Javier Anta: Intellectually inflationary science as a form of Lakatosian degeneration

Tuesday April 1 2025 @11:30 (CET)
Sala B, Edificio de Humanidades, UNED & online

Abstract
In this talk, I aim to conceptual engineer a particular sense of the Lakatosian notion of degenerative development, namely, the one encoded in the technical concept of intellectual inflation. Following a pluralist view on scientific progress, I argue that the diachronic development of a scientific research area can be analyzed as being intellectually inflationary in a limited period if it has considerably increased its productive output (thus displaying productive progress) while the overall semantic or epistemic value of those products has not improved in a significant fashion (hence lacking progress in a semantic or epistemic sense). Then, I apply this concept to assess whether there are some intellectually inflationary patterns in the development of two areas of research: (i) information-theoretical evolutionary biology in 1961-2023, and (ii) ensemblist non-equilibrium statistical mechanics in 1938-2023. Finally, I argue that tracking and analyzing intellectually inflationary patterns in the history of sciences might contribute to vindicating a non-productivist picture of current scientific research.

Bio
Javier Anta is currently a Humboldt Fellow at the MCMP (LMU) and profesor sustituto at UNED. Previously, he has held positions as Juan de la Cierva Fellow at the University of Seville and as FPU student in LOGOS and BIAP at the University of Barcelona, wherein he obtained a PhD in 2021 with a thesis entitled ‘Conceptual and historical foundations of informational physics’ under the supervision of Carl Hoefer. In the past years, he has visited institutions such as the CPNSS in the London School of Economics; the University of Pittsburgh and the CFCUL in Lisbon, and his research has been published in journals such as Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, Erkenntnis, Synthese, Hopos, Perspectives on Science, and so on. His research is currently focused on developing and assessing conceptual engineering methodologies in the philosophy of physics and biology.