International conference
CHARACTERIZING THE ROBUSTNESS OF SCIENCES AFTER THE "PRACTICAL TURN OF 
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE"

The conference will be held at the University Nancy 2, June 26-27, 2008.
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For more details:  http://poincare.univ-nancy2.fr

The disciplines whose scientific status is not brought into question, 
such as physics, are characterized by what is normally described as 
"successfulness", "reliability" or "solidity" of their theoretical, 
experimental or technical accomplishments. Today the philosophers of 
science often talk of "robustness".
At first sight, robustness seems beyond doubt, and its nature 
intuitively clear. Yet, it is far from easy to give a precise account of 
just what is implied by this notion. What exactly lies at the basis of 
the robustness of physics? How is robustness historically generated and 
improved upon? What does it mean that a scientific result or a 
developmental stage of science is "more robust" than another? Behind 
these questions, crucial epistemological issues await us. Indeed, 
nothing less than the very nature of science and its specificity with 
respect to other human practices, the nature of rationality and of 
scientific progress; and science's claim to be a truth-conducive activity.
In relation to these questions, William Wimsatt's contributions 
constitute a fundamental reference point. In a seminal article published 
in 1981, Wimsatt introduced into philosophy of science, beside the vague 
and widespread usage of the terms robustness, a more specific and 
technical one that, while preserving the common association with the 
ideas of solidity, reliability and successfulness, allows a more precise 
characterization. In the article, he defines robustness as the use of 
"multiple means of determinations" to "triangulate" the existence and 
the properties of a phenomenon, of an object or of a result. The idea is 
that any object (a perceptual object, or a physical phenomenon, or an 
experimental result, or etc...) that is sufficiently invariant under 
several independent derivations (in a wide sense of the term 
"derivation": means of identification, sensorial modalities, 
measurements processes, tests, models, levels of description...) owes 
its solidity (i.e. its robustness) to this situation; and that the 
higher is the number of the independent derivations of which it lies at 
the intersection, the more robust it can be considered.
Historically, the question of the reliability and solidity of physics 
has been first formulated, within philosophy of science, as a problem 
concerning the relations between statements. This conceptualization has 
been deeply transformed in the context of the so-called "practical turn" 
of science-studies that began in the '80s. The practical turn has led to 
an enlarged characterization of science that includes several aspects 
previously ignored or underplayed on the grounds of their alleged 
epistemological irrelevance: tacit knowledge, know-how and professional 
skills, local norms and standards, instrumental and material resources, 
geometry of the laboratory and short-term concrete feasibility, if not 
the available financial resources, the institutional organization, the 
power of convincing peers, decision-makers, sponsors and the like..
As a result, the question of reliability requires redefinitionin more 
complex terms, insofar as the network of the elements that "fit 
together" and that thus yield "robustness" is no longer simply a system 
of statements. Taking scientific practices as a starting point, physics 
appears as a process of "conciliation" of extremely diverse items. 
Scientific practices try to harmonize in the best possible way the 
greatest number of ingredients (especially experimental and theoretical 
ones), and sometimes they succeed: what emerges then, are good 
co-stabilizations, holistic unities of a kind endowed with a certain 
quality of stability and autonomy, which can be described as "closed 
systems" (Hacking) or as "scientific symbioses" (Pickering). It is with 
respect to such unities, to their stability and relative autonomy as 
unities, that, the robustness of the science must be understood. For, if 
what is often mentioned is the robustness of a certain particular result 
taken in isolation, this robustness always turns out to be dependent on 
a huge number of other elements with which the result happens or has 
happened to be intertwined within scientific practices. Ultimately, the 
robustness of an element is always dependent on an interconnected 
network of
elements.
If we admit this conclusion, the real difficulty lies in the search for 
a fine and operational characterization of the nature and of the dynamic 
process of constitution of the reticular entities that are likely to be 
involved. This is precisely the subject of the international conference 
of June 2008.

CONTRIBUTORS
Catherine Allamel-Raffin and Jean-Luc Gangloff
Mieke Boon
Catherine Dufour
Ralf Krömer
Thomas Nickles
Andrew Pickering
Terry Shinn
Christian Sichau
Léna Soler
Emiliano Trizio
Frédéric Wieber
William Wimsatt