Within the evidence-based medicine construct, clinical expertise is acknowledged to be both derived from primary experience and necessary for optimal medical practice. Primary experience in medical practice, however, remains undervalued. Clinicians’ primary experience tends to be dismissed by EBM as unsystematic or anecdotal, a source of bias rather than knowledge, never serving as the “best” evidence to support a clinical decision. The position that clinical expertise is necessary but that primary experience is untrustworthy in clinical decision-making is epistemically incoherent. Here (...) we argue for the value and utility of knowledge gained from primary experience for the practice of medicine. Primary experience provides knowledge necessary to diagnose, treat, and assess response in individual patients. Hierarchies of evidence, when advanced as guides for clinical decisions, mistake the relationship between propositional and experiential knowledge. We argue that primary experience represents a kind of medical knowledge distinct from the propositional knowledge produced by clinical research, both of which are crucial to determining the best diagnosis and course of action for particular patients. (shrink)

The function and legitimacy of values in decision making is a critically important issue in the contemporary analysis of science. It is particularly relevant for some of the more application-oriented areas of science, specifically decision-oriented science in the field of regulation of technological risks. Our main objective in this paper is to assess the diversity of roles that non-cognitive values related to decision making can adopt in the kinds of scientific activity that underlie risk regulation. We start out, first, by (...) analyzing the issue of values with the help of a framework taken from the wider philosophical debate on science and values. Second, we study the principal conceptualizations used by scholars who have applied them to numerous case studies. Third, we appraise the links between those conceptualizations and learning processes in decision-oriented science. In this, we recur to the concept of methodological learning, i.e., learning about the best methodologies for generating knowledge that is useful for science-based regulatory decisions. The main result of our analysis is that non-cognitive values can contribute to methodological improvements in science in three principal ways: as basis for critical analysis, for contextualizing methodologies, and for establishing the burden of proof. (shrink)

In this paper, I answer the question,how do we collaborate well with others?I first look at cases of good collaboration, contrasting them briefly with some cases of poor collaboration; I then describe the similarities between the good cases, such as shared aims, shared planning of projects, shared norms among collaborators. The conclusion is that collaborating well involves shared norms, derived both from societal norms and from a well‐ordered relationship between participants; a shared vision derived from shared knowledge and open communication (...) grounded in relationship; and open‐mindedness and thoughtful disagreement, which depend on mutual respect and trust between participants. (shrink)

Diagnosable individuals, caregivers, and clinicians typically embrace a biological conception of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), finding that medical treatment is beneficial. Scientists study ADHD phenomenology, interventions to ease symptoms, and underlying mechanisms, often with an aim of helping diagnosed people. Yet current understanding of ADHD, jointly influenced by science and society, has an unintended downside. Scientific and social influences have embedded negative values in the ADHD concept, and have simultaneously dichotomized ADHD diagnosable from non-diagnosable individuals. In social settings insistent on certain (...) types of success, the negative values associated with the diagnostic category are attributed to people in the dichotomized "ADHD" group. Devaluation, institutional restrictions on "success" definitions and endpoints, and limited options for achieving success jointly constitute institutionalized intolerance of ADHD. (shrink)

A concept of diversity is an understanding of what makes a group diverse that may be applicable in a variety of contexts. We distinguish three diversity concepts, show that each can be found in discussions of diversity in science, and explain how they tend to be associated with distinct epistemic and ethical rationales. Yet philosophical literature on diversity among scientists has given little attention to distinct concepts of diversity. This is significant because the unappreciated existence of multiple diversity concepts can (...) generate unclarity about the meaning of “diversity,” lead to problematic inferences from empirical research, and obscure complex ethical-epistemic questions about how to define diversity in specific cases. We illustrate some ethical-epistemic implications of our proposal by reference to an example of deliberative mini-publics on human tissue biobanking. (shrink)

