Science and values

In contemporary histories of psychology, William Moulton Marston is remembered for helping develop the lie detector test. He is better remembered in the history of popular culture for creating the comic book superhero Wonder Woman. In his time, however, he contributed to psychological research in deception, basic emotions, abnormal psychology, sexuality, and consciousness. He was also a radical feminist with connections to women's rights movements. Marston's work is an instructive case for philosophers of science on the relation between science and values. Although Marston's case provides further evidence of the role that feminist values can play in scientific work, it also poses challenges to philosophical accounts of value-laden science. Marston's work exemplifies standard views about feminist value-laden research in that his feminist values help him both to criticize the research of others and create novel psychological concepts and research techniques. His scientific work includes an account of the nature of psycho-emotional health that leads to normative conclusions for individual values and conduct and for society and culture, a direction of influence that is relatively under-theorized in the literature. To understand and evaluate Marston's work requires an approach that treats science and values as mutually influencing; it also requires that we understand the relationship between science advising and political advocacy in value-laden science.

The paper addresses the question of normative analysis of the value-based aspects of nursing. In our perspective, values in science may be distinguished into: a) epistemic when related to the goals of truth and objectivity; b) non-epistemic when related to social, cultural or political aspects. Furthermore, values can be called constitutive when necessary for a scientific enterprise, or contextual when contingently associated with science. Analysis of the roles of the various forms of values and models of knowledge translation provides the ground to understand the specific role of values in nursing. A conceptual framework has been built to classify some of the classical perspectives on nursing knowledge and to examine the relationships between values and different forms of knowledge in nursing. It follows that adopting a normative perspective in the analysis of nursing knowledge provides key-elements to identify its proper dimension.

Feminist and Indigenous philosophies of science have much to dialogue about regarding the relationship between science and consent. Some Indigenous scientific traditions emphasize consent as a significant characteristic of empirical inquiry. Consent means that responsibilities are acted out in ways that are accountable to the animacy of diverse beings and entities of the world. Responsibility and consent are significant to the role of science in governance systems, or its governance value. Consent is not a restriction or regulation on science, nor is consent a characteristic that merely increases the objectivity of empirical inquiry. By focusing on Indigenous accounts of knowledge and science, the essay builds concepts for understanding science and consent.

Examinaremos neste artigo o papel dos aspectos não epistêmicos na filosofia da ciência atual, a partir dos filósofos Bas van Fraassen e Larry Laudan. Assim, inicialmente retomaremos a noção de reconstrução racional no empirismo lógico, para ilustrar a concepção contra a qual van Fraassen e Laudan colocam-se: a ideia de que a filosofia da ciência é uma epistemologia com exemplos científicos. Concepção essa que implica trato privilegiado dos fatores epistêmicos em prejuízo dos não epistêmicos, por exemplo, valores cognitivos, pragmáticos, sociais etc. Depois, abordaremos a teoria pragmática da explicação em van Fraassen, a qual está no bojo dessa preocupação com o domínio não epistêmico. Enfim, veremos a distinção, feita por Laudan, entre valores epistêmicos e cognitivos como uma chave importante para uma teoria
da ciência voltada à prática científica e à história da ciência, sem incorrer nas visões recebidas, seja do neopositivismo, seja do realismo científico.

Recent statements of the responsibilities of scientists have strengthened the responsibilities of scientists towards the societies in which they pursue their research. Scientists are now expected to do more than treat their experimental subjects ethically and communicate their results. They are also expected to benefit humanity. In a shift from the predominant views of the second half of the 20th century, social responsibility is now yoked to the freedom to pursue scientific research, rather than opposed to such freedom. First I will describe this change and some of its causes. Then I will address the fact that much of our institutional research oversight infrastructure was put in place with a now-outdated understanding of the societal responsibilities and freedoms of scientists. Finally, I will make some recommendations on how to shift the structures we have to be more in tune with the current conceptualization of scientific freedom and social responsibility.

