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  1. Evolution of the Ethos of Science: From the Representationalist to the Interventionist Approach to Science.Marek Sikora - forthcoming - Foundations of Science:1-17.
    The article is an exploration into the problem of the ethos of modern science viewed from the representationalist and interventionist perspectives. The representationalist account of science is associated with the position of theoreticism, while the interventionist account pertains to the concept of new experimentalism. The former of these approaches is dominated by the ethos of science which Robert K. Merton defined as comprising four sets of institutional imperatives referred to as ‘Mertonian norms’: universalism, communitarism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism. In the (...)
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  • Science as public service.Hannah Hilligardt - 2024 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 14 (3):1-25.
    The problem this paper addresses is that scientists have to take normatively charged decisions which can have a significant impact on individual members of the public or the public as a whole. And yet mechanisms to exercise democratic control over them are often absent. Given the normative nature of these choices, this is often perceived to be at odds with basic democratic principles. I show that this problem applies in similar ways to civil service institutions and draw on political philosophy (...)
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  • Sins and Risks in Underreporting Suspected Adverse Drug Reactions.Austin Due - 2024 - Philosophy of Medicine 5 (1).
    The underreporting of suspected adverse drug reactions remains a primary issue for contemporary post-market drug surveillance or ‘pharmacovigilance.’ Pharmacovigilance pioneer W.H.W. Inman argued that ‘deadly sins’ committed by clinicians are to blame for underreporting. Of these ‘sins,’ ignorance and lethargy are the most obvious and impactful in causing underreporting. However, recent analyses show that diffidence, insecurity, and indifference additionally play a major role. I aim to augment our understanding of diffidence, insecurity, and indifference by arguing these sins are underwritten by (...)
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  • Bridgman and the Normative Independence of Science: An Individual Physicist in the Shadow of the Bomb.Mahmoud Jalloh - 2024 - Synthese 203 (141):1-24.
    Physicist Percy Bridgman has been taken by Heather Douglas to be an exemplar defender of an untenable value-free ideal for science. This picture is complicated by a detailed study of Bridgman's philosophical views of the relation between science and society. The normative autonomy of science, a version of the value-free ideal, is defended. This restriction on the provenance of permissible values in science is given a basis in Bridgman's broader philosophical commitments, most importantly, his view that science is primarily an (...)
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  • Science and values: a two-way direction.Emanuele Ratti & Federica Russo - 2024 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 14 (1):1-23.
    In the science and values literature, scholars have shown how science is influenced and shaped by values, often in opposition to the ‘value free’ ideal of science. In this paper, we aim to contribute to the science and values literature by showing that the relation between science and values flows not only from values into scientific practice, but also from (allegedly neutral) science to values themselves. The extant literature in the ‘science and values’ field focuses by and large on reconstructing, (...)
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  • The Influence of Values on Medical Research.S. Andrew Schroeder - forthcoming - In Alex Broadbent (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Medicine. Oxford University Press.
    Mainstream views of medical research tell us it should be a fact-based, value-free endeavor: what a scientist (or her funding source) wants or cares about should not influence her findings. At the same time, we also sometimes criticize medical research for failing to embody certain values, e.g. when we criticize pharmaceutical companies for largely ignoring the diseases that affect the global poor. This chapter seeks to reconcile these perspectives by distinguishing appropriate from inappropriate influences of values on medical research. It (...)
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  • Straightening the ‘value-laden turn’: minimising the influence of extra-scientific values in science.Philippe Stamenkovic - 2024 - Synthese 203 (20):1-38.
    Straightening the current ‘value-laden turn’ (VLT) in the philosophical literature on values in science, and reviving the legacy of the value-free ideal of science (VFI), this paper argues that the influence of extra-scientific values should be minimised—not excluded—in the core phase of scientific inquiry where claims are accepted or rejected. Noting that the original arguments for the VFI (ensuring the truth of scientific knowledge, respecting the autonomy of science results users, preserving public trust in science) have not been satisfactorily addressed (...)
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  • The value-free ideal in codes of conduct for research integrity.Jacopo Ambrosj, Hugh Desmond & Kris Dierickx - 2023 - Synthese 202 (5):1-23.
    While the debate on values in science focuses on normative questions on the level of the individual (e.g. should researchers try to make their work as value free as possible?), comparatively little attention has been paid to the institutional and professional norms that researchers are expected to follow. To address this knowledge gap, we conduct a content analysis of leading national codes of conduct for research integrity of European countries, and structure our analysis around the question: do these documents allow (...)