We suggest that philosophical accounts of epistemic effects of diversity have given insufficient attention to the relationship between demographic diversity and information elaboration, the process whereby knowledge dispersed in a group is elicited and examined. We propose an analysis of IE that clarifies hypotheses proposed in the empirical literature and their relationship to philosophical accounts of diversity effects. Philosophical accounts have largely overlooked the possibility that demographic diversity may improve group performance by enhancing IE, and sometimes fail to explore the (...) relationship between diversity and IE altogether. We claim these omissions are significant from both a practical and theoretical perspective. Moreover, we explain how the overlooked explanations suggest that epistemic benefits of diversity can depend on epistemically unjust social dynamics. (shrink)

A small but growing body of philosophically informed survey work calls into question whether the value-free ideal is a dominant viewpoint among scientists. However, the survey instruments in used in these studies have important limitations. Previous work has also made little headway in developing hypotheses that might predict or explain differing views about the value-free ideal among scientists. In this article, we review previous survey work on this topic, describe an improved survey instrument, report results from an initial administration of (...) it that strengthen and refine previous results, and develop two hypotheses that may account for gender effects found in the data. (shrink)

Critics of the ideal of value‐free science often assume that they must reject the distinction between epistemic and nonepistemic values. I argue that this assumption is mistaken and that the distinction can be used to clarify and defend the argument from inductive risk, which challenges the value‐free ideal. I develop the idea that the characteristic feature of epistemic values is that they promote, either intrinsically or extrinsically, the attainment of truths. This proposal is shown to answer common objections to the (...) distinction and provide a principled basis for separating legitimate from illegitimate influences of nonepistemic values in scientific inference. *Received June 2009; revised September 2009. †To contact the author, please write to: 503 S. Kedzie Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824‐1032; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

This article examines the business case for diversity, according to which diversity should be promoted because diverse groups outperform nondiverse groups. Philosophers who defend BCD usually...

While epistemic justification is a central concern for both contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science, debates in contemporary epistemology about the nature of epistemic justification have not been discussed extensively by philosophers of science. As a step toward a coherent account of scientific justification that is informed by, and sheds light on, justificatory practices in the sciences, this paper examines one of these debates—the internalist-externalist debate—from the perspective of objective accounts of scientific evidence. In particular, we focus on Deborah Mayo’s (...) error-statistical theory of evidence because it is a paradigmatically objective theory of evidence that is strongly informed by methodological practice. We contend that from the standpoint of such an objective theory of evidence, justification in science has both externalist and internalist characteristics. In reaching this conclusion, however, we find that the terms of the contemporary debate between internalists and externalists have to be redefined to be applicable to scientific contexts. (shrink)

Since our visual perception of physical things essentially involves our identifying objects by their colours, any theory of visual perception must contain some account of the colours of things. The central problem with colour has to do with relating our normal, everyday colour perceptions to what science, i.e. physics, teaches us about physical objects and their qualities. Although we perceive colours as categorical surface properties of things, colour perceptions are explained by introducing physical properties like reflectance profiles or dispositions to (...) cause certain experiences in normal human perceivers. Hence, it seems as if colours as they are experienced by us have no place in the physical world, because they are fundamentally different from the properties which we ascribe to physical objects in scientific accounts of colour perceptions. This special issue on perspectives on colour perception presents new suggestions to solve to this major problem. (shrink)

: The relationship between individuals and communities in knowing is a central topic of discussion in current feminist epistemology. Lynn Hankinson Nelson 's work is unusual in grounding knowledge primarily in the community rather than the individual. In this essay I argue that responses to Nelson 's work are based on a misinterpretation of her holistic approach. However, Nelson 's holism is incomplete and hence inconsistent. I defend a more radically holistic feminist empiricism with a multiaspect view of the knower, (...) which is more consistent with a feminist empiricist approach to evidence. (shrink)

The relationship between individuals and communities in knowing is a central topic of discussion in current feminist epistemology. Lynn Hankinson Nelson's work is unusual in grounding knowledge primarily in the community rather than the individual. In this essay I argue that responses to Nelson's work are based on a misinterpretation of her holistic approach. However, Nelson's holism is incomplete and hence inconsistent. I defend a more radically holistic feminist empiricism with a multiaspect view of the knower, which is more consistent (...) with a feminist empiricist approach to evidence. (shrink)

