[hopos-g] 24 Sept (Wed): Philosophy of Science, International Postdoc Forum

['Alan Love' via hopos-g@vt.edu]

24 September 2025, 12:15pm CDT (UTC-5)

Is citizen science exploitative?

Rose Trappes, University of Bergen

Abstract: Citizen science, or participatory science, uses the labour and expertise of volunteers to serve the needs and interests of professional scientists. Not infrequently, this involves siphoning valuable epistemic resources produced by these volunteers to scientists and databases in privileged institutions in the global north. Is citizen science therefore exploitative? And if it is, is this a problem? In this talk I consider these questions using resources from political philosophy, social epistemology, and philosophy of science, and drawing on cases of citizen science from ecology and meteorology.

Commentator: Emilie Snell-Rood, Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, University of Minnesota

The International Postdoc Forum for the Philosophy of Science is organized by the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science (MCPS). It showcases virtual research presentations from international scholars with commentaries from local MCPS community members. Presentations are by Zoom webinar. Please join our mailing list, email mc...@umn.edu, or go here for a link to attend.

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Alan C. Love

Winton Chair in the Liberal Arts

Distinguished McKnight University Professor

Department of Philosophy & Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science

University of Minnesota
http://umn.edu/~aclove

New Publications: The freedom to believe in free will: evidence from an adoption study against the first law of behavioral genetics (open access); The epistemic strength of proxies in scientific practice (open access); Measuring cell movement: concepts and quantification (journal publication); Mechanisms and principles: Two approaches to scientific generalization (journal publication)

"Institutions of learning should be devoted to the cultivation of curiosity, and the less they are deflected by considerations of immediacy of application, the more likely they are to contribute not only to human welfare but to the equally important satisfaction of intellectual interest" (Abraham Flexner, The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge, 1939).

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