What counts as relevant criticism? Longino's critical contextual empiricism and the feminist criticism of mainstream economics

I identify and resolve an internal tension in Critical Contextual Empiricism (CCE) - the normative account of science developed by Helen Longino. CCE includes two seemingly conflicting principles: on one hand, the cognitive goals of epistemic communities should be open to critical discussion (the openness of goals to criticism principle, OGC); on the other hand, criticism must be aligned with the cognitive goals of that community to count as "relevant" and thus require a response (the goal-relativity of response-requiring criticism principle, GRC). The co-existence of OGC and GRC enables one to draw both approving and condemning judgments about a situation in which an epistemic community ignores criticism against its goals. This tension results from conflating two contexts of argumentation that require different regulative standards. In the first-level scientific discussion, GRC is a reasonable principle but OGC is not; in the meta-level discussion about science, the reverse holds. In meta-level discussion, the relevance of criticism can be established by appealing to goals of science that are more general than the goals of a specific epistemic community. To illustrate my revision of CCE, I discuss why feminist economists' criticism of the narrowness of the goals pursued in mainstream economics is relevant criticism.

Ontological pluralism and social values

There seems to be an emerging consensus among many philosophers of science that non-epistemic values ought to play a role in the process of scientific reasoning itself. Recently, a number of philosophers have focused on the role of values in scientific classification or taxonomy. Their claim is that a choice of ontology or taxonomic scheme can only be made, or should only be made, by appealing to non-epistemic or social values. In this paper, I take on this "argument from ontological choice," claiming that it equivocates on the notion of choice. An ontological choice can be understood either in terms of determining which taxonomic scheme is valid, or in terms of deciding which taxonomic scheme to deploy in a given context. I try to show that while the latter can be determined in part by social values, the former ought not to be so determined.

Expert judgment in climate science: How it is used and how it can be justified

Like any science marked by high uncertainty, climate science is characterized by a widespread use of expert judgment. In this paper, we first show that, in climate science, expert judgment is used to overcome uncertainty, thus playing a crucial role in the domain and even at times supplanting models. One is left to wonder to what extent it is legitimate to assign expert judgment such a status as an epistemic superiority in the climate context, especially as the production of expert judgment is particularly opaque. To begin answering this question, we highlight the key components of expert judgment. We then argue that the justification for the status and use of expert judgment depends on the competence and the individual subjective features of the expert producing the judgment since expert judgment involves not only the expert's theoretical knowledge and tacit knowledge, but also their intuition and values. This goes against the objective ideal in science and the criteria from social epistemology which largely attempt to remove subjectivity from expertise.

How Do Scientists Perceive the Relationship Between Ethics and Science? A Pilot Study of Scientists' Appeals to Values

Efforts to promote responsible conduct of research (RCR) should take into consideration how scientists already conceptualize the relationship between ethics and science. In this study, we investigated how scientists relate ethics and science by analyzing the values expressed in interviews with fifteen science faculty members at a large midwestern university. We identified the values the scientists appealed to when discussing research ethics, how explicitly they related their values to ethics, and the relationships between the values they appealed to. We found that the scientists in our study appealed to epistemic and ethical values with about the same frequency, and much more often than any other type of value. We also found that they explicitly associated epistemic values with ethical values. Participants were more likely to describe epistemic and ethical values as supporting each other, rather than trading off with each other. This suggests that many scientists already have a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between ethics and science, which may be an important resource for RCR training interventions.