In this paper I use philosophical accounts on the relationship between trust and knowledge in science to apprehend this relationship on the Web. I argue that trust and knowledge are fundamentally entangled in our epistemic practices. Yet despite this fundamental entanglement, we do not trust blindly. Instead we make use of knowledge to rationally place or withdraw trust. We use knowledge about the sources of epistemic content as well as general background knowledge to assess epistemic claims. Hence, although we may (...) have a default to trust, we remain and should remain epistemically vigilant; we look out and need to look out for signs of insincerity and dishonesty in our attempts to know. A fundamental requirement for such vigilance is transparency: in order to critically assess epistemic agents, content and processes, we need to be able to access and address them. On the Web, this request for transparency becomes particularly pressing if (a) trust is placed in unknown human epistemic agents and (b) if it is placed in non-human agents, such as algorithms. I give examples of the entanglement between knowledge and trust on the Web and draw conclusions about the forms of transparency needed in such systems to support epistemically vigilant behaviour, which empowers users to become responsible and accountable knowers. (shrink)

Feyerabend is infamous for his defense of pluralism, which he extends to every topic he discusses. Disagreement, a by-product of this pluralism, becomes a sign of flourishing critical communities. In Feyerabend’s political works, he extends this pluralism from science to democratic societies and incorporates his earlier work on scientific methodology into a procedure for designing just policy. However, a description and analysis of Feyerabend’s conception of disagreement is lacking. In this paper, I reconstruct and assess Feyerabend’s conception of disagreement, with (...) a particular emphasis on the role of experts, and its role in the formation of science policy. I go on to assess this argument in light of recent literature on manufactured disagreement on politically contentious science policy. I conclude by suggesting some prospects and problems for de-idealizing Feyerabend’s position on disagreement to see whether it may be plausibly implemented. (shrink)

Aujourd’hui, bon nombre de philosophes des sciences ou d’universitaires semblent penser que leur expertise peut éclairer les débats publics. Le premier empirisme logique peut apparaître comme un modèle de philosophie des sciences politiquement pertinent. Dans ses travaux sur la « dépolitisation» de l’empirisme logique, George Reisch a aidé à prendre conscience de l’agenda politique du Cercle de Vienne, agenda qui a disparu dans les États-Unis d’après-guerre, sous la pression de l’anti-communisme. L’étude du cas d’Edgar Zilsel, un sociologue des sciences membre (...) de l’aile gauche radicale du Cercle de Vienne, montre cependant que l’empirisme logique ne peut pas être considéré aussi facilement comme politique. Certes, Zilsel était un intellectuel politiquement engagé, mais il n’était pas un philosophe des sciences politiquement engagé: son intention n’était pas d’intervenir dans les débats publics ou de soutenir des causes publiques en vertu de son statut académique ou de son expertise professionnelle. Je soutiens en outre que les débats contemporains sur la place de la science dans la société, menés par des universitaires qui, soucieux de leur impact sur les questions de société, conceptualisent l’influence sociale en termes de motifs et de valeurs individuels, ne correspondent pas au point de vue des empiristes logiques de gauche: ceux-ci cherchaient à fournir une explication sociologique de la science et s’attachaient davantage aux déterminants structuraux qu’aux motifs individuels. Ainsi, même si l’empirisme logique peut être vu comme un modèle de philosophie des sciences politiquement pertinent, il pointe, à mon sens, dans une direction différente de celle généralement prise par ses héritiers d’aujourd’hui. (shrink)

