Colin Allen - US grants

9320214 Allen Working under the direction of Professor Marc Bekoff of the University of Colorado, Dr. Allen is focusing on the impact of philosophy of mind and cognitive ethology on each other. Dr. Allen is a philosopher; Professor Bekoff is an ethologist. Dr. Allen is studying under Professor Bekoff's direction the empirical techniques appropriate to ethology and the explanatory objectives of ethologists. Dr. Allen's research objectives are to improve our understanding of the extent to which philosophy of mind can help advance empirical objectives of cognitive ethologists and the extent to which ethological data bear on philosophical theories of mind. During the course of the year that he is spending working in Colorado, Dr. Allen is participating in Professor Bekoff's study of antipredator vigilance in birds. These two have already jointly authored articles on conceptual issues in cognitive ethology. They are using this experience working together in order to develop an extended treatment of cognitive ethology and its relationship to philosophy of mind. This study promises to be of significance to specialists in both fields as well as to the wider societal interest in the nature and origins of mentality in humans and other animals. ***

PROJECT SUMMARY

We propose to host a 5-day intensive graduate training workshop for students of history,
philosophy, and social studies of biology. The workshop will be modeled on the very
successful graduate training FDISH conference held in San Francisco in 2004, which was
sponsored by both the NSF and ISHPSSB (the International Society for the History,
Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology). Ten researchers of distinction from the
fields of history, philosophy, and social studies of biology will be invited to address
the specific questions: what is the future of biology studies? what are the benefits and
challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration? what can philosophers, historians,
sociologists, and biologists learn from one another? In addition to these plenary talks,
the faculty attendees will also participate in hands-on workshops addressing training
issues, such as: how to write a paper for submission to a journal; strategies for
navigating the job market; how to obtain funding for research in biology studies. An
innovative feature of the San Francisco FDISH meetings will be continued at the IU
meeting, namely, "office hours", wherein faculty members make themselves available at a
specific time and location (coffeehouse, restaurant, classroom), for students to drop in
and make informal contacts or discuss research ideas.
The intellectual merits of the workshop are expected to be widely distributed and varied.
Disciplinary training in philosophy, history, and social studies of biology is taken as a
given. More unusual intellectual fruits of the workshop will involve interdisciplinary
synergies arising from the interactions of the scholars at the various individual sessions
and personal interactions. For example, one researcher in philosophy from the past
workshop gained access to work of another in ecology that proved fruitful in her
postdoctoral project. These sorts of idiosyncratic and unpredictable interactions
predictably appear when these groups of researchers on biology are thrown together in the
right ways, as we plan to do with the organization of both formal and informal sessions.
Broader impacts include: increased interdisciplinary understanding, especially among
sciences and humanities; dissemination of up-to-date information regarding high-priority
bio-risks and bio-ethical issues; training opportunities and opportunities for
network-building for graduate students from a wide variety of institutional backgrounds,
including historically black and women's colleges; and emphasis on future employment
opportunities for well-trained bio-ethics personnel.

Introduction

Despite widespread acceptance of the idea that humans are not the only conscious creatures on the planet, and a resurgence of scientific work and public interest in the topic of animal consciousness, considerable scientific skepticism and divergent public opinion remains concerning what it actually means to say that animals are conscious. This project addresses two related research questions. How is consciousness conceptualized in different research contexts? Can the various and seemingly incompatible conceptualizations of animal consciousness be integrated or related in an evidence-based way?

Intellectual Merit

The project will use the methods of conceptual and logical analysis of scientific and philosophical positions to generate a series of research publications on this topic, and will initiate an "Online Tree of Consciousness" to serve as an open database for research, education, ethics, and policy in this area. The project will provide a clear characterization of existing concepts and methods from multiple disciplines. The goal is to integrate these into a single domain of discourse organized around phylogenetic relationships among the species that have been studied. This will allow different sorts of evidence (behavioral, neurophysiological, evolutionary, etc.) to be evaluated in their phylogenetic context, and should aid in the discovery of patterns in existing data as well as helping to identify systematically understudied areas.

Potential Broader Impacts

The project is expected to yield general recommendations and guidelines for future scientific work, greater conceptual clarity about the range of ideas about animal consciousness and how to study it, improved accessibility for policymakers and ethicists concerned with animal welfare to the latest research on consciousness, better access for social scientists to data relevant to the historical and sociological patterns of animal consciousness research, and easy access for educators looking to challenge students with one of the hardest and most fascinating conceptual problems facing any science.

This award supports the development of an international Research Coordination Network (RCN) for developing computational and big data methods for history and philosophy of science (HPS) research. Such research is beginning to yield novel insights from individual projects. However, an integrated approach is required in order to take full advantage of these methods. The RCN will take some of the steps that are necessary to eventually provide a structured representation of HPS knowledge and the foundation for a data driven computational HPS infrastructure. Given the diversity of contexts, questions, and approaches, it is clear that integration, coordination and standards cannot be imposed centrally, meaning that an RCN is the pertinent mechanism for this type of project. By establishing a new integrative approach to computational and data-driven HPS, the RCN will in turn facilitate an integration of HPS with big-data and data-driven science. In addition, the RCN will lead to new types of questions facilitated by this approach, and thereby increase the relevance of HPS for larger questions at the intersection between science and society. It will also facilitate international collaborations and the inclusion of a diverse group of scholars, particularly many younger scholars; it will do so by promoting commitment to open source, open access, and open education thereby providing broader access to and participation in the HPS community, including members of the general public.

Without coordinated authorities and ontologies, data cannot be shared or integrated across individual projects, severely limiting their broader use. Without the benefits of such an economy of scale the transformative impact of computational methods in HPS is limited as the integration and computational analysis of datasets across multiple projects is precisely what enables novel and innovative questions. This RCN addresses the challenges related to authorities and ontologies for computational and digital projects in HPS by conducting research and developing computational solutions for mapping authorities and integrating ontologies across HPS projects through step-wise aggregation and mapping of data models, authorities and ontologies. The international RCN will (1) solidify a working social/organizational network of researchers in computational HPS, including a structured set of educational modules; (2) coordinate research and development of software solutions to address the challenge of data integration across HPS projects; and (3) document and analyze the process of reaching these solutions and integration as an example of how the computational turn affects the development of scientific fields.