Research in the Context of Practice: Strategies for Making Application-Oriented Science Epistemically Sound and Practically Beneficial
Final Report Abstract
Many parts of society and science-funding organizations expect science to be practically useful and to serve societal goals. However, it is not so clear how research should be organized in order to promote such goals best. The two ends of the relevant spectrum constitute knowledge-driven and the demand-driven research heuristics. The knowledge-driven research heuristic focuses on epistemic research and seeks useful applications on the basis of the knowledge thus gained. Accordingly, the practical results sought do not appear in the research at all; they only appear when the results are supposed to be implemented in concrete procedures. By contrast, the demand-driven research heuristic is targeted specifically at the practical questions that are of primary interest. The objection to the knowledge-driven heuristic is that the practical research yield remains comparatively low; the objection to the demand-driven heuristic is that tailored research on concrete practical questions neglects the broader context of the corresponding phenomena, thus becoming superficial and unreliable, and ultimately also missing the practical benefit. The project focused on a number of research endeavors that had set themselves simultaneously epistemic and practical goals. The object of the investigation was to find out what relationships existed between these two types of goals. One of the results was that knowledge-driven research or research aimed at understanding nature was not a prerequisite for practical success. Trial and error approaches were promising once a general theoretical framework was available that identified important variables and relevant parameters. Theoretical understanding is sufficiently developed when it is able to provide a framework for screening and experimental exploration. Practically useful results can be obtained without theoretical understanding. Instead, knowledge-driven research plays an essential role in a completely different respect, namely in securing validity. If the reliability of functioning is to be ascertained under practical conditions, then it is necessary to track the influence of possible distorting factors. Their diversity and interactions make an exclusively empirical approach cumbersome and expensive. Accordingly, theoretical understanding moves into a central position here. The same applies to the optimization of processes and their scaling up from laboratory dimensions to prototypes. Thus, the project has developed a novel understanding of the nature of a research heuristic that determines the practical usefulness of research results.