Aujourd’hui, bon nombre de philosophes des sciences ou d’universitaires semblent penser que leur expertise peut éclairer les débats publics. Le premier empirisme logique peut apparaître comme un modèle de philosophie des sciences politiquement pertinent. Dans ses travaux sur la « dépolitisation» de l’empirisme logique, George Reisch a aidé à prendre conscience de l’agenda politique (de certaines composantes) du Cercle de Vienne, agenda qui a disparu dans les États-Unis d’après-guerre, sous la pression de l’anti-communisme. L’étude du cas d’Edgar Zilsel, un sociologue (...) des sciences membre de l’aile gauche radicale du Cercle de Vienne, montre cependant que l’empirisme logique ne peut pas être considéré aussi facilement comme politique. Certes, Zilsel était un intellectuel politiquement engagé, mais il n’était pas un philosophe des sciences politiquement engagé: son intention n’était pas d’intervenir dans les débats publics ou de soutenir des causes publiques en vertu de son statut académique (il n’en avait pas) ou de son expertise professionnelle (il en avait une). Je soutiens en outre que les débats contemporains sur la place de la science dans la société, menés par des universitaires qui, soucieux de leur impact sur les questions de société, conceptualisent l’influence sociale en termes de motifs et de valeurs individuels, ne correspondent pas au point de vue des empiristes logiques de gauche: ceux-ci cherchaient à fournir une explication sociologique de la science et s’attachaient davantage aux déterminants structuraux qu’aux motifs individuels. Ainsi, même si l’empirisme logique peut être vu comme un modèle de philosophie des sciences politiquement pertinent, il pointe, à mon sens, dans une direction différente de celle généralement prise par ses héritiers d’aujourd’hui. (shrink)

If we cannot define science using only analysis or description, then we must rely on imagination to provide us with suitable objects of philosophical inquiry. This process ties our intellectual findings to the particular ways in which we philosophers think about scientific practice and carve out a cognitive space between real world practice and conceptual abstraction. As an example, I consider Heather Douglas’s work on the responsibilities of scientists and document her implicit ideal of science, defined primarily as an epistemic (...) practice. I then contrast her idealization of science with an alternative: “technoscience,” a heuristic concept used to describe nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and similar “Mode 2” forms of research. This comparison reveals that one’s preferred imaginary of science, even when inspired by real practices, has significant implications for the distribution of responsibility. Douglas’s account attributes moral obligations to scientists, while the imaginaries associated with “technoscience” and “Mode 2 science” spread responsibility across the network of practice. This dynamic between mind and social order, I argue, demands an ethics of imagination in which philosophers of science hold themselves accountable for their imaginaries. Extending analogous challenges from feminist philosophy and Mills’s. “Ideal Theory’ as Ideology,” I conclude that we ought to reflect on the idiosyncrasy of the philosophical imagination and consider how our idealizations of science, if widely held, would affect our communities and broader society. (shrink)

Much of the literature on values in science is limited in its perspective because it focuses on the role of values in individual scientists’ decision making, thereby ignoring the context of scientific collaboration. I examine the epistemic structure of scientific collaboration and argue that it gives rise to two arguments showing that moral and social values can legitimately play a role in scientists’ decision to accept something as scientific knowledge. In the case of scientific collaboration some moral and social values (...) are properly understood to be extrinsic epistemic values, that is, values that promote the attainment of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

In recent years, feminist philosophy of science has been subjected to criticism. The debate has focused on the implications of the underdetermination thesis for accounts of the role of social values in scientific reasoning. My aim here is to offer a different approach. I suggest that feminist philosophers of science contribute to our understanding of science by (1) producing gender‐sensitive analyses of the social dimensions of scientific inquiry and (2) examining the relevance of these analyses for normative issues in philosophy (...) of science. (shrink)

I argue that in epistemically well-designed scientific communities, scientists are united by mutual epistemic responsibilities, and epistemic responsibilities are understood not merely as epistemic but also as moral duties. Epistemic responsibilities can be understood as moral duties because they contribute to the well-being of other human beings by showing respect for them, especially in their capacity as knowers. A moral account of epistemically responsible behaviour is needed to supplement accounts that appeal to scientists’ self-interests or personal epistemic goals. This is (...) because neither the self-interest nor the epistemic account can always explain why it is rational for an individual scientist to be epistemically responsible. (shrink)

