Modern scientific knowledge is increasingly collaborative. Much analysis in social epistemology models scientists as self-interested agents motivated by external inducements and sanctions. However, less research exists on the epistemic import of scientists’ moral concern for their colleagues. I argue that scientists’ trust in their colleagues’ moral motivations is a key component of the rationality of collaboration. On the prevailing account, trust is a matter of mere reliance on the self-interest of one’s colleagues. That is, scientists merely rely on external compulsion (...) to motivate self-interested colleagues to be trustworthy collaborators. I show that this self-interest account has significant limitations. First, it cannot fully account for trust by relatively powerless scientists. Second, reliance on self-interest can be self-defeating. For each limitation, I show that moral trust can bridge the gap—when members of the scientific community cannot rely on the self-interest of their colleagues, they rationally place trust in the moral motivations of their colleagues. Case studies of mid-twentieth-century industrial laboratories and exploitation of junior scientists show that such moral trust justifies collaboration when mere reliance on the self-interest of colleagues would be irrational. Thus, this paper provides a more complete and realistic account of the rationality of scientific collaboration. (shrink)

Discussions about the appropriate way of assessing and managing new or emerging technologies—like nanomaterials—expose the problematic relationship between scientific knowledge production and regulatory decision-making. On one hand, there is a strong demand for scientific expertise to support decisions, especially by analyzing risks and hazards when uncertainties are prevalent and society’s stakes are high. On the other hand, science is criticized for its authoritative claim to objectivity and for keeping the inherent uncertainty, ambiguity, and selectivity of scientific observation latent. Requests for (...) more transparency in science can lead to revealing, to risk managers and the public, the indeterminacy in knowledge production processes. This has consequences for the prevalence of scientific knowledge in decision-making, because it increases uncertainty on both sides of the breach between science and decisions: scientists lose confidence regarding the scientifically tested knowledge which they pass on, and risk managers lose confidence regarding their decisions based on this knowledge. Nonetheless, the concept of “probabilistic risk assessment” remains an important heuristic for dealing with potential future events. This paper addresses questions of the function of scientific risk assessment in organized risk management. The main argument in this paper is that knowledge alone no longer functions as a mechanism for absorbing uncertainty. Accordingly, the interaction between science and decisions must enable a temporarily stable commitment to manage new threats like products and applications coming from the field of nanoscience and nanomaterials. (shrink)