Disciplinary niche construction. A conceptual framework for disciplinary expertise

AGUSTIN F. MAURO

Buenos Aires

Congreso; 17th International Congress on Logic, Metholodogy and Philosophy of Science and Technology; 2023

As the philosophy of science has moved towards pluralistic and social perspectives on scientific knowledge, it has become more relevant to understand disciplinary expertise, i.e. the ability of a discipline to establish an area of competence. How is the expertise or competence of a discipline established? What processes determine its area? Ultimately, how do they arrive at "true" discourses on certain phenomena? These questions are not only relevant for theory but also become pressing when establishing interdisciplinary spaces or in scientific controversies, spaces where expertise is disputed between disciplines. In this theoretical-argumentative presentation I seek to show the possibilities of looking at processes of disciplinary expertise production as analogous to the evolution and construction of niches (Jablonka & Lamb, 2014; Odling-Smee et al., 2003). While "niche" is a concept from ecology, there are other philosophical uses for understanding cognition (Clark, 2005), technological change (Schot & Geels, 2007), and even online communities (Arfini et al., 2019), but not for conceptualising disciplines and specialties. In this metaphorical extrapolation I intend to show how disciplinary expertise can be thought of as a n-dimensional space established by a distribution of factors and resources, which a discipline constructed in order to produce knowledge about one or several domains. This framework makes explicit how the local actions of epistemic agents and the availabilities objectified in more global aspects of the scientific production system, both in terms of environmental factors and resources, guide the evolution of disciplines and enable agents to establish an area of expertise. Furthermore, the framework can inherit the perspectives of other authors such as the non-differentiation between the cognitive and the social (Bloor, 1991), the role of non-humans (Latour, 2005) or the diversity of resource relations in scientific research(Knorr-Cetina, 1982). Finally, the conceptual framework provides a link between discussions in the philosophy of science and discussions on the Anthropocene and Capitalocene (Haraway, 2015).