Technological developments enable science to gather or produce massively complex data sets which cannot be analyzed or understood via traditional methods. Instead, new computationally intensive methods of visualization and simulation have been developed for the analysis of data and the testing of models and theories. These developments call into question traditional concepts and dichotomies used by those researchers, including philosophers of science, to analyze science. They also call into question standard accounts of testing and confirmation. Under this professional development fellowship, Dr. Frederick Suppe is focusing on analyzing the sorts of interpretive arguments that lie at the heart of manipulating and using scientific data via these new methods. He is studying these methods as a participant- observer on a research team in structural geology. Scientists are taught to do empirical research largely through apprenticeship as graduate students. In the training component of this fellowship, Dr. Suppe is spending a year in an Earth and planetary structural lab undergoing such an apprenticeship as a participant-observer mentored by one of the world's leading structural geologists. His lab uses the new computer data methods as it regularly produces major developments in Earth and planetary structural geology such as discovering the tectonic structure of Venus.