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  • Sisyphean Science: Why Value Freedom is Worth Pursuing.Tarun Menon & Jacob Stegenga - 2023 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 13 (48):1-24.
    The value-free ideal in science has been criticised as both unattainable and undesirable. We argue that it can be defended as a practical principle guiding scientific research even if the unattainability and undesirability of a value-free end-state are granted. If a goal is unattainable, then one can separate the desirability of accomplishing the goal from the desirability of pursuing it. We articulate a novel value-free ideal, which holds that scientists should act as if science should be value-free, and we argue (...)
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  • The Difference-to-Inference Model for Values in Science.Jacob Stegenga & Tarun Menon - 2023 - Res Philosophica 100 (4):423-447.
    The value-free ideal for science holds that values should not influence the core features of scientific reasoning. We defend the difference-to-inference model of value-permeation, which holds that value-permeation in science is problematic when values make a difference to the inferences made about a hypothesis. This view of value-permeation is superior to existing views, and it suggests a corresponding maxim—namely, that scientists should strive to eliminate differences to inference. This maxim is the basis of a novel value-free ideal for science. -/- (...)
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  • Varying Evidential Standards as a Matter of Justice.Ahmad Elabbar - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    The setting of evidential standards is a core practice of scientific assessment for policy. Persuaded by considerations of inductive risk, philosophers generally agree that the justification of evidential standards must appeal to non-epistemic values but debate whether the balance of non-epistemic reasons favours varying evidential standards versus maintaining fixed high evidential standards in assessment, as both sets of standards promote different and important political virtues of advisory institutions. In this paper, I adjudicate the evidential standards debate by developing a novel (...)
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  • A Rawlsian Solution to the New Demarcation Problem.Frank Cabrera - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (8):810-827.
    In the last two decades, a robust consensus has emerged among philosophers of science, whereby political, ethical, or social values must play some role in scientific inquiry, and that the ‘value-free ideal’ is thus a misguided conception of science. However, the question of how to distinguish, in a principled way, which values may legitimately influence science remains. This question, which has been dubbed the ‘new demarcation problem,’ has until recently received comparatively less attention from philosophers of science. In this paper, (...)
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  • Science, Values, and the New Demarcation Problem.David B. Resnik & Kevin C. Elliott - 2023 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 54 (2):259-286.
    In recent years, many philosophers of science have rejected the “value-free ideal” for science, arguing that non-epistemic values have a legitimate role to play in scientific inquiry. However, this philosophical position raises the question of how to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate influences of values in science. In this paper, we argue that those seeking to address this “new” demarcation problem can benefit by drawing lessons from the “old” demarcation problem, in which philosophers tried to find a way of distinguishing (...)
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  • Objectivity, value-free science, and inductive risk.Paul Hoyningen-Huene - 2023 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 13 (1):1-26.
    In this paper I shall defend the idea that there is an abstract and general core meaning of objectivity, and what is seen as a variety of concepts or conceptions of objectivity are in fact criteria of, or means to achieve, objectivity. I shall then discuss the ideal of value-free science and its relation to the objectivity of science; its status can be at best a criterion of, or means for, objectivity. Given this analysis, we can then turn to the (...)
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  • The Value-Free Ideal of Science: A Useful Fiction? A Review of Non-epistemic Reasons for the Research Integrity Community.Jacopo Ambrosj, Kris Dierickx & Hugh Desmond - 2023 - Science and Engineering Ethics 29 (1):1-22.
    Even if the “value-free ideal of science” (VFI) were an unattainable goal, one could ask: can it be a useful fiction, one that is beneficial for the research community and society? This question is particularly crucial for scholars and institutions concerned with research integrity (RI), as one cannot offer normative guidance to researchers without making some assumptions about what ideal scientific research looks like. Despite the insofar little interaction between scholars studying RI and those working on values in science, the (...)
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  • Beyond Value Sovereignty.Nicolas Silva - 2022 - Culturas Cientificas 3 (2):131-149.
    The following paper argues that issues in paradigmatic proposals for solving the new demarcation problem stem from absolutist assumptions about judgments of value legitimacy. Both the problem of uninformativeness (Larroulet Philippi 2020; Fernandez-Pinto 2014, 2015) and the problem of ambiguous judgments of cases (Hicks 2014; Intemann 2017) are explained by an absolutist pretension contained in one of the main aims of these proposals: providing criteria for differentiating legitimate from illegitimate uses of values, without qualification. After presenting the problems and showing (...)
