The dematerialisation of science

Objective

Across the world, museums are ‘digitising’ their collections. Geologists and archaeologists increasingly rely on remote sensing techniques to study sites and create ‘digital twins’ for further study. Computer simulations play a key role in research from climate modelling to synthetic chemistry, preceding and sometimes replacing experiments. On the face of it, these research practices have little in common. Taken together, however, they represent a potentially alarming trend: science is becoming less and less material. In DeMatS, I take these individual cases of ‘digitising’, ‘remote sensing’, and ‘simulating’ as a starting point to scrutinise the wider transformation of science underway as different aspects of science are increasingly being dematerialised. The aim of DeMatS is to understand the significance of this trend to dematerialise science by providing a comprehensive philosophical framework for dematerialised science. Philosophical study of this phenomenon is in its infancy and has so far focused mainly on the case of computer simulations, while downplaying the more fundamental question of materiality. By contrast, DeMatS is wider in scope, by developing two new case studies covering research collections and fieldwork respectively, which will not only add new perspectives to the literature, but also show the breadth of the trend to dematerialise. Methodologically DeMatS combines metaphysics of science with philosophy of science in practice to set a new standard for general philosophy of science. By characterising the scientific developments as dematerialising, DeMatS uniquely focuses on what is left behind in dematerialising science. Centring matter enables me to show that dematerialised science presents novel and hitherto largely unrecognised epistemic and ontological challenges, which cannot be addressed without a unified philosophical framework. DeMatS will result in a new interdisciplinary subfield, the study of dematerialised science.