Purdue Philosophy Professor Awarded Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant to Examine How AI is Reshaping Scientific Inquiry

As artificial intelligence accelerates discovery across the sciences, one Purdue researcher will lead a new effort to understand how these tools are transforming the norms and methods that guide scholarly inquiry.

Eamon Duede, assistant professor of philosophy and a joint appointee at the Argonne National Laboratory’s Data Science and Learning Division, has received a $250,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support his project, AI & Evolving Disciplinary Norms of Inquiry (award number G-2025-79234).

The project will investigate how AI systems are reshaping the norms that guide how scientific and scholarly disciplines produce, justify, and communicate knowledge. His research will investigate whether AI enhances the specialized approach for each field of study or risks reshaping them into a single, uniform way of doing research.

“AI systems are now participating in nearly every stage of inquiry, and that means they’re beginning to press directly on the epistemic and normative commitments that make each discipline what it is. This project is about taking that seriously,” Duede said. “We’re documenting, in real time, how fields negotiate these pressures, how their standards of justification and problem-choice adapt or resist, and how we might guide AI’s integration so that it deepens rather than flattens the intrinsic heterogeneity of scientific practice. Ultimately, the aim is not just to understand how AI is changing science, but to use those insights to help disciplines shape the trajectory of AI itself.”

The award comes at a time when debates about AI and scientific credibility are intensifying. Duede’s project seeks to provide scholars, institutions, and policymakers with a deeper and clearer understanding of how disciplinary norms evolve in response to new computational capabilities.