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  • How Values Shape the Machine Learning Opacity Problem.Emily Sullivan - 2022 - In Insa Lawler, Kareem Khalifa & Elay Shech (eds.), Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 306-322.
    One of the main worries with machine learning model opacity is that we cannot know enough about how the model works to fully understand the decisions they make. But how much is model opacity really a problem? This chapter argues that the problem of machine learning model opacity is entangled with non-epistemic values. The chapter considers three different stages of the machine learning modeling process that corresponds to understanding phenomena: (i) model acceptance and linking the model to the phenomenon, (ii) (...)
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  • Looking beyond values: The legitimacy of social perspectives, opinions and interests in science.Hannah Hilligardt - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (4):1-20.
    This paper critically assesses the current debates in philosophy of science that focus on the concept of values. In these debates, it is often assumed that all relevant non-epistemic influences on scientific research can be described as values and, consequently, that science carries social legitimacy if the correct values play their proper role in research. I argue that values are _not_ the only relevant non-epistemic influences on research: not unless our definition of values is so broad that it becomes unmanageable. (...)
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  • (1 other version)Epistemic Priority or Aims of Research? A Critique of Lexical Priority of Truth in Regulatory Science.Joby Verghese - 2022 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 22 (64):21-37.
    A general criterion for distinguishing between epistemic and non-epistemic values is that the former promotes the attainment of truth whereas the latter does not. Daniel Steel is a proponent of this criterion, although it was initially proposed by McMullin. There are at least two consequences of this criterion; it always prioritizes epistemic values over non-epistemic values in scientific research, and it overlooks the diverse aims of science, especially the aims of regulatory or policy-oriented science. This criterion assumes the lexical priority (...)
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  • Science advice: making credences accurate.Simon Blessenohl & Deniz Sarikaya - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2).
    Policy-makers often rely on scientists to inform their decisions. When advising policy-makers, what should scientists say? One view says that scientists ought to say what they have a high credence in. Another view says that scientists ought to say what they expect to lead to good policy outcomes. We explore a third view: scientists ought to say what they expect to make the policy-makers’ credences accurate.
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  • DRUG FACTS, VALUES, AND THE MORNING-AFTER PILL.Christopher ChoGlueck - 2021 - Public Affairs Quarterly 35 (1):51-82.
    While the Value-Free Ideal of science has suffered compelling criticism, some advocates like Gregor Betz continue to argue that science policy advisors should avoid value judgments by hedging their hypotheses. This approach depends on a mistaken understanding of the relations between facts and values in regulatory science. My case study involves the morning-after pill Plan B and the “Drug Fact” that it “may” prevent implantation. I analyze the operative values, which I call zygote-centrism, responsible for this hedged drug label. Then, (...)
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  • Objectivity for the research worker.Noah van Dongen & Michał Sikorski - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (3):1-25.
    In the last decade, many problematic cases of scientific conduct have been diagnosed; some of which involve outright fraud others are more subtle. These and similar problems can be interpreted as caused by lack of scientific objectivity. The current philosophical theories of objectivity do not provide scientists with conceptualizations that can be effectively put into practice in remedying these issues. We propose a novel way of thinking about objectivity for individual scientists; a negative and dynamic approach.We provide a philosophical conceptualization (...)
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  • Value management and model pluralism in climate science.Julie Jebeile & Michel Crucifix - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 88 (August 2021):120-127.
    Non-epistemic values pervade climate modelling, as is now well documented and widely discussed in the philosophy of climate science. Recently, Parker and Winsberg have drawn attention to what can be termed “epistemic inequality”: this is the risk that climate models might more accurately represent the future climates of the geographical regions prioritised by the values of the modellers. In this paper, we promote value management as a way of overcoming epistemic inequality. We argue that value management can be seriously considered (...)
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  • What is the environment in environmental health research? Perspectives from the ethics of science.David M. Frank - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 88 (C):172-180.
    Environmental health research produces scientific knowledge about environmental hazards crucial for public health and environmental justice movements that seek to prevent or reduce exposure to these hazards. The environment in environmental health research is conceptualized as the range of possible social, biological, chemical, and/or physical hazards or risks to human health, some of which merit study due to factors such as their probability and severity, the feasibility of their remediation, and injustice in their distribution. This paper explores the ethics of (...)
