Special section: Studying science “in the wild”

This special section of the June 2024 issue of Qualitative Psychology, “Qualitative Methods in the Philosophy of Science: Historical and Contemporary Applications,” highlights important ways psychologists and philosophers of science use qualitative methods to inform fundamental questions about the nature of science. The section is dedicated to the 50th anniversary of The Subjective Side of Science, Ian Mitroff’s (1974) pioneering study of over 40 National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists engaged with the Apollo 11 missions. Mitroff’s comprehensive methods included repeated interviews with key scientists, which led to important insights on how their personalities and social interactions influenced their handling of evidence, especially when new evidence contradicted a scientist’s pet theory. Mitroff’s findings led him to question the “storybook” view of science implicit in the idea that there is a single scientific method that guarantees objectivity and distance in any branch of inquiry. The open access introduction to the special section (Osbeck et al., 2024) features an interview with Mitroff on the inspiration and motivation for his book and what he considers his most important findings. The special section also includes contributions from contemporary philosophers of science and psychologists who, like Mitroff, use qualitative methods as a rich source of insights about science. The idiom “in the wild” in the title of this spotlight refers to the pioneering study by Edwin Hutchins (1995) in which he investigated cognition in naturally occurring contexts of practice. As a set, the articles in the special section raise important questions about the nature of science as it is actually practiced, including the intricate ways cognitive, social, cultural, and personal processes coordinate in problem-solving and innovation.

The special section is important for two main reasons. First, it explores what it means for human activity to be scientific. This line of inquiry obviously has implications for psychological science, the most important being that science is more complex and multidimensional than is typically assumed and that scientific thinking is inextricably tied to social and cultural processes. The human element of science raises questions that are ultimately epistemological and ethical.

Second, the special section demonstrates an expanded range of applications and the epistemic value of qualitative methods. It illustrates that these methods can and should be used in the pursuit of knowledge relating to epistemology and cognition. The respect garnered by qualitative methods in cutting-edge philosophy of science may surprise some psychologists and challenge their view of qualitative data and interpretive analysis.

• In their open access article, Rachel A. Ankeny and Sabina Leonelli provide an overview of ways qualitative analysis is important to contemporary philosophy of science. They illustrate using several examples from their own work, describing how qualitative data and analysis inform processes of data curation, modeling, and classification in biology and biomedical sciences. They also examine the role of funding priorities in directing scientific practice. The examples they provide demonstrate the multifaceted value of qualitative methods for investigating cognitive and social practices relevant to science and what scientists understand to be best practice.

• In his open access article, Michael T. Stuart discusses imagination in science, noting that there is a need to better understand how, why, and when scientists use imagination; why they value imagination; and how social processes play a role in imagination. He argues that qualitative methods are best suited to addressing these questions and shares preliminary insights from his interviews and observational studies with practicing scientists. On the basis of these studies, Stuart suggests that imagination is valued less or viewed with more suspicion by young scientists and scientists from underrepresented groups. He also found that scientists deliberately use imagination primarily as a last resort in the search for solutions and that they evaluate the products of imagination primarily in terms of results—that is, how imagination concretely contributes to problem-solving. Stuart analyzes the epistemological and ethical implications of his studies and offers suggestions for future directions in the study of scientific imagination. He considers imagination to be a cognitive–cultural process and recommends using qualitative methods to study similar cognitive–cultural processes such as emotion, humor, and aesthetic experience.
• In her article, Nancy J. Nersessian focuses on creative thinking in science, especially as it leads to conceptual innovation and change. She argues that scientific thinking needs to be studied not just as something that takes place in the head but as a system phenomenon in which problem-solving is distributed across researchers, community investigative practices, and artifacts. Further, she argues that determining how cognitive, social, material, and cultural dimensions of research are integrated in processes of concept formation and change requires a fine-grained qualitative analysis. Her investigations use two forms of innovative qualitative methods: cognitive historical and cognitive ethnographic. She discusses findings from her investigations of in situ modeling practices in physics and bioengineering sciences. Her focus on how scientists create and change scientific concepts in two different domains, using different qualitative methods, underscores the nature of analysis each kind of qualitative approach to studying scientific thinking enables. Nersessian argues that in addition to its intrinsic value, studying scientific thinking demonstrates the creative potential of human psychological capacities when embedded in rich social, cultural, and material environments.
• In their article, Kieran C. O’Doherty, Cory Fairley, Dan Badulescu, and Alexis Fabricius focus on scientific discourse, noting the foundational role implicit ontological presumptions play in enabling human conduct of all kinds, including science. They provide a description, rationale, and illustration of the method they developed to analyze ontological commitments implicit in scientific discourse. To illustrate the importance of ontologies and the ways they implicate values and influence decision making, O’Doherty et al. draw data from a series of interviews with relevant experts on forest health in British Columbia. They also offer guidelines for recognizing and interpreting implicit ontologies, describe their important implications for science policy, and suggest a range of practical applications for which their method might be adapted.