Louis Pasteur’s defeat of belief in spontaneous generation has been a classical rationalist example of how the experimental approach of modern science can reveal superstition. Farley and Geison told a counter-story of how Pasteur’s success was due to political and ideological support rather than superior experimental science. They claimed that Pasteur violated proper norms of scientific method, and that the French Academy of Science did not see this, or did not want to. Farley and Geison argued that Pouchet’s experiments were (...) as valid as those of Pasteur. In this paper I argue that the core of the scientific debate was not general theories for or against spontaneous generation but the outcome of specific experiments. It was on the conduct of these experiments that the Academy made judgements favorable to Pasteur. Claude Bernard was a colleague of Pasteur, supportive and sometimes critical. I argue that Bernard’s fact-oriented methodology of “experimental medicine” is a better guide to explaining the controversy than the hypothetic-deductive view of scientific method typical of logical empiricism. (shrink)

The standard view on economics imperialism is that it should be resisted when it is epistemically or morally harmful. I argue that the moral dimension of economics imperialism is in need of further analysis. In my view, economics imperialism is wrong when imperialists violate the epistemic responsibility they have towards scientists working in the discipline that is the target for imperialist explorations. By epistemic responsibility, I refer to a moral duty to justify one’s knowledge claims to a particular audience so (...) that the justification appeals to at least some of the standards of argumentation recognized by that audience. (shrink)

I introduce a case study from organization studies to argue that social epistemologists’ recommendation to cultivate diversity and dissent in science is unlikely to be welcomed in the social sciences unless it is coupled with another epistemic ideal: the norm of epistemic responsibility. The norm of epistemic responsibility enables me to show that organization scholars’ concern with the fragmentation of their discipline is generated by false assumptions: the assumption that a diversity of theoretical approaches will lead to fragmentation and the (...) assumption that an imposed consensus on a theoretical approach is needed to maintain the unity of the discipline. (shrink)

Catherine Elgin has recently argued that a nonfactive conception of understanding is required to accommodate the epistemic successes of science that make essential use of idealizations and models. In this paper, I argue that the fact that our best scientific models and theories are pervasively inaccurate representations can be made compatible with a more nuanced form of scientific realism that I call Understanding Realism. According to this view, science aims at (and often achieves) factive scientific understanding of natural phenomena. I (...) contend that this factive scientific understanding is provided by grasping a set of true modal information about the phenomenon of interest. Furthermore, contrary to Elgin’s view, I argue that the facticity of this kind of scientific understanding can be separated from the inaccuracy of the models and theories used to produce it. (shrink)

Although radical forms of relativism are perhaps beyond the epistemological pale, I argue here that a more moderate form may be plausible, and articulate the conditions under which moderate epistemic relativism could well serve our epistemic goals. In particular, as a result of our limitations as human cognizers, we find ourselves needing to investigate the dappled and difficult world by means of competing communities of highly specialized researchers. We would do well, I argue, to admit of the existence of unresolvable (...) disputes between such communities, but only so long as there is a sufficient amount of fruitful exchange between them as well. I close with some speculation about when it is or is not legitimate to make an “appeal to discipline”: responding to another’s argument by saying something like, “we should do it this way, because we are philosophers (/linguists/psychologists/…), and that’s just what we do”. (shrink)

In this introduction to the Topical Collection on Social and Cognitive Diversity in Science, we map the questions that have guided social epistemological approaches to diversity in science. Both social and cognitive diversity of different types is claimed to be epistemically beneficial. The challenge is to understand how an increase in a group’s diversity can bring about epistemic benefits and whether there are limits beyond which diversity can no longer improve a group’s epistemic performance. The contributions to the Topical Collection (...) discuss various proposals to maintain an appropriate amount of cognitive diversity in science, for instance, by recruiting and retaining practitioners from underrepresented social groups, providing incentives for explorative and risky research, encouraging interdisciplinary collaborations and stakeholder participation in research, requiring industry scientists to share their evidence, and developing strategies to encounter politically motivated attempts to manufacture doubt. To be successful, efforts to promote diversity in science should anticipate risks related to institutional interventions, navigate trade-offs between different types of epistemically good outcomes, and identify hidden costs that such policies may cause for various actors. Such efforts need to be assessed not only from an epistemic perspective but also from the point of view of fairness and the political legitimacy of scientific institutions. (shrink)