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  • Gildi vísinda og gildin í vísindum - á tímum heimsfaraldurs [English title: "The Value of Science and the Values in Science - in Pandemic Times"].Finnur Dellsén - 2020 - Skírnir 194:251-273.
    English summary: This paper uses research on the COVID-19 pandemic as the backdrop for an accessible discussion of the value and status of science, and of the role of valuesin science. In particular, the paper seeks to debunk three common myths or dogmas about scientific research: (i) that there is such a thing as 'scientific proof' of a theory or hypothesis, (ii) that disagreement is necessarily unhealthy or unnatural in science, (iii) and that personal values play no role in scientific (...)
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  • Values in Psychometrics.Lisa D. Wijsen, Denny Borsboom & Anna Alexandrova - forthcoming - Perspectives on Psychological Science.
    When it originated in the late 19th century, psychometrics was a field with both a scientific and a social mission: psychometrics provided new methods for research into individual differences, and at the same time, these psychometric instruments were considered a means to create a new social order. In contrast, contemporary psychometrics - due to its highly technical nature and its limited involvement in substantive psychological research - has created the impression of being a value-free discipline. In this article, we develop (...)
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  • How to Assess the Epistemic Wrongness of Sponsorship Bias? The Case of Manufactured Certainty.Jon Leefmann - 2021 - Frontiers In 6 (Article 599909):1-13.
    Although the impact of so-called “sponsorship bias” has been the subject of increased attention in the philosophy of science, what exactly constitutes its epistemic wrongness is still debated. In this paper, I will argue that neither evidential accounts nor social–epistemological accounts can fully account for the epistemic wrongness of sponsorship bias, but there are good reasons to prefer social–epistemological to evidential accounts. I will defend this claim by examining how both accounts deal with a paradigm case from medical epistemology, recently (...)
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  • The value-ladenness of transparency in science: Lessons from Lyme disease.Kevin C. Elliott - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 88 (C):1-9.
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  • Formal models of the scientific community and the value-ladenness of science.Vincenzo Politi - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (4):1-23.
    In the past few years, social epistemologists have developed several formal models of the social organisation of science. While their robustness and representational adequacy has been analysed at length, the function of these models has begun to be discussed in more general terms only recently. In this article, I will interpret many of the current formal models of the scientific community as representing the latest development of what I will call the ‘Kuhnian project’. These models share with Kuhn a number (...)
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  • Uncertainties, Values, and Climate Targets.Mathias Frisch - 2020 - Philosophy of Science 87 (5):979-990.
    Using climate policy debates as a case study, I argue that a certain response to the argument from inductive risk, the hedging defense, runs afoul of a reasonable ethical principle: the no-passing-...
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  • Integrating Heather Douglas’ Inductive Risk Framework with an Account of Scientific Evidence: Why and How?O. Çağlar Dede - 2020 - Perspectives on Science 28 (6):737-763.
    I examine how Heather Douglas’ account of values in science applies to the assessment of actual cases of scientific practice. I focus on the case of applied toxicologists’ acceptance of molecular evidence-gathering methods and evidential sources. I demonstrate that a set of social and institutional processes plays a philosophically significant role in changing toxicologists’ inductive risk judgments about different kinds of evidence. I suggest that Douglas’ inductive risk framework can be integrated with a suitable account of evidence, such as Helen (...)
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  • Inductive risk in macroeconomics: Natural Rate Theory, monetary policy, and the Great Canadian Slump.Gabriele Contessa - 2021 - Economics and Philosophy 37 (3):353-375.
    This paper has two goals. The first is to fill a gap in the literature on inductive risk by exploring the relevance of the notion of inductive risk to macroeconomics and monetary policy. The second goal is to draw some general lessons about inductive risk from the case discussed. The most important of these lessons is that the notion of inductive risk is no less relevant to the relationship between the proximate and distal goals of policy than it is to (...)
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  • On value-laden science.Zina B. Ward - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 85:54-62.
    Philosophical work on values in science is held back by widespread ambiguity about how values bear on sci entific choices. Here, I disambiguate several ways in which a choice can be value-laden and show that this disambiguation has the potential to solve and dissolve philosophical problems about values in science. First, I characterize four ways in which values relate to choices: values can motivate, justify, cause, or be impacted by the choices we make. Next, I put my proposed taxonomy to (...)
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  • Thinking about Values in Science: Ethical versus Political Approaches.S. Andrew Schroeder - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (3):246-255.