Pursuitworthiness in urgent research: Lessons on well-ordered science from sustainability science

Urgent and complex sustainability problems are redefining the conditions for success of science and instigating novel methodologies and new roles of values in science. At the same time, sustainability research, mostly under the umbrella of sustainability science, is abundant with dubious methods and dubious aims of research, contributing to the already widespread crisis of the quality control mechanisms in science. This paper identifies some of these dubious methods (non-systemic thinking and specific contractual funding mechanisms) and dubious aims (unclear aims and undisclosed value assumptions), and argues that, with proper expert evaluation, it is possible to predict the type of content (and the scientific value) these forms of research will result in. Identifying the forms of research with predictably dubious results has practical implications for doing and evaluating research in sustainability science, on the one hand, while on the other, it contributes to the discussion on the ideal of well-ordered science by concretizing the ideal and developing a criterion for ordering science in the case of sustainability science. Finally, the paper provides a connection of sustainability science with the meta-science discussions on the crisis in the quality of science and on science organization, what at the same time more closely connects the philosophy of science with problems encountered in research practice tackling urgent, complex and value-laden problems.

Looking beyond values: The legitimacy of social perspectives, opinions and interests in science

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. Other factors also affect the authority and social legitimacy of science. I employ political theorist Iris Marion Young's concepts of social perspectives, opinions and interests to attempt a differentiation of contextual influences relevant to scientific research. While problems arising from these influences may overlap, they often differ in important ways too. As a consequence, I argue that contextual influences cannot be managed jointly but require distinct and complementary strategies.

When do non-epistemic values play an epistemically illegitimate role in science? How to solve one half of the new demarcation problem

Solving the "new demarcation problem" requires a distinction between epistemically legitimate and illegitimate roles for non-epistemic values in science. This paper addresses one 'half' (i.e. a sub-problem) of the new demarcation problem articulated by the Gretchenfrage: What makes the role of a non-epistemic value in science epistemically illegitimate? I will argue for the Explaining Epistemic Errors (EEE) account, according to which the epistemically illegitimate role of a non-epistemic value is defined via an explanatory claim: the fact that an epistemic agent is motivated by a non-epistemic value explains why the epistemic agent commits a particular epistemic error. The EEE account is inspired by Douglas' and Steel's "functionalist" or "epistemic constraint" accounts of epistemic illegitimacy. I will suggest that the EEE account is able to meet two challenges that these two accounts face, while preserving the key intuition underlying both accounts. If my arguments succeed, then the EEE account provides a solution to one half of the new demarcation problem (by providing a definition of what makes the role of a non-epistemic value epistemically illegitimate) and it opens up new ways for addressing the other half (i.e. characterizing an epistemically legitimate role for non-epistemic values).

Distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate roles for values in transdisciplinary research

In this paper, we argue that the new demarcation problem does not need to be framed as the problem of defining a set of necessary and jointly sufficient criteria for distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable roles that non-epistemic values can play in science. We introduce an alternative way of framing the problem and defend an open-ended list of criteria that can be used in demarcation. Applying such criteria requires context-specific work that clarifies which principles should be used, and possibly leads to the identification of new principles - which then can be added to the open-ended list. We illustrate our approach by examining a context where distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable value influences in science is both needed and tricky: transdisciplinary research.

The new demarcation problem

There is now a general consensus amongst philosophers in the values in science literature that values necessarily play a role in core areas of scientific inquiry. We argue that attention should now be turned from debating the value-free ideal to delineating legitimate from illegitimate influences of values in science, a project we dub "The New Demarcation Problem." First, we review past attempts to demarcate the uses of values and propose a categorization of the strategies by where they seek to draw legitimacy from. Next, we propose a set of desiderata for what we take to be a satisfactory solution and present a case study where conflicting sets of values clearly impinge on science, but where the legitimacy of their influence is ambiguous. We use these desiderata and the case study to illustrate what we take to be the strengths and weaknesses of current strategies. To be clear, our goal is not to answer the question we pose, but to articulate a framework within which a solution can be judged.

