A consistent claim from governments around the world during the Coronavirus pandemic has been that they were following the science. This raises the question, central to this paper, of what and whose knowledge is or should be sought, which is being side-lined through the choice of particular framings and discourses, and with what consequences for the creation and implementation of evidence-based policy to tackle wicked problems. Through the lens of Fricker’s epistemic injustice, I problematise the expertise that has guided the (...) COVID-19 response as epistemically narrow and argue that counteracting a monolithic culture of expertise requires tackling the structural inequalities in the systems of knowledge production to diversify the social and epistemological foundations of science. Drawing on Post-normal Science (PNS) theory, I suggest that the expertise needed to respond to the challenges of a post-COVID world is one that embraces greater pluralism, avoids groupthink, challenges the accepted orthodoxy and helps us revert old models and rigid path dependencies that so often neglect the lived realities and demands of those left behind. This can only be realised by overcoming epistemic injustice and embracing epistemic democracy in the practice of evidence-based policy. (shrink)

Controversies around large-scale development projects offer many cases and insights which may be analyzed through the lenses of corporate social (_ir_)responsibility (CS_I_R) and business ethics studies. In this paper, we confront the CSR narratives and strategies of _WeBuild_ (formerly known as _Salini Impregilo_), an Italian transnational construction company. Starting from the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas), we collect evidence from NGOs, environmental justice organizations, journalists, scholars, and community leaders on socio-environmental injustices and controversies surrounding 38 large hydropower schemes built (...) by the corporation throughout the last century. As a counter-reporting exercise, we code (un)sustainability discourses from a plurality of sources, looking at their discrepancy under the critical lenses of post-normal science and political ecology, with environmental justice as a normative framework. Our results show how the mismatch of narratives can be interpreted by considering the voluntary, self-reporting, non-binding nature of CSR accounting performed by a corporation wishing to grow in a global competitive market. Contributing to critical perspectives on political CS(I)R, we question the reliability of current CSR mechanisms and instruments, calling for the inclusion of complexity dimensions in and a re-politicization of CS(I)R accounting and ethics. We argue that the fields of post-normal science and political ecology can contribute to these goals. (shrink)

Philosophy of science has traditionally focused on the epistemological dimensions of scientific practice at the expense of the ethical and political questions scientists encounter when addressing questions of policy in advisory contexts. In this article, I will explore how an exclusive focus on epistemology and theoretical reason can function to reinforce common, yet flawed assumptions concerning the role of scientific knowledge in policy decision making when reproduced in philosophy courses for science students. In order to address this concern, I will (...) argue that such courses should supplement the traditional focus on theoretical reason with an analysis of the practical reasoning employed by scientists in advisory contexts. Later sections of this paper outline a teaching strategy by which this can be achieved that consists of two steps: the first examines idealized examples of scientific advising in order to highlight the irreducible role played by moral reasoning in justifying policy recommendations. The second employs argument analysis to reveal implicit moral assumptions in actual advisory reports that form the basis for class discussion. This paper concludes by examining some of the wider benefits that can be expected from adopting such an approach. (shrink)

Contemporary interdisciplinary research is often described as bringing some important changes in the structure and aims of the scientific enterprise. Sometimes, it is even characterized as a sort of Kuhnian scientific revolution. In this paper, the analogy between interdisciplinarity and scientific revolutions will be analysed. It will be suggested that the way in which interdisciplinarity is promoted looks similar to how new paradigms were described and defended in some episodes of revolutionary scientific change. However, contrary to what happens during some (...) scientific revolutions, the rhetoric with which interdisciplinarity is promoted does not seem to be accompanied by a strong agreement about what interdisciplinarity actually is. In the end, contemporary interdisciplinarity could be defined as being in a ‘pre-paradigmatic’ phase, with the very talk promoting interdisciplinarity being a possible obstacle to its maturity. (shrink)

While ethics and evidence‐based medicine are often viewed as separate domains of inquiry and practice, what we know influences what we can ethically justify doing, and what we see as our moral obligations shapes the way we interpret evidence. The boundaries between the moral and epistemic spheres become particularly blurred when the health of people is at stake and even more so when no “officially” recommended medical intervention is available to help a patient in need. The treatment of major hemorrhages (...) using recombinant factor VIIa (rFVIIa), which was originally approved under orphan drug legislation to treat hemophilia, is a case in point.Following reports in the late 1990s that rFVIIa was success­fully used to stop bleeding in gunshot trauma, there was much excitement about its potential to help patients with uncontrolled bleeding in other clinical settings, leading to wide‐spread off‐label use of the drug. In recent years, new evidence has raised questions about the off‐label use of rFVIIa for severe bleeding. Nonetheless, while some clini­cians are now adamantly opposed to prescribing rFVIIa for massive bleed­ing, many remain determined to continue the practice. This raises the question: why do clinicians have such variable responses to the same body of evidence?We analyzed the debate around off‐label use of rFVIIa and character­ized its main conceptual features and tensions. We did not seek to provide a normative analysis as to whether the evidence supports the case for off‐label prescribing, nor did we try to provide a historical analysis of how attitudes and clinical practice have changed. Rather, we sought to make visible the moral and epistemic values underpinning stakeholders’ opinions and practices. On the basis of our analysis, which is described in this ar­ticle, we suggest that debates such as those surrounding rFVIIa will not be resolved simply by conducting more studies and that, therefore, there is also a need for conceptual and pro­cedural frameworks that more sys­tematically incorporate values into clinical policy‐making. (shrink)

