Citizen Science: which kind of public participation is epistemologically feasible?

Projects concerning the participation of citizens to the scientific research have become very popular in recent years. However, the literature seems not offer much foundational investigations into the epistemological conditions that make citizens’ contribution to science a fruitful and rigorous activity. Research institutions and citizens, understood as entities bearing generally distinct requests, practices and goals, knowledge and skills, are totally misaligned. In order to participate to collaborative research, citizens need an epistemic and methodological literacy to overcome common sense ideas, towards an ever adequate vision of phenomena under investigation. Besides understanding the social advantages introduced by the participatory dimension, it is therefore necessary to analyze the related epistemological problems, to understand to what extent and in what respect to the participation of citizens to research processes might be regarded as truly advantageous from an epistemological perspective.