Still no pill for men? Double standards & demarcating values in biomedical research

Double standards are widespread throughout biomedicine, especially in research on reproductive health. One of the clearest cases of double standards involves the feminine gendering of reproductive responsibility for contraception and the continued lack of highly effective, reversible methods for cisgender men. While the biomedical establishment accepts diversity and inclusion as important social values for clinical trials, their continued use of inequitable standards undermines their ability to challenge unfair social hierarchies by developing male contraception. Thus, the gender/sex bias present in contraceptive research raises the "New Demarcation Problem": If we accept that values can and will play important roles in science, how can we nevertheless distinguish positive influences of values from more corrosive bias? I argue that biomedical researchers ought to aim their clinical trials at equity and utilize methodologies that actually achieve that aim. More specifically, I contend that we can avoid the problem of double standards by gender/sex in contraceptive research by utilizing more equitable standards. My demarcation strategy captures dynamic interplay between values and their effects, with direct policy implications for institutions conducting, funding, and evaluating clinical trials. For male contraceptive trials, this involves shifting risk assessment from an individual model to a shared model for sexual partners.

Introduction to values and pluralism in the environmental sciences: From inferences to institutions

Philosophers of science continue to elaborate our understanding of the roles that values play in scientific reasoning, practice, and institutions. This special issue focuses on the environmental sciences, a mosaic of fields ranging from restoration ecology to forestry to climatology, unified by its attention to the relationships between humans and their habitats. It is a field that revolves around ameliorating environmental problems, aiming to support the provision of social goods and provide guidance to policymakers about how to regulate individuals and industries. Values abound in such judgments as setting the boundaries of an ecosystem, integrating the human dimensions of social-ecological systems, and collaborating with stakeholders. Since few in the field are likely to insist that these judgments can be made without reference to social values, environmental science can serve as fertile ground for exploring the ethical, social, and political terrain at the frontier of the science and values discourse.

Value management and model pluralism in climate science

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 as soon as the value-free ideal and inductive risk arguments commonly used to frame the discussions of value influence in climate science are replaced by alternative social accounts of objectivity. We consider objectivity in Longino's sense as well as strong objectivity in Harding's sense to be relevant options here, because they offer concrete proposals that can guide scientific practice in evaluating and designing so-called multi-model ensembles and, in fine, improve their capacity to quantify and express uncertainty in climate projections.

The value-ladenness of transparency in science: Lessons from Lyme disease

Both philosophers and scientists have recently promoted transparency as an important element of responsible scientific practice. Philosophers have placed particular emphasis on the ways that transparency can assist with efforts to manage value judgments in science responsibly. This paper examines a potential challenge to this approach, namely, that efforts to promote transparency can themselves be value-laden. This is particularly problematic when transparency incorporates second-order value judgments that are underwritten by the same values at stake in the desire for transparency about the first-order value judgments involved in scientific research. The paper uses a case study involving research on Lyme disease to illustrate this worry, but it responds by elucidating a range of scenarios in which transparency can still play an effective role in managing value judgments responsibly.

The algorithmic turn in conservation biology: Characterizing progress in ethically-driven sciences

As a discipline distinct from ecology, conservation biology emerged in the 1980s as a rigorous science focused on protecting biodiversity. Two algorithmic breakthroughs in information processing made this possible: place-prioritization algorithms and geographical information systems. They provided defensible, data-driven methods for designing reserves to conserve biodiversity that obviated the need for largely intuitive and highly problematic appeals to ecological theory at the time. But the scientific basis of these achievements and whether they constitute genuine scientific progress has been criticized. We counter by pointing out important inaccuracies about the science and rejecting the apparent theory-first focus. More broadly, the case study reveals significant limitations of the predominant epistemic-semantic conceptions of scientific progress and the considerable merits of pragmatic, practically-oriented accounts.

