Cercetarea dirijată de date şi revigorarea științei baconiene în „Era petabyților”
The Data-driven Research and the Revival of Baconian Science in the „Petabytes Age”

Summary/Abstract: Is the „end of theory” really in our sight? Was scientific understanding overrated? Is the Big Data revolution revealing some unnoticed limitations of our old conception of knowledge and scientific inquiry? Are we witnessing the final days of our concept of scientific method and the arising of a „fourth paradigm” in science? These are some of the main questions that confront the philosophers of science, when faced with the Data Deluge of our days. In this article, I try to examine if, and how far, the Big Data analysis challenges our current understanding of science, by calling into question the received view of „the scientific” (i.e., hypothetico-deductive) method, but also the meaning or utility of some central epistemological concepts: context of discovery – context of justification, correlation – causation, explanation, (dis)unity of science etc. I think that, at the end of the day, the discussions about how to scientifically use the huge datasets could be seen as manifestations of a pluralistic idea of science (and a pluralistic vision in the contemporary philosophy of science), where „pluralism” should be interpreted as a sort of virtuous relativism, cautiously separated from the supposed vicious relativism of the 1970s.

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