ArgumentScientific uncertainty is fundamental to the management of contemporary global risks. In 2009, the World Health Organization declared the start of the H1N1 Influenza Pandemic. This declaration signified the risk posed by the spread of the H1N1 virus, and in turn precipitated a range of actions by global public health actors. This article analyzes the WHO's public representation of risk and examines the centrality of scientific uncertainty in the case of H1N1. It argues that the WHO's risk narrative reflected the (...) context of scientific uncertainty in which it was working. The WHO argued that it was attempting to remain faithful to the scientific evidence, and the uncertain nature of the threat. However, as a result, the WHO's public risk narrative was neither consistent nor socially robust, leading to the eventual contestation of the WHO's position by other global public health actors, most notably the Council of Europe. This illustrates both the significance of scientific uncertainty in the investigation of risk, and the difficulty for risk managing institutions in effectively acting in the face of this uncertainty. (shrink)

Scientific knowledge is the outcome of a collective, for example, of experts, methods, equipment, and experimental sites. The configuration of the collective shapes the scientific findings, allowing some interactions to become visible and meaningful at the expense of others. PROTEE is a methodology that aims to increase the reflexivity of research and innovation projects by helping to sensitize practitioners to the demarcations their projects enact and to think through how these may affect the relevance of the outcomes. We used PROTEE (...) to structure a series of dialogues with a research project that wanted its findings to make a contribution to the heated debate on transgenic trees. Through this process, the project did indeed become more articulated while we ourselves became engaged with the project in a very particular way, by becoming loyal to it. The dialogues also made the risks that engagement with public debate entails for scientists very apparent. Like us, the scientific project chose its loyalties, but what PROTEE did was to help make these explicit. (shrink)

The New York Times receives more citations from academic journals than the American Sociological Review, Research Policy, or the Harvard Law Review. This article explores the reasons why scholars cite the NYT so much. Reasons include studying the newspaper itself or New York City, establishing public interest in a topic by referencing press coverage, introducing specificity, and treating the NYT very much like an academic journal. The phenomenon seems to reflect a mode 2 type of scholarship produced in the context (...) of application, organizationally diverse, socially accountable, and aiming to be socially useful as well as high quality as assessed by peers. (shrink)

Controversies around large-scale development projects offer many cases and insights which may be analyzed through the lenses of corporate social (_ir_)responsibility (CS_I_R) and business ethics studies. In this paper, we confront the CSR narratives and strategies of _WeBuild_ (formerly known as _Salini Impregilo_), an Italian transnational construction company. Starting from the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas), we collect evidence from NGOs, environmental justice organizations, journalists, scholars, and community leaders on socio-environmental injustices and controversies surrounding 38 large hydropower schemes built (...) by the corporation throughout the last century. As a counter-reporting exercise, we code (un)sustainability discourses from a plurality of sources, looking at their discrepancy under the critical lenses of post-normal science and political ecology, with environmental justice as a normative framework. Our results show how the mismatch of narratives can be interpreted by considering the voluntary, self-reporting, non-binding nature of CSR accounting performed by a corporation wishing to grow in a global competitive market. Contributing to critical perspectives on political CS(I)R, we question the reliability of current CSR mechanisms and instruments, calling for the inclusion of complexity dimensions in and a re-politicization of CS(I)R accounting and ethics. We argue that the fields of post-normal science and political ecology can contribute to these goals. (shrink)

It has been convincingly argued that computer simulation modeling differs from traditional science. If we understand simulation modeling as a new way of doing science, the manner in which scientists learn about the world through models must also be considered differently. This article examines how researchers learn about environmental processes through computer simulation modeling. Suggesting a conceptual framework anchored in a performative philosophical approach, we examine two modeling projects undertaken by research teams in England, both aiming to inform flood risk (...) management. One of the modeling teams operated in the research wing of a consultancy firm, the other were university scientists taking part in an interdisciplinary project experimenting with public engagement. We found that in the first context the use of standardized software was critical to the process of improvisation, the obstacles emerging in the process concerned data and were resolved through exploiting affordances for generating, organizing, and combining scientific information in new ways. In the second context, an environmental competency group, obstacles were related to the computer program and affordances emerged in the combination of experience-based knowledge with the scientists’ skill enabling a reconfiguration of the mathematical structure of the model, allowing the group to learn about local flooding. (shrink)