One important way the articles featured in the special section can be useful is for education in research methods. The suggestion that psychology students would benefit from exposure to philosophy of science arises with some frequency. However, without some background in philosophy, it can be difficult to present relevant material in a way that bears any relation to actual research practice. The articles in the special section provide concrete illustrations of how philosophy of science has implications for psychology and how empirical research, in turn, can be used to inform philosophy of science and science policy. At the very least, the topics invite nuanced reflection and discussion about scientific research and what it means for psychologists to “do science.” As the articles in the special section illustrate, qualitative research in philosophy of science and in psychology of science reveal scientific thinking to be a complex but fruitful domain in which to study a range of human psychological processes, including perception, intuition, learning, reasoning, imagining, emotion, and values.

This article is in the Core of Psychology topic area.

Ankeny, R. A., & Leonelli, S. (2024). Investigating research practices: How qualitative methods enhance philosophical understandings of science. Qualitative Psychology, 11(2), 247–262. https://doi.org/10.1037/qup0000289

Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. MIT Press.

Mitroff, I. (1974). The subjective side of science: A philosophical inquiry into the psychology of the Apollo moon scientists. Elsevier.

Nersessian, N. J. (2024). Why/how to study scientific thinking? Qualitative Psychology, 11(2), 263–276. https://doi.org/10.1037/qup0000288

O’Doherty, K. C., Fairley, C., Badulescu, D., & Fabricius, A. (2024). Analyzing discourse for implicit ontologies. Qualitative Psychology, 11(2), 294–314. https://doi.org/10.1037/qup0000293

Osbeck, L. M., Nersessian, N. J., & Antczak, S. L. (2024). Qualitative methods in philosophy of science: Historical and contemporary applications. Qualitative Psychology, 11(2), 235–246. https://doi.org/10.1037/qup0000294

Stuart, M. T. (2024). The qualitative study of scientific imagination. Qualitative Psychology, 11(2), 277–293. https://doi.org/10.1037/qup0000297

Lisa M. Osbeck, PhD, is a professor of psychology at the University of West Georgia and a former visiting research scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is a fellow of APA and a past president of the Society for General Psychology (APA Division 1). Her book Science as Psychology: Sense-Making and Identity in Science Practice (2011), coauthored with Nancy J. Nersessian, Kareen R. Malone, and Wendy C. Newstetter, received a William James Book Award from APA. Contact Osbeck.

Nancy J. Nersessian, PhD, is Regents’ Professor of Cognitive Science Emerita, Georgia Institute of Technology, and a visiting scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her latest book is Interdisciplinarity in the Making: Models and Methods in Frontier Science (2022).

Stephen L. Antczak, MLIS, is a PhD student at the University of West Georgia. He has also been a professional editor and writer of numerous articles and works of fiction. His areas of interest include the psychology of science, personality, and the intersection of fiction and psychology.