 - 15:00 Where: same place - HS 3A, NIG (Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien) We will focus our discussion on an article by Kevin Zollman (attached pdf): Zollman, K. J. S. (2007). The Communication Structure of Epistemic Communities. Philosophy of Science, 74(5), 574-587. https://doi.org/10.1086/525605 As an introduction we suggest this SEP article (especially Chapters 2, 3.1, 4.1 and 4.2): Šešelja, Dunja, "Agent-Based Modeling in the Philosophy of Science", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/agent-modeling-philscience/>. For further reading regarding the topic: Heesen, R. (2018). Why the reward structure of science makes reproducibility problems inevitable. The Journal of Philosophy, 115(12), 661-674. https://doi.org/10.5840/jphil20181151239 Kitcher, P. (1990). The Division of Cognitive Labor. The Journal of Philosophy, 87(1), 5-22. https://doi.org/10.2307/2026796 Thoma, J. (2015). The Epistemic Division of Labor Revisited. Philosophy of Science, 82(3), 454-472. https://doi.org/10.1086/681768 Best wishes, Vinzenz Fischer