Sumários
9 Dezembro 2025, 16:00
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Tiago José Ferreira Lapa da Silva
The Scientific Revolution, the Scientific Method and the Foundation of Modern Science
Price: The metrics of science – “from Little Science to Big Science”
Is science socioculturally conditioned?
Realism vs. Constructivism: The Classic Debate
Science is a central institution in modern societies
Scientific knowledge is a product of social organisation
Power and inequality are embedded in the production of knowledge.
The Science Wars and postmodernism revealed fears about legitimacy.
5 Dezembro 2025, 14:00
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Tiago José Ferreira Lapa da Silva
How contemporary forms of data and evolving relationships between science, politics, and the public reshape the production and use of knowledge.
The rise of Big Data as an alternative model for social science, showing how tools like anonymised Google search analysis (Stephens-Davidowitz’s “digital truth serum”) promise insights into hidden attitudes while encouraging theory-light, prediction-driven approaches that fuel commercial micro-targeting and political manipulation, exemplified by Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data.
The political uptake of scientific expertise, tracing how science has been mobilised for regulation and policy, from “speaking truth to power” to navigating controversies where evidence cannot resolve high-stakes disputes, and highlighting the growing calls for democratic public participation in scientific decision-making alongside the challenges of post-truth politics, where authority, objectivity and the role of experts become contested.
4 Dezembro 2025, 16:00
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Tiago José Ferreira Lapa da Silva
How scientific claims about gender have historically reinforced social hierarchies and how critical theory offers an alternative vision for social science.
How scientific practices from the 18th century to today have often naturalized social differences: Schiebinger’s analysis of anatomical drawings reveals how women were excluded from scientific institutions while being studied as “objects,” and Fine’s critique of Bateman’s principle demonstrates how contemporary evolutionary psychology continues to reproduce gender stereotypes under the guise of objectivity.
Frankfurt School’s project of critical theory, where thinkers like Horkheimer, Adorno and later Habermas argue that social science should not imitate the natural sciences but instead pursue an emancipatory knowledge interest, that is, identifying and challenging the social constraints that shape human behavior rather than predicting or controlling it.
3 Dezembro 2025, 16:00
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Tiago José Ferreira Lapa da Silva
How scientific knowledge depends fundamentally on practices of trust, witnessing, and quality assurance.
Observation is never self-evident and credibility is historically relied on “virtual witnessing,” replication, and the socio-cultural settings of experimentation, from the gentlemanly conventions of the Royal Society to the place-cultures of modern labs such as SLAC, where trust is built through shared norms, spaces and hierarchies.
Contemporary mechanisms that sustain or threaten trust in science, examining peer review, tacit knowledge, citation metrics, the replication crisis, predatory publishing, and Bohannon’s sting operation revealing widespread failures in journal refereeing, while also discussing attempts to regulate digital image manipulation and uphold standards of integrity.
2 Dezembro 2025, 16:00
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Tiago José Ferreira Lapa da Silva
How epistemology and the philosophy of science shape the standing of the social sciences, beginning with debates around scientific realism, Popper’s falsificationism, Lakatos’s research programmes and Kuhn’s cognitive values, while emphasising that scientific knowledge and expertise must also be understood sociologically.
Analysis of the legal arena, showing how courts attempt to regulate scientific authority through rules such as the Frye standard and later the Daubert decision, which introduced criteria like testability, peer review, error rates and community acceptance to judge expert testimony.
Daubert case and its aftermath: those criteria do not simply describe science but actively construct and police its boundaries, revealing that the authority of science, whether in academia or the courtroom, is produced through social, institutional and methodological practices rather than any single universal method.
