The People's Science I: What is Extitutional Science?
The following is the first part of a multi-part series on the way non-professional scientists have enabled significant scientific progress in the understanding of their disease. In this part, I begin to describe the nature of their activities. In future parts, I will explain why what I call extitutional science enables scientific progress, and what this means for the way in which scientific activities ought to be organised. *** Philosophers of science have on the whole not been very interested in the science done by people who aren’t affiliated with and/or employed by scientific institutions: what we might call non-professional or extra-academic science (Koskinen 2023: 413). But the work that has been done on this topic can be fruitfully divided into two camps. The first have tended to theorise non-professional science, which they tend to call participatory science , as in some sense subsumed under institutional science (Dunlap et al. 2021, Evans and Potochnik 2023, Potochnik ...