Samantha M. Copeland

That there is a “crisis of peer review” at the moment is not in dispute, but sufficient attention has not yet been paid to the normative potential that lies in current calls for reform. In contrast to approaches to “fixing” the problems in peer review, which tend to maintain the status quo in terms of professionalising opportunities, this paper addresses the needs of philosophers and how peer‐review reform can be an opportunity to improve the academic discipline of philosophy, whereby progress is understood as making the discipline more fair to the global academic community and more conducive to the flourishing of academic philosophers. The paper evaluates recent categories of relevant norms and correlating reforms. In conclusion, it recommends that philosophy pursue the norms of transparency and democracy explicitly when proposing peer‐review reform and suggest that proposals for forum‐based models of peer review are most likely to support those norms.

Serendipity is fundamental to science. This quirky and intriguing phenomenon permeates across scientific disciplines, including the medical sciences, psychological sciences, management and organizational sciences, innovation science, philosophy and library and information sciences. Why is it so ubiquitous? Because of what it facilitates and catalyzes: scientific discoveries from velcro to Viagra, innovation of all forms, unexpected encounters of useful information, novel and important ideas, and deep reflection on how we, as individuals, organizations, communities and societies can take leaps forwards by seizing unexpected opportunities and ‘making our own luck.’

In this volume, we bring together for the first time the diverse threads within the field of serendipity research, to reflect both the origins of this emerging field within different disciplines as well as its growing influence as its own field with foundational texts and emerging practices. Many have been drawn to the mystery of serendipity, the wonder of the ‘aha’ moments humans experience when they encounter it. In the present volume we present, in contrast to the storytelling approach that drives common fascination with serendipity’s impact on our lives, chapters by experts who have addressed questions about serendipity from a more scientific approach. They ask difficult questions in the following chapters, such as: what is serendipity, exactly?, what role does it actually play in discovery and how does it influence our methods?, how can we study and measure it?, are its results always or necessarily positive?, and how can we potentially influence it?, each with the intent of scientific rigour in their investigations. This introductory review highlights the impact that the phenomenon of serendipity has on human lives, and thereby its worth as an object of serious study.

Samantha Copeland takes this chapter to delve into the history of philosophy of science, paying particular attention to the discussions around scientific discoveryDiscovery (also, Scientific Discovery) and the assumptions made by philosophers along the way about what parts of the discovery processProcess can and cannot be studied. Copeland suggests that serendipity research might shed light on what has been left outside of philosophical investigation. She focusses in particular on the seeming ‘leap’ that scientists must take when discoveries happen, between a state of not-knowing to a state of recognizing the scientific valueValue of an observation or event. Most philosophical accounts tend towards internalism (that is, assuming the important steps in discoveryDiscovery (also, Scientific Discovery) occur only in the mind), or the focus remains on what happens afteran accidentAccident(al) or chanceChance encounter rather than on the encounter itself. Copeland offers an alternative interpretation from the perspective of her serendipity research, on what the interactionInteraction, Interactive between chanceChance and reason can tell us about scientific discovery more generally. That is, she argues, the intersection of chanceChance and wisdomWisdom provides philosophy with the opportunity to better understand how our minds interact with the world to produce knowledgeKnowledge.

This volume brings together for the first time the diverse threads within the growing field of serendipity research, to reflect both on the origins of this emerging field within different disciplines as well as its increasing influence as its own field with foundational texts and emerging practices. The phenomenon of serendipity has been described in many ways since Horace Walpole initially coined the term in 1754 to categorize those discoveries that happen by “both accidents and sagacity”. This book offers a sampling of perspectives from experts in serendipity research from organizational studies, management theory, information science and library studies, psychology, literature, computer science, social science, ethics, and the history and philosophy of science. Considerations about the importance and role of serendipity are being raised now across science (both empirical and theoretical) as well as practice (from art and innovation to leadership and governance), with ever more eyes looking closer at its significance in human history and the likelihood it will play a key, while unpredictable, role in forming our future. Serendipity Science represents an emerging, and also important and potentially necessary field of study, if we are to deal well as a society with our complex times and uncertain future.

This article contributes to recent work on justice in resilience-based projects for climate adaptation. At present, the model commonly used for guiding normative reflection in this domain is the tripartite model of justice, whereby justice is seen as comprising distributive, procedural and recognitional aspects. After discussing some conceptual problems and practical shortcomings of this model, we propose an alternative model with six forms of justice or kinds of justice demands: distributive, procedural, intergenerational, restorative and retributive justice, and justice in system outcomes. We also illustrate some advantages of this model with respect to representative accounts of the tripartite model.

This chapter looks closely at the use of resilience as a value in pandemic discourses, and particularly at how it reflects the moral complexity of the situation the pandemic presents: an extended crisis where shocks and stressors interact and have an uncertain end. We review key aspects of how resilience has been conceptualised, generally speaking, focusing on its normative implications. Insofar as resilience is suggested as a goal, or used to evaluate individuals, groups and systems, the rhetorical use of resilience in the pandemic has moral implications that we unpack. Asking questions such as resilience to what, of what, and for whom, drives our analysis of the multiple scales at which morally relevant factors must be considered, in terms of distance and certainty, and across space and over time. Further, we highlight the importance of particularly challenging, intersecting scales both within and beyond the pandemic, such as the interaction between other- and self-regarding concerns and the tension between transformation and conservation, as we consider when to take up opportunities for improving ourselves, our society and our systems, in times of extended crises and radical change. Given that a ‘return to normal’ is neither universally desirable nor likely, we recommend in this chapter ways to address resilience as a value that can shape approaches to policy and behaviour while also being explicit about the normative—evaluative and also prescriptive—implications of its use.

