Fellows WS 2017/18

Im geplanten Projekt am MECS in Lüneburg wird es um die Analyse einer der ersten Computersimulationen von Bewegungen eines Lebewesens überhaupt gehen. 1968 schufen drei Mathematiker der Moskauer Lomonosov-Universität eine 40 Sekunden dauernde Computeranimation – den Lauf einer Katze. Unter der Leitung von Nikolaj Konstantinov beschlossen die Mathematiker, die Gangart des Tieres mit Hilfe des Rechners BESM-4 zu simulieren und jede kleinste Veränderung auf dem Papier festzuhalten

During my junior fellowship at MECS, I will focus on the writing of the third and fifth parts of my thesis. The third part is composed by three chapters. The first one analyzes and questions the ways complexity scientists establish the proof and make their digital simulations credible. In it, I propose the term of “socio-epistemology” in order to study sociologically, following the approach of Armatte and Dahan (2004), what Althusser (1974) has called “spontaneous epistemologies”. I will show that complexity science models’ legitimacy is the result of a complex mix of conventional methods and new metaphysics. Such a chapter is conceived to be a critical, methodological and complementary dialogue with philosophers of science and epistemologists (Varenne and Silberstein, 2013; Grüne-Yanoff, 2009; Gramelsberger, 2011; Pias, 2011).