Values in early-stage climate engineering: The ethical implications of "doing the research"

Calls for research on climate engineering have increased in the last two decades, but there remains widespread agreement that many climate engineering technologies (in particular, forms involving global solar radiation management) present significant ethical risks and require careful governance. However, proponents of research argue, ethical restrictions on climate engineering research should not be imposed in early-stage work like in silico modeling studies. Such studies, it is argued, do not pose risks to the public, and the knowledge gained from them is necessary for assessing the risks and benefits of climate engineering technologies. I argue that this position, which I call the "broad research-first" stance, cannot be maintained in light of the entrance of nonepistemic values in climate modeling. I analyze the roles that can be played by nonepistemic political and ethical values in the design, tuning, and interpretation of climate models. Then, I argue that, in the context of early-stage climate engineering research, the embeddedness of values will lead to value judgments that could harm stakeholder groups or impose researcher values on non-consenting populations. I conclude by calling for more robust reflection on the ethics and governance of early-stage climate engineering research.

Knowledge, behaviour, and policy: questioning the epistemic presuppositions of applying behavioural science in public policymaking

The aim of this article is to question the epistemic presuppositions of applying behavioural science in public policymaking. Philosophers of science who have examined the recent applications of the behavioural sciences to policy have contributed to discussions on causation, evidence, and randomised controlled trials. These have focused on epistemological and methodological questions about the reliability of scientific evidence and the conditions under which we can predict that a policy informed by behavioural research will achieve the policymakers' goals. This paper argues that the philosophical work of Helen Longino can also help us to have a better and fuller understanding of the knowledge which the behavioural sciences provide. The paper advances an analysis of the knowledge claims that are made in the context of policy applications of behavioural science and compares them with the behavioural research on which they are based. This allows us to show that behavioural policy and the debates accompanying it are based on an oversimplified understanding of what knowledge behavioural science actually provides. Recognising this problem is important as arguments that justify reliance on the behavioural sciences in policy typically presume this simplification.

On value-laden science

Philosophical work on values in science is held back by widespread ambiguity about how values bear on scientific 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 work, using it to clarify one version of the argument from inductive risk. The claim that non-epistemic values must play a role in scientific choices that run inductive risk makes most sense as a claim about values being needed to justify such choices. The argument from inductive risk is not unique: many philosophical arguments about values in science can be more clearly understood and assessed by paying close attention to how values and choices are related.

Enzyme classification and the entanglement of values and epistemic standards

This paper investigates the case of enzyme classification to evaluate different ideals for regulating values in science. I show that epistemic and non-epistemic considerations are inevitably and untraceably entangled in enzyme classification, and argue that this has significant implications for the two main kinds of views on values in science, namely, Epistemic Priority Views and Joint Satisfaction Views. More precisely, I argue that the case of enzyme classification poses a problem for the usability and descriptive accuracy of these two views. The paper ends by suggesting that these two views provide different but complementary perspectives, and that both are useful for evaluating values in science.

Epistemic risks in cancer screening: Implications for ethics and policy

Cancer screening is the subject of much debate; while screening has the potential to save lives by identifying and treating cancers in early stages, it is also the case that not all cancers cause symptoms, and the diagnosis of these cancers can lead to unnecessary treatments and subsequent side-effects and complications. This paper explores the relationships between epistemic risks in cancer diagnosis and screening, the social organization of medical research and practice, and policy making; it does this by examining 2018 recommendations by the United States Preventative Services Task Force that patients make individualized, autonomy-based decisions about cancer screening on the basis of discussions with their physicians. While the paper focuses on prostate cancer screening, the issues that it raises are relevant to other cancer screening programs, especially breast cancer. The paper argues that prostate cancer screening-and, more generally, the process of risk assessment for prostate cancer-is pervaded by epistemic risks that reflect value judgments and that the pervasiveness of these epistemic risks creates significant and under-explored difficulties for physician-patient communication and the achievement of autonomous patient decision making.

Taxonomy and conservation science: interdependent and value-laden

The relation between conservation science and taxonomy is typically seen as a simple dependency of the former on the latter. This dependency is assumed to be strictly one-way to avoid normative concerns from conservation science inappropriately affecting the descriptive discipline of taxonomy. In this paper, I argue against this widely assumed standard view on the relation between these two disciplines by highlighting two important roles for conservation scientists in scientific decisions that are part of the internal stages of taxonomy. I show that these roles imply that the two disciplines should be interdependent and that value-judgments should play a substantial role in both.