Lieber Herr Professor Kaldewey, sehr geehrte Damen und Herren, für die Einladung und die Möglichkeit, heute zu Ihnen über den Beitrag der Wissenschaft zum Umgang mit großen gesellschaftlichen Herausforderungen zu sprechen, danke ich Ihnen herzlich. Als ich diese Einladung angenommen habe, war ich noch davon ausgegangen, Ihnen über ein Papier des Wissenschaftsrats zu diesem Thema berichten zu können, das im Frühjahr diesen Jahres hätte verabschiedet werden sollen. Die Beratungen darüber im Wissenschaftsrat waren kontroverser als erwartet und sind noch nicht zu einem Abschluss gekommen. Obwohl ich in diesem Prozess und vor allem in den Diskussionen der Arbeitsgruppe, die die Empfehlungen des Wissenschaftsrats vorbereitet hat, viel gelernt habe, kann ich mich heute also nicht auf eine Beschlusslage des Gremiums, für das ich arbeite, berufen. Vielmehr spreche ich zu Ihnen als Privatperson. Ich hoffe, mein Vortrag findet dennoch Ihr Interesse und regt zum Nachdenken an. Dass sich politische Diskussionen um die Förderung der Wissenschaft explizit mit deren Beitrag zum Umgang mit großen gesellschaftlichen Herausforderungen befassen, ist eine noch relativ neue Erscheinung. Neu ist daran nicht, dass staatliche Investitionen in die Wissenschaft überhaupt für begründungsbedürftig gehalten werden. Das war sicher schon immer so. Nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg war lange Zeit eine Denkschrift mit dem Titel

Philosophy of Science After Feminism is an important contribution to philosophy of science, in that it argues for the central relevance of advances from previous work in feminist philosophy of science and articulates a new vision for philosophy of science going in to the future. Kourany's vision of philosophy of science's future as ``socially engaged and socially responsible'' and addressing questions of the social responsibility of science itself has much to recommend it. I focus the book articulation of an ethical-epistemic ideal for science, the Ideal of Socially Responsible Science, compare it to recent work in the same vein by Heather Douglas, and argue for some advantages of Kourany's approach. I then ask some critical question about the view, particularly with respect to the source of values that are to be integrated into science and the status of values that are to be so integrated. I argue that Kourany is too sanguine about where the values that inquirers will use come from and that these values seem to be accorded too fixed a status in her account.

The drug approval process is fraught with inductive risk. Regulators must make a prediction about whether or not an experimental drug will be effective and safe. Such inductive risk has important practical consequences, and so non-epistemic values about the importance of these consequences impact the regulatory decisions. To balance the demands of the non-epistemic values, regulators must perform an ‘inductive risk calculus’. In the American context this inductive risk calculus is not well-managed. For a variety of fine-grained methodological reasons, the epistemic standard with which the FDA assesses experimental pharmaceuticals is low. This chapter discuses these problems and argues that the inductive risk calculus for pharmaceutical regulation should be re-tuned in a variety of ways.

Gender-medicine has been very successful in discovering gaps in medical knowledge, disclosing biases in earlier research, and generating new results. It has superseded a more androcentric and sexist medicine. Yet, its development should not be understood in terms of a further approximation of value-freedom. Rather, it is a case of better value-laden science due to an enhanced pluralism in medicine and society. This interpretation is based on an account of the origins of gender-medicine in the feminist women’s health movement and an analysis of the debate on inclusion of women in clinical trials. Consequently, the history of gender-medicine provides support for a procedural account of objectivity that stresses the importance of a diversity of perspectives.

Phronetic organizational research is an approach to the study of management and organizations focusing on ethics and power. It is based on a contemporary interpretation of the Aristotelian concept phronesis, usually as ‘prudence’. Phronesis is the ability to think and act in relation to values, to deliberate about ‘things that are good or bad for humans’ in the words of Aristotle (1976:1140a24–b12). Phronetic organizational research effectively provides answers to the following four value-rational questions, for specific problematics in management and organization studies: 1. Where are we going with this specific management problematic? 2. Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? 3. Is this development desirable? 4. What, if anything, should we do about it?