One way to make philosophy of science more socially relevant is to attend to specific scientific practises that affect society to a great extent. One such practise is biomedical research. This paper looks at contemporary U.S. biomedical research in particular and argues that it suffers from important epistemic, moral and socioeconomic failings. It then discusses and criticises existing approaches to improve on the status quo, most prominently by Thomas Pogge (a political philosopher), Joseph Stiglitz (a Nobel-prize winning economist) and James (...) Robert Brown (a philosopher of science). Finally, it sketches an alternative proposal and argues for its superiority. The proposal has four components: changing the intellectual property regime; instituting independent clinical research; aligning innovators' and patients' interests; and enacting additional regulation. (shrink)

Verweij and Dawson claim that population health has a distributive dimension; Coggon argues that this presupposes a normative commitment to equity in the very definition of population health, which should, rather, be neutral. I describe possible sources of the distributive view, several of which do not presuppose egalitarian commitments. Two relate to the nature of health as a property of individuals ; two relate to the epistemology and pragmatics of public and population health. A fifth source of the distributive view (...) is a critical stance on the concept of population health; I contrast this with Coggon’s account of the public as a shared political imaginary. None of these views is ‘neutral’: they exhibit several different kinds of normativity and quasi-normativity, but this is not problematic. I argue that the critical stance appropriately distinguishes and relates social justice and public health. (shrink)

The history of the research on peptic ulcer disease is characterized by a premature abandonment of the bacterial hypothesis, which subsequently had its comeback, leading to the discovery of Helicobacter pylori—the major cause of the disease. In this paper we examine the received view on this case, according to which the primary reason for the abandonment of the bacterial hypothesis in the mid-twentieth century was a large-scale study by a prominent gastroenterologist Palmer, which suggested no bacteria could be found in (...) the human stomach. To this end, we employ the method of digital textual analysis and study the literature on the etiology of PUD published in the decade prior to Palmer’s article. Our findings suggest that the bacterial hypothesis had already been abandoned before the publication of Palmer’s paper, which challenges the widely held view that his study played a crucial role in the development of this episode. In view of this result, we argue that the PUD case does not illustrate harmful effects of a high degree of information flow, as it has frequently been claimed in the literature on network epistemology. Moreover, we argue that alternative examples of harmful effects of a high degree of information flow may be hard to find in the history of science. (shrink)

Social Epistemology arose from the recognition that nearly all that we believe or claim to know is second hand and derived from the speech or writing of others. The “we” of “our knowledge” here is, of course, “educated members of advanced industrial societies”. Our remoter, but still identifiably, human ancestors, without speech or writing, picked up such knowledge or belief as they had on their own, apart from what they may have leant from the reactions of others to the presence (...) of quarry or danger. Palaeolithic man, having mastered speech, had access to plenty of second hand knowledge. But it was only of what the people he directly met could tell him. With writing a vast new range of informants is brought into play. Clay tablets and papyrus rolls give way to codices – in other words, books – and another gigantic step forward is made with the invention of printing. We would appear to be going through a comparable information revolution at the present day. We, as defined above, either posses or have ready access to a vast assemblage of common knowledge, actual or claimed. How are we to rationally to decide how much of this we are to accept? It is obviously not all worthy, or equally worthy of acceptance. (shrink)