Philosophical import of non-epistemic values in clinical trials and data interpretation

In this essay, I argue that at least in two phases of pharmaceutical research, especially while assessing the adequacy of the accumulated data and its interpretation, the influence of non-epistemic values is necessary. I examine a specific case from the domain of pharmaceutical research and demonstrate that there are multiple competing sets of values which may legitimately or illegitimately influence different phases of the inquiry. In such cases, the choice of the appropriate set of values-epistemic as well as non-epistemic-should be made on the basis of the set's viability to promote specific epistemic and social aims of the research, in the case at hand, rather than other competing aims. I put forth an account which addresses two philosophically significant and interrelated questions in the context of values in science debates: (i) which aim should be prioritized when there are different stakeholders who try to achieve competing but, sometimes, conflicting goals; and (ii) what should be the criteria according to which the prioritization of a particular goal(s) over other competing goals can be determined? I argue that both these questions can be addressed by invoking the principle of non-arbitrariness and the mere means principle and self-determination right. The philosophical import of raising and addressing these questions from an ethical perspective is that this approach leads to a better understanding of problems in today's pharmaceutical research and guides us in efforts to alleviate these problems.

The abundant world: Paul Feyerabend's metaphysics of science

The goal of this paper is to provide an interpretation of Feyerabend's metaphysics of science as found in late works like Conquest of Abundance and Tyranny of Science. Feyerabend's late metaphysics consists of an attempt to criticize and provide a systematic alternative to traditional scientific realism, a package of views he sometimes referred to as "scientific materialism." Scientific materialism is objectionable not only on metaphysical grounds, nor because it provides a poor ground for understanding science, but because it implies problematic claims about the epistemic and cultural authority of science, claims incompatible with situating science properly in democratic societies. I show how Feyerabend's metaphysical view, which I call "the abundant world" or "abundant realism," constitute a sophisticated and challenging form of ontological pluralism that makes interesting connections with contemporary philosophy of science and issues of the political and policy role of science in a democratic society.

Values, standpoints, and scientific/intellectual movements

Feminist standpoint empiricism contributes to the criticism of the value-free ideal by offering a unique analysis of how non-epistemic values can play not only a legitimate but also an epistemically productive role in science. While the inductive risk argument focuses on the role of non-epistemic values in the acceptance of hypotheses, standpoint empiricism focuses on the role of non-epistemic values in the production of evidence. And while many other analyses of values in science focus on the role of non-epistemic values either in an individual scientist's decision making or in the distribution of research efforts in scientific communities, standpoint empiricism focuses on the role of non-epistemic values in the building of scientific/intellectual movements.

John Dewey's pragmatist alternative to the belief-acceptance dichotomy

Defenders of value-free science appeal to cognitive attitudes as part of a wedge strategy, to mark a distinction between science proper and the uses of science for decision-making, policy, etc. Distinctions between attitudes like belief and acceptance have played an important role in defending the value-free ideal. In this paper, I will explore John Dewey's pragmatist philosophy of science as an alternative to the philosophical framework the wedge strategy rests on. Dewey does draw significant and useful distinctions between different sorts of cognitive attitudes taken by inquirers, but none can be used to support the wedge strategy.

'Holding' and 'endorsing' claims in the course of scientific activities

My principal aims are to show that holding, adopting and endorsing (definitions of which I provide) are distinct cognitive attitudes that may be taken towards claims at different moments of scientific activities, and that none of them are reducible to acceptance (as defined by Jonathan Cohen); to explore in detail the differences between holding and accepting, using the controversies about GMOs to provide illustrations; and to draw some implications pertinent to democratic decision-making concerning public policies about science and technology, and to the responsibilities that scientists thereby incur.