Haack was very surprised to be asked by TARKA, a Yoga journal, if they might reprint this article. But given that they were interested in her ideas, she agreed.

The paper articulates six signs that the respect due to the achievements of the science has transmuted into scientistic over-deference to science.

This article will discuss how two theoretical frameworks can be useful in the analysis of conflict situations in social work practice. By viewing situations from the perspective of competing and differing values, social workers are able to come to respect the positions of those with whom they are in conflict. The respect that emanates from being empathic and validating towards another's values is crucial for negotiating resolution to difficult conflict situations.

Die Wertfreiheit der Wissenschaft gilt als Bedingung ihrer Objektivität. Eine Analyse des entsprechenden Wertfreiheitsideals zeigt jedoch, dass dieses auf einer Reihe von Voraussetzungen beruht – wie der Trennbarkeit kognitiver von anderen Werten und der epistemischen Unabhängigkeit der Rechtfertigung – die sich als problematisch erweisen. Eine Fallstudie zur Frauengesundheitsforschung untermauert zudem, dass die Möglichkeiten für Werteinflüsse in der Wissenschaft weit komplexer sind, als dieses Ideal zu erfassen vermag. Daher bietet ein sozialepistemologischer Ansatz, der auf Wertvielfalt statt Wertfreiheit setzt, die bessere Grundlage für Objektivität: Epistemische Vertrauenswürdigkeit erfordert nicht Neutralität, sondern einen pluralistischen und konsensorientierten kritischen Prozess.

Recently, invasion biologists have argued that some of the skepticism expressed in the scientific and lay literatures about the risks of invasive species and other aspects of the consensus within invasion biology is a kind of science denialism. This paper presents an argument that, while some claims made by skeptics of invasion biology share important features with paradigm cases of science denialism, others express legitimate ethical concerns that, even if one disagrees, should not be dismissed as denialist. Further, this case illustrates a more general point about ethical disagreement within sciences like invasion biology that constitutively pursue non-epistemic goals and values. While philosophers of science have argued that epistemic disagreement within science can be productive as heterogeneous epistemic communities “hedge their bets,” the case of invasion biology shows how non-epistemic or ethical disagreement within sciences, while carrying significant risks, can also be epistemically and non- epistemically valuable.

This paper supports calls for an increased integration of patients into taxonomic decision- making in psychiatry by arguing that their exclusion constitutes a special kind of epistemic injustice: Pre-emptive testimonial injustice, which precludes the opportunity for testimony due to a wrongly presumed irrelevance or lack of expertise. Here, this presumption is misguided for two reasons: (1) the role of values in psychiatric classification and (2) the potential function of first-person knowledge as a corrective means against implicitly value- laden, inaccurate, or incomplete diagnostic criteria sets. This kind of epistemic injustice leads to preventable epistemic losses in psychiatric classification, diagnosis, and treatment.

In recent years, pragmatism in general and John Dewey in particular have been of increasing interest to philosophers of science. Dewey's work provides an interesting alternative package of views to those which derive from the logical empiricists and their critics, on problems of both traditional and more recent vintage. Dewey's work ought to be of special interest to recent philosophers of science committed to the program of analyzing ``science in practice.'' The core of Dewey's philosophy of science is his theory of inquiry---what he called ``logic.'' There is a major lacuna in the literature on this point, however: no contemporary philosophers of science have engaged with Dewey's logical theory, and scholars of Dewey's logic have rarely made connections with philosophy of science. This paper aims to fill this gap, to correct some significant errors in the interpretation of key ideas in Dewey's logical theory, and to show how Dewey's logic provides resources for a philosophy of science.

