Science necessitates collaboration

Science necessitates collaboration is a lecture about how collaboration is necessary condition for scientific development and how collaboration can be facilitated by means of web-based formal argumentation.

Scope

Purpose: To describe the role of collaboration in science and how web-based formal argumentation can be used in facilitating scientific collaboration.

Intended audience: Researchers (especially at doctoral student level) in any field of science (mainly natural, not social scientists).

Duration: 2 x 1 hour 15 minutes

Definition

The lecture consists of two parts: the first discussing what collaboration means in the context of science and how it is operationalized in open assessment, the second part discusses more technically how to collaborate in open assessment by means of web-based formal argumentation.

In order to understand this lecture it is recommended to first acquaint oneself with the following lectures:

• Open assessment in research
• Assessments - science-based decision support
• Variables - evolving interpretations of reality
• Evaluating assessment performance

Objectives:

• Learn why collaboration is better than working alone.
• Learn to apply the scientific method, and the importance of it in open assessment.
• Learn the structure of formal argumentation.
• Learn how to collaborate

Result

Part I:

• scientific method: guess, observe, falsify (Karl Popper: Conjectures and refutations: The growth of scientific knowledge, 1963).
• Bayesian updating is the natural way of looking at hypotheses.
• Decision variables as example: what they are, how they are updated.
• Value variables: how do they capture the societal values. Example: DALY weights.
• Methods as shared pieces of practical knowledge. Example: Merging models with different grids.
• creation of hypotheses, falsification of hypotheses

Part II:

• web-based pragma-dialectical argumentation
  • hypothesis
  • statement about hypothesis
  • arguments for and/or against statement
  • arguments for and/or against arguments
• unless a statement becomes invalidated, the hypothesis must be refined accordingly