Fellows WS 2017/18

The planned project at the MECS in Lüneburg will involve the analysis of one of the first computer simulations of a living being movements. In 1968, three mathematicians of Moscow's Lomonosov University created a computer animation lasting 40 seconds — a cat's course. Under the direction of Nikolaj Konstantinov, the mathematicians decided to simulate the gait of the animal using the calculator BESM-4 and to record every slightest change on the paper. In the journal Problemy Kibernetiki (Cybernetics problems), the simulation of controlled acceleration of certain parts of the body is based on differential equations, as the six-year-later article "Programm, which models a mechanism and an animation about it" Order; the graphic interpretation of the cat was achieved using a character field. The parametrically dissected contours of the animal made it possible to simulate the arrival of the cat at the display.

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).