    Philosophers of science now broadly agree that doing good science involves making non-epistemic value judgments. I call attention to two very different normative standards which can be used to evaluate such judgments: standards grounded in ethics and standards grounded in political philosophy. Though this distinction has not previously been highlighted, I show that the values in science literature contain arguments of each type. I conclude by explaining why this distinction is important. Seeking to determine whether some value-laden determination meets substantive (...)
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  • Objectivity and orgasm: the perils of imprecise definitions.Samantha Wakil - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2315-2333.
    Lloyd analyzes every proposed evolutionary explanation of female orgasm and argues that all but one suffers from serious evidential errors. Lloyd attributes these errors to two main biases: androcentrism and adaptationism. This paper begins by arguing that the explanation Lloyd favors—the by-product account—is guilty of the androcentrism which supposedly implicates the other explanations of female orgasm with numerous evidential discrepancies. This suggests that there is another error afflicting orgasm research in addition to the biases Lloyd identities. I attempt to diagnose (...)
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  • A Taxonomy of Transparency in Science.Kevin C. Elliott - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (3):342-355.
    Both scientists and philosophers of science have recently emphasized the importance of promoting transparency in science. For scientists, transparency is a way to promote reproducibility, progress, and trust in research. For philosophers of science, transparency can help address the value-ladenness of scientific research in a responsible way. Nevertheless, the concept of transparency is a complex one. Scientists can be transparent about many different things, for many different reasons, on behalf of many different stakeholders. This paper proposes a taxonomy that clarifies (...)
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  • Objectivity, trust and social responsibility.Kristina H. Rolin - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):513-533.
    I examine ramifications of the widespread view that scientific objectivity gives us a permission to trust scientific knowledge claims. According to a widely accepted account of trust and trustworthiness, trust in scientific knowledge claims involves both reliance on the claims and trust in scientists who present the claims, and trustworthiness depends on expertise, honesty, and social responsibility. Given this account, scientific objectivity turns out to be a hybrid concept with both an epistemic and a moral-political dimension. The epistemic dimension tells (...)
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  • Value-Free yet Policy-Relevant? The Normative Views of Climate Scientists and Their Bearing on Philosophy.Torbjørn Gundersen - 2020 - Perspectives on Science 28 (1):89-118.
    The proper role of non-epistemic values such as moral, political, and social values in practices of justification of policy-relevant hypotheses has recently become one of the central questions in philosophy of science. This strand of research has yielded conceptual clarifications and significant insight into the complex and notoriously contentious issue of the proper relationship between science, non-epistemic values, and policymaking. A central part of this discussion revolves around whether scientists should aspire for the value-free ideal, according to which non-epistemic values (...)
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  • Introduction: systematicity, the nature of science?Hasok Chang, Simon Lohse & Karim Bschir - 2019 - Synthese 196 (3):761-773.
    Introduction to Synthese SI: Systematicity: The Nature of Science?
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  • Values in Science: Assessing the Case for Mixed Claims.Uwe Peters - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Social and medical scientists frequently produce empirical generalizations that involve concepts partly defined by value judgments. These generalizations, which have been called ‘mixed claims’, raise interesting questions. Does the presence of them in science imply that science is value-laden? Is the value-ladenness of mixed claims special compared to other kinds of value-ladenness of science? Do we lose epistemically if we reformulate these claims as conditional statements? And if we want to allow mixed claims in science, do we need a new (...)
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  • Public Trust in Science: Exploring the Idiosyncrasy-Free Ideal.Marion Boulicault & S. Andrew Schroeder - 2021 - In Kevin Vallier & Michael Weber (eds.), Social Trust: Foundational and Philosophical Issues. Routledge.
    What makes science trustworthy to the public? This chapter examines one proposed answer: the trustworthiness of science is based at least in part on its independence from the idiosyncratic values, interests, and ideas of individual scientists. That is, science is trustworthy to the extent that following the scientific process would result in the same conclusions, regardless of the particular scientists involved. We analyze this "idiosyncrasy-free ideal" for science by looking at philosophical debates about inductive risk, focusing on two recent proposals (...)
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  • Why Simpler Computer Simulation Models Can Be Epistemically Better for Informing Decisions.Casey Helgeson, Vivek Srikrishnan, Klaus Keller & Nancy Tuana - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (2):213-233.
    For computer simulation models to usefully inform climate risk management, uncertainties in model projections must be explored and characterized. Because doing so requires running the model many ti...