Genealogies of belief have dominated recent philosophical discussions of genealogical debunking at the expense of genealogies of concepts, which has in turn focused attention on genealogical debunking in an epistemological key. As I argue in this paper, however, this double focus encourages an overly narrow understanding of genealogical debunking. First, not all genealogical debunking can be reduced to the debunking of beliefs—concepts can be debunked without debunking any particular belief, just as beliefs can be debunked without debunking the concepts in (...) terms of which they are articulated. Second, not all genealogical debunking is epistemological debunking. Focusing on concepts rather than beliefs brings distinct forms of genealogical debunking to the fore that cannot be comprehensively captured in terms of epistemological debunking. We thus need a broader understanding of genealogical debunking, which encompasses not just epistemological debunking, but also what I shall refer to as metaphysical debunking and ethical debunking. (shrink)

When should a scientific community be cognitively diverse? This article presents a model for studying how the heterogeneity of learning heuristics used by scientist agents affects the epistemic efficiency of a scientific community. By extending the epistemic landscapes modeling approach introduced by Weisberg and Muldoon, the article casts light on the micro-mechanisms mediating cognitive diversity, coordination, and problem-solving efficiency. The results suggest that social learning and cognitive diversity produce epistemic benefits only when the epistemic community is faced with problems of (...) sufficient difficulty. (shrink)

This paper is meant to link the philosophical debate concerning the underdetermination of theories by evidence with a rather significant socio-political issue that has been taking place in Canada over the past few years: the so-called ‘death of evidence’ controversy. It places this debate within a broader philosophical framework by discussing the connection between evidence and theory; by bringing out the role of epistemic values in the so-called scientific method; and by examining the role of social values in science. While (...) it should be admitted that social values play an important role in science, the key question for anyone who advocates this view is: what and whose values? The way it is answered makes an important epistemic difference to how the relation between evidence and theory is appraised. I first review various arguments for the claim that evidence underdetermines theory and shows their presuppositions and limitations, using conceptual analysis and historical examples. After broaching the relation between evidence and method in science by highlighting the need to incorporate epistemic values into the scientific method, my discussion focuses on recent arguments for the role of social values in science. Finally, I address the implications of the approach outlined for the current ‘death of evidence’ debate in Canada. (shrink)

El recientemente publicado libro de Adrián Almazán Gómez, Técnica y tecnología. Cómo conversar con un tecnolófilo, constituye un intento de aprender del pasado para auspiciar un futuro que supere la crisis de encaje entre tecnosfera y biosfera en que consiste nuestro presente. El planteamiento en el libro de figuras como el campesino y el artesano, así como de una marcada oposición entre naturaleza y ciencia, invita a un debate y a una profunda indagación que problematice la Modernidad.

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 (...) of questions about the relation between individuals and communities. At the same time, they also inherit some of Kuhn’s problematic characterisations of the scientific community. In particular, current models of the social organisation of science represent the scientific community as essentially value-free. This may put into question both their representational adequacy and their normative ambitions. In the end, it will be shown that the discussion on the formal models of the scientific community may contribute in fruitful ways to the ongoing debates on value judgements in science. (shrink)

Arguments discrediting the value-free ideal of science have left us with the question of how to distinguish desirable values from biases that compromise the reliability of research. In this paper, I argue for a characterization of cognitive biases as deviations of thought processes that systematically lead scientists to the wrong conclusions. In particular, cognitive biases could help us understand a crucial issue in science today: how systematic error is introduced in research outcomes, even when research is evaluated as of good (...) quality. To conclude, I suggest that some debiasing mechanisms have great potential for countering implicit methodological biases in science. (shrink)

Gender bias is a recalcitrant problem in academia and society. However, dissent has been created on this issue. We focus on dissenting studies by Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams, arguing that they reach conclusions that are unwarranted on the basis of the available evidence and that they ignore fundamental objections to their methodological decisions. Drawing on discussions from other contexts, particularly on manufactured dissent concerning anthropogenic climate change, we conclude that dissent on gender bias substantially contributes to the (...) exacerbation of biases in society and an increasing number of attacks on researchers, making it both epistemically and socially problematic. (shrink)

