Presentation

Simulation is a creative and epistemologically-delicate process that has attracted growing attention since the 1990s, both in the natural and the social sciences. The crucial role of simulation in theorizing, modelling, and understanding complex systems, and its increasing use for decision-making in concrete problems and/or public policy, has led philosophy of simulation to an entirely new level of attention. At the same time, a huge community of researchers are utilizing simulation with a set of tools, methods, and concepts, in an intense cross-disciplinary atmosphere, with obvious interest in investigating the conditions for the successful use of simulation. The recognition that progress in the science of simulation must go hand in hand with the analysis of its epistemological status has been an important motive for the EPOS workshops since 2004.

The first EPOS workshop, organized by Ulrich Frank and Klaus Troitzsch in 2004 at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany, was successful in bringing together researchers from the social, natural and computational sciences, as well as philosophers of science, to debate and elaborate on epistemological perspectives of simulation. The results of the meeting were published, after a further reviewing process, in a special issue of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (volume 8(4), 2005).

The second EPOS workshop, organized by Flaminio Squazzoni in 2006 at the University of Brescia, Italy, amplified this constructive atmosphere. Once more the positive and constructive outcome that the encounter of researchers and philosophers of science produces became clear. The articles were collected by Squazzoni, Troitzsch, and Frank after a further reviewing process, and have been published in Flaminio Squazzoni, Epistemological Aspects of Computer Simulation in the Social Sciences: Second International Workshop, EPOS 2006, Brescia, Italy, October 5-6, 2006 (Springer, Berlin, 2009).

The third EPOS workshop was organized by Nuno David, José Castro Caldas and Helder Coelho, Portugal, and took place in Lisbon October 2-3, 2008. Again the workshop provided an excellent multidisciplinary forum for researchers from various disciplines, such as the social sciences, economics, computer science, engineering, natural sciences or philosophy to discuss epistemological aspects of simulation. Moreover, the workshop attracted a considerable number of researchers from overseas. The papers presented there are currently under a second review for publication.

The fourth EPOS workshop, organized by Matthias Meyer and Klaus G. Troitzsch, on June 23-25, 2010, aims to continue the young tradition of these workshops and their lively atmosphere. Moreover, it could benefit from the evident growth of contributions in the literature on the methodology and epistemology of simulation since the first meeting in 2004. A selection of papers will be published in a special issue of Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory afterwards.