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  • The Politics of Certainty: The Precautionary Principle, Inductive Risk and Procedural Fairness.Stephen John - 2019 - Ethics, Policy and Environment 22 (1):21-33.
    This paper re-interprets the precautionary principle as a ‘social epistemic rule’. First, it argues that sometimes policy-makers should act on claims which have not been scientifically established....
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  • Null hypothesis testing ≠ Scientific inference: A critique of the shaky premise at the heart of the science and values debate, and a defense of value‐neutral risk assessment.Brian H. MacGillivray - forthcoming - Risk Analysis.
    Many philosophers and statisticians argue that risk assessors are morally obligated to evaluate the probabilities and consequences of methodological error, and to base their decisions of whether to adopt a given parameter value, model, or hypothesis on those considerations. This argument is couched within the rubric of null hypothesis testing, which I suggest is a poor descriptive and normative model for risk assessment. Risk regulation is not primarily concerned with evaluating the probability of data conditional upon the null hypothesis, but (...)
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  • Science, Values, and the Priority of Evidence.P. D. Magnus - 2018 - Logos and Episteme 9 (4):413-431.
    It is now commonly held that values play a role in scientific judgment, but many arguments for that conclusion are limited. First, many arguments do not show that values are, strictly speaking, indispensable. The role of values could in principle be filled by a random or arbitrary decision. Second, many arguments concern scientific theories and concepts which have obvious practical consequences, thus suggesting or at least leaving open the possibility that abstruse sciences without such a connection could be value-free. Third, (...)
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  • Adjusting Inferential Thresholds to Reflect Nonepistemic Values.Kim Kaivanto & Daniel Steel - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (2):255-285.
    Many philosophers have challenged the ideal of value-free science on the grounds that social or moral values are relevant to inferential thresholds. But given this view, how precisely and to what extent should scientists adjust their inferential thresholds in light of nonepistemic values? We suggest that signal detection theory provides a useful framework for addressing this question. Moreover, this approach opens up further avenues for philosophical inquiry and has important implications for philosophical debates concerning inductive risk. For example, the signal (...)
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  • The Error Is in the Gap: Synthesizing Accounts for Societal Values in Science.Christopher ChoGlueck - 2018 - Philosophy of Science 85 (4):704-725.
    Kevin Elliott and others separate two common arguments for the legitimacy of societal values in scientific reasoning as the gap and the error arguments. This article poses two questions: How are these two arguments related, and what can we learn from their interrelation? I contend that we can better understand the error argument as nested within the gap because the error is a limited case of the gap with narrower features. Furthermore, this nestedness provides philosophers with conceptual tools for analyzing (...)
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  • Ethics of the scientist qua policy advisor: inductive risk, uncertainty, and catastrophe in climate economics.David M. Frank - 2019 - Synthese:3123-3138.
    This paper discusses ethical issues surrounding Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) of the economic effects of climate change, and how climate economists acting as policy advisors ought to represent the uncertain possibility of catastrophe. Some climate economists, especially Martin Weitzman, have argued for a precautionary approach where avoiding catastrophe should structure climate economists’ welfare analysis. This paper details ethical arguments that justify this approach, showing how Weitzman’s “fat tail” probabilities of climate catastrophe pose ethical problems for widely used IAMs. The main (...)
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  • Structuring Decisions Under Deep Uncertainty.Casey Helgeson - 2020 - Topoi 39 (2):257-269.
    Innovative research on decision making under ‘deep uncertainty’ is underway in applied fields such as engineering and operational research, largely outside the view of normative theorists grounded in decision theory. Applied methods and tools for decision support under deep uncertainty go beyond standard decision theory in the attention that they give to the structuring of decisions. Decision structuring is an important part of a broader philosophy of managing uncertainty in decision making, and normative decision theorists can both learn from, and (...)
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  • Inductive Risk and Regulatory Toxicology: A Comment on de Melo-Martín and Intemann.Daniel J. Hicks - 2018 - Philosophy of Science 85 (1):164-174.
    Inmaculada de Melo-Martín and Kristen Intemann consider whether, from the perspective of the argument from inductive risk, ethical and political values might be logically, epistemically, pragmatically, or ethically necessary in the “core” of scientific reasoning. In each case, they argue that there are significant conceptual problems. In this comment, employing regulatory uses of high-throughput toxicology at the US Environmental Protection Agency as a case study, I respond to some of their claims about the notion of “pragmatic necessity.” I conclude that, (...)
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