This paper reviews current debates in social epistemology about the relations between knowledge and consensus. These relations are philosophically interesting on their own, but also have practical consequences, as consensus takes an increasingly significant role in informing public decision making. The paper addresses the following questions. When is a consensus attributable to an epistemic community? Under what conditions may we legitimately infer that a consensual view is knowledge-based or otherwise epistemically justified? Should consensus be the aim of scientific inquiry, and if so, what kind of consensus? How should dissent be handled? It is argued that a legitimate inference that a theory is correct from the fact that there is a scientific consensus on it requires taking into consideration both cognitive properties of the theory as well as social properties of the consensus. The last section of the paper reviews computational models of consensus formation.

En esta investigación abordo desde la perspectiva sociológica el problema sustantivo de las relaciones entre la ciencia, la tecnología y la sociedad. Inicialmente, presento el interrogante teórico principal y relato el estado de la cuestión y de la discusión en el estudio de las relaciones existentes entre la ciencia, la tecnología y la sociedad. Después, muestro los objetivos, la hipótesis de trabajo, la metodología y las características generales de un objeto de estudio empíricamente relevante como lo es la controversia desatada en torno a la supuesta viabilidad de los organismos modificados genéticamente. Seguidamente, expongo cómo los distintos productos y prácticas derivados del paradigma dominante de la nueva ingeniería genética influyen en el devenir de las actuales sociedades occidentales. Inversamente y con posterioridad, analizo cómo los diversos factores sociales, políticos y económicos posibilitan y condicionan la creación y el desarrollo supuestamente lógico e interno de estos productos y procedimientos. Por último, me interrogo acerca de cómo es posible que, cuando menos de momento, no se haya asistido a un cierre dialogado y consensuado de esta misma polémica fundamental. En concreto, examino los tres modelos interpretativos que se demuestran más relevantes y clarificadores. Así, la posible clausura futura de esta polémica podría ser básicamente racional y empírica, principalmente interesada y sujeta a nítidas e intensas relaciones de fuerza, o esencialmente cultural y valorativa. Con lo cual, una de las cuestiones sociológicas más importantes no consiste en dilucidar qué posición científica y técnica posee más o menos razón o verdad sino en esclarecer cómo desde la mirada sociológica más crítica y reflexiva puede comprenderse y explicarse plausiblemente la existencia y la persistencia de unas posiciones científicas y técnicas tan divergentes e incluso contradictorias sobre el diagnóstico, la evaluación y la regulación de las posibles consecuencias humanas y ambientales adversas derivadas de la libre proliferación mundial de los organismos modificados genéticamente.

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.

The trustworthiness of nutrition science has been questioned recently. According to the critics, the food industry has corrupted scientists in the field. I argue that the worries that commercialization threatens the epistemic trustworthiness of nutrition science are indeed well-founded. However, it is problematic that the discussion has revolved around how funding can threaten the integrity of researchers and the methodological quality of the studies. By extending Wilholt's (2013) account of epistemic trustworthiness, I argue that when assessing the epistemic trustworthiness of research that forms the basis for different health policy measures, it is necessary to evaluate research at the macro-level and whether agenda setting advances the goals that are assigned to the field. The prevalence of commercial funding becomes problematic if it leads to a situation where the body of available evidence that is used for making health policy decisions does not reflect the shared sense of what epistemic and non-epistemic goals of the inquiry are important.

This study examined the relationship between Schwartz's (1992) 10 universal values and individual differences in empathy (Davis, 1983). Trait empathy was predicted to have the strongest positive relationship with benevolence values and the strongest negative relationship with achievement values. The pattern of correlations between empathy and the 10 values was closely associated with the predicted rank order of the correlations based on the Schwartz value system, but also varied slightly between a non-religious university (n = 284)and a religious university (n = 179).

