My training is in philosophy of science and decision theory. Most of my research sits at the intersection of philosophy of science, metascience, social epistemology, and formal epistemology. My recent and upcoming research is focused around three projects, briefly described below.

First, the credit economy, i.e., the reward system of academia. The primary reward for good scientific work takes the form of recognition or prestige, often referred to as credit. Credit is crucial to having a successful career as an academic. I investigate how a concern for credit affects academics’ decision-making regarding such questions as: what to study, how to study it, how long to study it, and what to share from their findings. I find a mixed bag of positive and negative epistemic consequences: there is a strong incentive to share for credit-maximisers which is efficient from a social perspective in the sense of minimising redundant effort (Heesen 2017), but there is also a credit incentive to rush new ideas into print prematurely which is socially inefficient as it increases the need for error correction (Heesen 2018b). Future work will explore some of the complicated resulting trade-offs in more detail.

Second, academic peer review. I have studied biases in peer review (Heesen 2018a) and argued that these are to some extent unavoidable (Heesen 2022). In light of some of the problems of journal peer review as currently practiced, I have argued that we should abolish prepublication peer review in favour of a more open, crowd-sourced approach to peer review that takes place postpublication (Heesen and Bright 2021, Arvan et al. forthcoming).

Third, the epistemology of evidence-based policy. The concept of evidence-based policy raises many interesting questions. As many commentators have pointed out, evidence does not speak for itself. So, while evidence-based policy evidently aims to give an important role to evidence in policy-making, we can ask: what counts as evidence for policy and who gets to decide this? How, if at all, does evidence play a role in determining which problems and which solutions are considered in policy-making? How should different kinds of evidence be weighted? How can we evaluate policy-making especially in the face of disagreement? A recent paper (Heesen et al. 2024) addresses this latter question. Future work will look at some of the other questions and especially how the perspective of (formal) epistemology may shed new light on them.

For a full overview of my published research please refer to my publications page.

References

• Marcus Arvan, Liam Kofi Bright, and Remco Heesen. Jury Theorems for Peer Review. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, forthcoming. URL https://doi.org/10.1086/719117.
• Remco Heesen. Communism and the Incentive to Share in Science. Philosophy of Science, 84(4):698–716, 2017. URL https://doi.org/10.1086/693875.
• Remco Heesen. When Journal Editors Play Favorites. Philosophical Studies, 175(4):831–858, 2018a. URL https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0895-4.
• Remco Heesen. Why the Reward Structure of Science Makes Reproducibility Problems Inevitable. The Journal of Philosophy, 115(12):661–674, 2018b. URL https://doi.org/10.5840/jphil20181151239.
• Remco Heesen. The Necessity of Commensuration Bias in Grant Peer Review. Ergo, 8(39):423–443, 2022. URL https://doi.org/10.3998/ergo.2240.
• Remco Heesen and Liam Kofi Bright. Is Peer Review a Good Idea? The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 72(3):635–663, 2021. URL https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axz029.
• Remco Heesen, Hannah Rubin, Mike D. Schneider, Katie Woolaston, et al. A Model of Faulty and Faultless Disagreement for Post-Hoc Assessments of Knowledge Utilization in Evidence-Based Policymaking. Scientific Reports, 14:18495, 2024. URL https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-69012-3.