While resilience is a major concept in development, climate adaptation, and related domains, many doubts remain about how to interpret this term, its relationship with closely overlapping terms, or its normativity. One major view is that, while resilience originally was a descriptive concept denoting some adaptive property of ecosystems, subsequent applications to social contexts distorted its meaning and purpose by framing it as a transformative and normative quality. This article advances an alternative philosophical account based on the scrutiny of C.S. Holling’s original work on resilience. We show that resilience had a central role among Holling’s proposals for reforming environmental science and management, and that Holling framed resilience as an ecosystem’s capacity of absorbing change and exploiting it for adapting or evolving, but also as the social ability of maintaining and opportunistically exploiting that natural capacity. Resilience therefore appears as a transformative social-ecological property that is normative in three ways: as an intrinsic ecological value, as a virtue of organizations or management styles, and as a virtuous understanding of human–nature relations. This interpretation accounts for the practical relevance of resilience, clarifies the relations between resilience and related terms, and is a firm ground for further normative work on resilience.

An increasingly popular solution to the anti-scientific climate rising on social media platforms has been the appeal to more critical thinking from the user's side. In this paper, we zoom in on the ideal of critical thinking and unpack it in order to see, specifically, whether it can provide enough epistemic agency so that users endowed with it can break free from enclosed communities on social media (so called epistemic bubbles). We criticise some assumptions embedded in the ideal of critical thinking online and, instead, we propose that a better way to understand the virtuous behaviour at hand is as critical engagement, namely a mutual cultivation of critical skills among the members of an epistemic bubble. This mutual cultivation allows members within an epistemic bubble (in contrast, as we will show, with the authority-based models of epistemic echo chambers) to become more autonomous critical thinkers by cultivating self-trust. We use the model of relational autonomy as well as resources from work on epistemic self-trust and epistemic interdependence to develop an explanatory framework, which in turn may ground rules for identifying and creating virtuous epistemic bubbles within the environments of social media platforms.

Abstract‘Serendipity’ is a category used to describe discoveries in science that occur at the intersection of chance and wisdom. In this paper, I argue for understanding serendipity in science as an emergent property of scientific discovery, describing an oblique relationship between the outcome of a discovery process and the intentions that drove it forward. The recognition of serendipity is correlated with an acknowledgment of the limits of expectations about potential sources of knowledge. I provide an analysis of serendipity in science as a defense of this definition and its implications, drawing from theoretical and empirical research on experiences of serendipity as they occur in science and elsewhere. I focus on three interrelated features of serendipity in science. First, there are variations of serendipity. The process of serendipitous discovery can be complex. Second, a valuable outcome must be obtained before reflection upon the significance of the unexpected observation or event in respect to that outcome can take place. Therefore, serendipity is retrospectively categorized. Third, the primacy of epistemic expectations is elucidated. Finally, I place this analysis within discussions in philosophy of science regarding the impact of interpersonal competition upon the number and significance of scientific discoveries. Thus, the analysis of serendipity offered in this paper contributes to discussions about the social-epistemological aspects of scientific discovery and has normative implications for the structure of epistemically effective scientific communities.

What is the role of chance in scientific discovery? And, more to the point, if chance plays a key role in scientific discovery, what room is left for reason? These are grounding questions in the debates, for instance, over whether there is a distinction to be made between discovery and justification in science, and whether innate genius must play a role in discovery or if there exists some method that can be taught to anyone. While the role of chance has been discussed throughout the history of science, it has resurfaced in recent debates over how science should be funded, and particularly in the field of biomedical research. The word serendipity, for example, has become increasingly...

‘Serendipity’ is a category used to describe discoveries in science that occur at the intersection of chance and wisdom. In this paper, I argue for understanding serendipity in science as an emergent property of scientific discovery, describing an oblique relationship between the outcome of a discovery process and the intentions that drove it forward. The recognition of serendipity is correlated with an acknowledgment of the limits of expectations about potential sources of knowledge. I provide an analysis of serendipity in science as a defense of this definition and its implications, drawing from theoretical and empirical research on experiences of serendipity as they occur in science and elsewhere. I focus on three interrelated features of serendipity in science. First, there are variations of serendipity. The process of serendipitous discovery can be complex. Second, a valuable outcome must be obtained before reflection upon the significance of the unexpected observation or event in respect to that outcome can take place. Therefore, serendipity is retrospectively categorized. Third, the primacy of epistemic expectations is elucidated. Finally, I place this analysis within discussions in philosophy of science regarding the impact of interpersonal competition upon the number and significance of scientific discoveries. Thus, the analysis of serendipity offered in this paper contributes to discussions about the social-epistemological aspects of scientific discovery and has normative implications for the structure of epistemically effective scientific communities.