Once one abandons the ideal of value-free, impartial science, the question of how to distinguish biased from legitimately value-laden science arises. To approach this "new demarcation problem", I argue that one should distinguish different uses of "bias" in a first step: a narrow sense of bias as systematic deviation from the truth, and a wider sense that covers any kind of tendency impacting scientific reasoning. Secondly, the narrow sense exemplifies an ontological notion of bias, which understands bias in terms of deviation from an impartial ideal outcome. I propose to replace it with an epistemic notion of bias, which understands biased research as research that we have good reasons to suspect could have been (done) systematically better. From a socio-epistemic perspective, such good reasons to expect better can be found in a lack of responsiveness to conventional standards and/or critical discourse in the scientific community. In short, bias in an epistemic sense consists in a deviation, not from truth but from current best practice. While this turns bias into something that is dependent on time and context, it allows for value-laden research to be unbiased, if there are no good reasons to expect this research to be better.

As scientific research moves increasingly to the private sector, the social organization of science undergoes important transformations. Focusing on the production of ignorance, agnotology has been a fruitful approach to understanding the social and epistemic consequences of the recent commercialization of scientific research. Despite their important contributions, scholars working on agnotology seem to hold implicit normative commitments that are in tension with their descriptive accounts of ignorance-constructive practices. The main aim of the paper is to uncover these commitments and to expose the emerging tensions. Thus, the paper begins an exploration into normative aspects of the studies of ignorance. In particular, it shows that agnotology still needs the support of a well-articulated normative approach capable of identifying and evaluating the epistemic and social concerns raised by the private funding and performance of science.

Resiliency is the ability to survive, or even thrive, during adversity.  It is a key construct within both humanistic and positive psychology, but each sees it from a contrasting vantage.  Positive psychology decontextualizes resilience by judging it as a virtue regardless of circumstance, while humanistic psychology tends to view it in a more holistic way in relationship to other virtues and environmental affordances, clarifying how resiliency can actually be either a virtue or a vice depending upon circumstances.  Adolf Hitler is presented as an example of a resilient person who would not be seen as virtuous, while the U.S. Army Comprehensive Soldier Fitness study training warfighters in resiliency illustrates possible ethical problems with a decontextualized view of resiliency.

The thesis that the practice and evaluation of science requires social value-judgment, that good science is not value-free or value-neutral but value-laden, has been gaining acceptance among philosophers of science. The main proponents of the value-ladenness of science rely on either arguments from the underdetermination of theory by evidence or arguments from inductive risk. Both arguments share the premise that we should only consider values once the evidence runs out, or where it leaves uncertainty; they adopt a criterion of {lexical priority of evidence over values}. The motivation behind lexical priority is to avoid reaching conclusions on the basis of wishful thinking rather than good evidence. {The problem of wishful thinking} is indeed real---it would be an egregious error to adopt beliefs about the world because they comport with how one would prefer the world to be. I will argue, however, that giving lexical priority to evidential considerations over values is a mistake, and unnecessary for adequately avoiding the problem of wishful thinking. Values have a deeper role to play in science than proponents of the underdetermination and inductive risk arguments have suggested.

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.

The technosciences are objective, value-free, rational, and inevitable: these are the myths that this course will question. Our human values and social concerns have deep connections to science and technology. This course will explore those connections from a variety of philosophical perspectives. The development of science and technology involve personal, social, and political decisions. In this course, you will learn to question whether those developments are responsible and appropriate.

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 claim is that economists who ignore or downplay catastrophic risks in their representations of uncertainty likely fall afoul of ethical constraints on scientists acting as policy advisors. Such scientists have duties to honestly articulate uncertainties and manage (some) inductive risks, or the risks of being wrong in different ways.

Recent philosophers of science have not only revived the classical argument from inductive risk but extended it. I argue that some of the purported extensions do not fit cleanly within the schema of the original argument, and I discuss the problem of overdiagnosis of disease due to expanded disease definitions in order to show that there are some risks in the research process that are important and that very clearly fall outside of the domain of inductive risk. Finally, I introduce the notion of epistemic risk in order to characterize such risks.