Philosophers of science have argued that epistemic diversity is an asset for the production of scientific knowledge, guarding against the effects of biases, among other advantages. The growing privatization of scientific research, on the contrary, has raised important concerns for philosophers of science, especially with respect to the growing sources of biases in research that it seems to promote. Recently, Holman and Bruner ( 2017 ) have shown, using a modified version of Zollman ( 2010 ) social network model, that (...) an industrial selection bias can emerge in a scientific community, without corrupting any individual scientist, if the community is epistemically diverse. In this paper, we examine the strength of industrial selection using a reinforcement learning model, which simulates the process of industrial decision-making when allocating funding to scientific projects. Contrary to Holman and Bruner’s model, in which the probability of success of the agents when performing an action is given a priori, in our model the industry learns about the success rate of individual scientists and updates the probability of success on each round. The results of our simulations show that even without previous knowledge of the probability of success of an individual scientist, the industry is still able to disrupt scientific consensus. In fact, the more epistemically diverse the scientific community, the easier it is for the industry to move scientific consensus to the opposite conclusion. Interestingly, our model also shows that having a random funding agent seems to effectively counteract industrial selection bias. Accordingly, we consider the random allocation of funding for research projects as a strategy to counteract industrial selection bias, avoiding commercial exploitation of epistemically diverse communities. (shrink)

In this paper, we draw attention to the epistemological assumptions of market liberalism and standpoint theory and argue that they have more in common than previously thought. We show that both traditions draw on a similar epistemological bedrock, specifically relating to the fragmentation of knowledge in society and the fact that some of this knowledge cannot easily be shared between agents. We go on to investigate how market liberals and standpoint theorists argue with recourse to these similar foundations, and sometimes (...) diverge, primarily because of normative pre-commitments. One conclusion we draw from this is that these similarities suggest that market liberals ought to, by their own epistemological lights, be more attentive towards various problems raised by feminist standpoint theorists, and feminist standpoint theorists ought to be more open to various claims made by market liberals. (shrink)

In this paper I defend a pure proceduralist conception of legitimacy that applies to epistemic democracy. This conception, which I call pure epistemic proceduralism, does not depend on procedure-independent standards for good outcomes and relies on a proceduralist epistemology. It identifies a democratic decision as legitimate if it is the outcome of a process that satisfies certain conditions of political and epistemic fairness. My argument starts with a rejection of instrumentalism–the view that political equality is only instrumentally valuable. I reject (...) instrumentalism on two grounds: (i) because it fails to respect reasonable value pluralism and to recognize the constitutive role of democratic procedures for legitimacy in pluralist societies, and (ii) because it neglects the constructive function of democratic decision-making. I then consider two alternatives to pure epistemic proceduralism: David Estlund's version of epistemic proceduralism and a Deweyan account of epistemic democracy. I argue that only pure epistemic proceduralism can make good on both shortcomings of instrumentalism, whereas each of the other two approaches only makes good on one and neglects the other. (shrink)

The English language now dominates scientific communications. Yet, many scientists have English as their second language. Their English proficiency may therefore often be more limited than that of a ‘native speaker’, and their scientific contributions (e.g. manuscripts) in English may frequently contain linguistic features that disrupt the fluency of a reader’s, or listener’s information processing even when the contributions are understandable. Scientific gatekeepers (e.g. journal reviewers) sometimes cite these features to justify negative decisions on manuscripts. Such justifications may rest on (...) the prima facie plausible assumption that linguistic characteristics that hinder fast and easy understandability of scientific contributions are epistemically undesirable in science. I shall raise some doubts about this assumption by drawing on empirical research on processing fluency and its biasing effects. I also argue that directing scientists with English as a foreign language toward approaching ‘native-level’ English can have the negative consequence of reducing their potential to make scientific belief formation more reliable. These points suggest that one seemingly compelling justification for linguistically discriminating against scientific contributions in ‘non-native’ English is questionable and that the common insistence by scientific gatekeepers on ‘native-like’ English may be epistemically harmful to science. (shrink)