What is the environment, and in particular the environment that can have an impact on our health? What is its nature? How do we conceptualise it? The environment, in the broadest sense of the term, is at the heart of some of society's most pressing challenges. It raises issues that can only be tackled by combining scientific research with the views of the general public. There is a growing awareness among the latter, not only of the impact that the environment, as we have transformed it, can have on our health, but also of the way in which our habits and experiences throughout our lives are changing us and may contribute to the development of certain diseases. The EnviroParCiPhil project raises the question of participatory research methodologies that could be used on a large scale to change the definition of the (spatio-temporal) boundaries of the environment as a determinant of our states of health and disease. The aim is to establish collaboration between scientists and citizens in order to co-develop a methodology that can be replicated on a large scale to gain a better understanding of 'health-environment' issues. The aim is to listen to the views and questions of members of civil society in order to broaden the scope of research in the biomedical sciences and the humanities and social sciences into the environmental determinants of disease, and thus to strengthen the relevance of this research from a purely epistemic point of view but also at the service of citizens directly concerned by "exposures" and the public health policies that can protect them from these exposures. The object of the co-construction is therefore to co-develop a method for amending the concept of environment in health within the framework of cohorts, and to enable cohort members to become more involved in developing future research questions and analysis methodologies that will concern other epidemiology projects. This methodology therefore has an iterative dimension, with the concepts of environments expressed also being studied in philosophy of science on subsequent cohorts. The aim of this pilot project is to set a precedent and encourage researchers to use, in health-environment studies, research methodologies that mobilise participation as a conceptually and pragmatically enriching tool in interdisciplinary research, for example with the co-design of intervention studies. At the end of the project, a colloquium will bring together researchers from the fields concerned to assess the results of the project and to study the feasibility of using the methodologies generated in future research.

The evolution of scientific knowledge is directly related to the history of humanity. Document archives and bibliographic sources like the “Web Of Science” or PubMed contain a valuable source for the analysis and reconstruction of this evolution. The proposed project takes as starting point the contributions of D. Chavalarias and J.P. Cointet about the analysis of the dynamicity of evolutive corpora and the automatic construction of “phylomemetic” topic lattices (as an analogy with genealogic trees of natural species). Currently existing tools are limited to the processing of medium sized collections and a non interactive usage. The expected project outcome is situated at the crossroad between Computer science and Social sciences. Our goal is to develop new highly performant tools for building phylomemetic maps of science by exploiting recent technologies for parallelizing tasks and algorithms on complex and voluminous data. These tools are conceived and validated in collaboration with experts in philosophy and history of science over large scientific archives.

LongCov will study the emergence and recognition of a new disease entity, long covid, under direct pressure of patients and with their active participation. While long covid is widely recognized as a major public health problem, the precise boundaries of this condition are difficult to stabilize, as are issues such as patients’ right to specialized treatments, remunerated leave of absence, or the recognition of long covid as a professional disease. Our study, which includes patients as co-researchers, will follow in real-time potential obstacles to the stabilization of this new nosological entity, in a context of uncertainty. Our hypothesis is that obstacles to the full recognition of long covid by clinicians and public health authorities reflect a difficulty in contemporary medicine to identify "functional diseases", based essentially on symptoms and therefore, above all, on patients’ discourse. Such conditions, more frequent in women are perceived by some physicians as mainly "psychosomatic" and therefore tend to be minimized. Our research will contribute to a better understanding of the ways medicine and society deal with these complex pathologies that are source of major suffering for many people. The LongCov team will combine sociological, historical, epistemological, sociological, legal and ethical approaches to examine the status and evolution of this nosological entity and the conflicts that its recognition may generate between stakeholders. The question of the stabilization of the Covid long entity is at the same time practical and ethical, since the material organization of care becomes much more complicated when a given pathological condition has no well-defined symptomatic basis, is not based on reliable diagnostic tests, and when care meets resistance and skepticism. A study of the stabilization – or not – of "long Covid," conducted by a multidisciplinary team asks, besides its obvious intrinsic interest, fundamental epistemological questions about the evolution of contemporary medicine.

This project investigates the interplay between informal mathematical theories and their formalization, and argues that this dynamism generates three different forms of understanding: 1. Different kinds of formalizations fix the boundaries and conceptual dependences between concepts in different ways, thus contributing to our understanding of the content of an informal mathematical theory. We argue that this form of understanding of an informal theory is achieved by recasting it as a formal theory, i.e. by transforming its expressive means. 2. Once a formal theory is available, it becomes an object of understanding. An essential contribution to this understanding is made by our recognition of the theory in question as a formalization of a particular corpus of informal mathematics. This form of understanding will be clarified by studying both singular intended models, and classes of models that reveal the underlying conceptual commonalities between objects in different areas of mathematics. 3. The third level concerns how the study of different formalizations of the same area of mathematics can lead to a transformation of the content of those areas, and a change in the geography of informal mathematics itself. In investigating these forms of mathematical understanding, the project will draw on philosophical and logical analyses of case studies from the history of mathematical practice, in order to construct a compelling new picture of the relationship of formalization to informal mathematical practice. One of the main consequences of this investigation will be to show that the process of acquiring mathematical understanding is far more complex than current philosophical views allow us to account for. While formalization is often thought to be negligible in terms of its impact on mathematical practice, we will defend the view that formalization is an epistemic tool, which not only enforces limits on the problems studied in the practice, but also produces new modes of reasoning that can augment the standard methods of proof in different areas of mathematics. Reflecting on the interplay between informal mathematical theories and their formalization means reflecting on mathematical practice and on what makes it rigorous, and how this dynamism generates different forms of understanding. We therefore also aim to investigate the connection between the three levels of understanding described above, and the notion of rigor in mathematics. The notion of formal rigor (in the proof theoretic sense) has been extensively investigated in philosophy and logic, though an account of the epistemic role of the process of formalization is currently missing. We argue that formal rigor is best understood as a dynamic abstraction from informally rigorous mathematical arguments. Such informally rigorous arguments will be studied by critically analyzing case studies from different subfields of mathematics, in order to identify patterns of rigorous reasoning.

Algorithms take nowadays a central place in the public debate: they structure our social interactions, they modify our work, our means of transport, and also our scientific and medical instruments. But who can say what exactly an algorithm is? Since there is no real consensus among the experts, it is important to give an epistemological foundation to this debate. By giving a precise mathematical representation to the algorithms, it becomes possible to assign them a genuine scientific status. In particular, the use of geometric tools will allow us to distinguish the notion of algorithm from other related and yet different ones, like that of computation or that of program. This analysis will thus open the way to develop an ontology proper to computer science, and to look at the latter as a mathematized theory, in the same way as physics.