CfP: Evidence Amalgamation in the Sciences (Special Issue with Synthese)

Samuel C. Fletcher, Jürgen Landes & Roland Poellinger are guest-editing a special issue on “Evidence Amalgamation in the Sciences” with Synthese. To submit a manuscript login into Synthese’s editorial manager before 15. Feb. 2017 and choose to submit to this special issue. Here’s the call:

Amalgamating evidence from heterogeneous sources and across levels of enquiry is becoming increasingly important in many pure and applied sciences. “Systems approaches” play major roles in a number of (social) sciences, e.g., biology, ecology, medicine, sociology, geography, climate science and economics. The amalgamation of different models, scales, and types of data continues to be central in these sciences.

This proposed special issue provides a forum for researchers from diverse scientific and philosophical perspectives to discuss evidence amalgamation, its methodologies, its history, its pitfalls and its potential. In particular, we encourage critical analysis of past and current practice highlighting inadequacies and advances.

We are calling for contributions which address normative, historical and descriptive aspects of evidence amalgamation in the (social) sciences. Specific areas of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Commonalities and differences of methodologies for amalgamation across different sciences.
• The roles of models and mechanisms in evidence amalgamation.
• Normative – epistemological and ethical – issues concerning the amalgamation of evidence.
• Basic issues in the philosophy of science relevant to evidence amalgamation such as: unification, justification, explanation, coherence, reductionism, incommensurability, inductive methods, and causal inference.
• Decision and policy-making with large heterogeneous bodies of evidence.
• Methodology of meta-analysis and systematic reviews.
• Foundational issues of data integration and fusion within and across disciplines.

To discuss a possible contribution drop an email to the guest-editor of your choice:

• Samuel C. Fletcher (LMU/MCMP)
• Jürgen Landes (LMU/MCMP)
• Roland Poellinger (LMU/MCMP)