Prompted by the thesis that an organism’s umwelt possesses not just a descriptive dimension, but a normative one as well, some have sought to annex semiotics with ethics. Yet the pronouncements made in this vein have consisted mainly in rehearsing accepted moral intuitions, and have failed to concretely further our knowledge of why or how a creature comes to order objects in its environment in accordance with axiological charges of value or disvalue. For want of a more explicit account, theorists writing on the topic have relied almost exclusively on semiotic insights about perception originally designed as part of a sophisticated refutation of idealism. The end result, which has been a form of direct givenness, has thus been far from convincing. In an effort to bring substance to the right-headed suggestion that values are rooted in the biological and conform to species-specific requirements, we present a novel conception that strives to make explicit the elemental structure underlying umwelt normativity. Building and expanding on the seminal work of Ayn Rand in metaethics, we describe values as an intertwined lattice which takes a creature’s own embodied life as its ultimate standard; and endeavour to show how, from this, all subsequent valuations can in principle be determined.

With twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy of science’s unfolding acceptance of the nature of scientific inquiry being value-laden, the persistent worry has been that there are no means for legitimate negotiation of the social or non-epistemic values that enter into science. The rejection of
the value-free ideal in science has thereby been coupled with the spectres of indiscriminate relativism and bias in scientific inquiry. I challenge this view in the context of recently expressed concerns regarding Canada’s death of evidence controversy. The worry, raised by Stathis Psillos, is that as constructivist accounts of science demoted the previously secure status of evidence for drawing justified conclusions in science, we were left with no rational delineation between the right and wrong values for science.
The implication for the death of evidence controversy is that we may have no rational grounds for claiming that the Canadian Government is wrong to interfere with scientific enterprise. But he does offer another avenue for reaching the conclusion that the wrong social values are directing the current stifling of some sectors of Canadian science. Psillos draws from stand-point epistemologies to devise a salient defence of 'valuing evidence’ as a universalizable social value. That is, government bodies ought to enable scientific research via adequate funding as well as political non-interference. In this paper, I counter that (i) non-epistemic values can be rationally evaluated and that (ii) standpoint epistemology’s universalizable standpoint
provides an inadequate framework for negotiating social values in science. Regarding (i), I draw from the evidence-based medicine debate in philosophy of medicine and from feminist empiricist investigations into the science
–values relationship in order to make the argument for empirically driven value arbitration. If social values can be
rationally chosen in the context of justification, then we can have grounds for charging the Canadian leadership with being ‘at war with science’ . (ii) I further argue that my recommended empiricist methodology is preferable to Psillos’s search for universalizable perspectives for negotiating social values in science because the latter method permits little more than the trivial conclusion that evidence is valuable to science.

For over fifty years, successive waves of critique have underscored that the apolitical character of much of Political Science research betrays the founding mission of the discipline to have science serve democracy. The Caucus for a New Political Science was originally based on such a critique, and the Perestroika movement in the discipline included a call for more problem-driven as opposed to theory- or method-driven work that would better connect Political Science research to ongoing political struggles. In recent years, movements for a public Sociology and public Anthropology as well as dissonant movements in Economics and related fields have added to the insistence that social science research was too often disconnected from the real world. Phronetic Social Science has emerged out of the ferment for change in the social sciences, starting with the much-debated book by Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter (Cambridge 2001). Flyvbjerg critiqued the social sciences for mimicking the natural sciences while proposing an alternative approach that focuses research on helping people address the problems they are facing in the context they are facing them. Today, Phronetic Social Science goes beyond the call for an alternative approach to social inquiry and its growing adherents are providing evidence that this alternative approach to doing research can enrich the social sciences by more effectively connecting research to efforts to address real world problems as people experience them. This essay provides a genealogy of efforts to connect Political Science to politics, a review of the major critiques of mainstream research, an explication of the rationale for more problem-driven, mixed methods research, a specification of the key principles of the phronetic approach, and examples of its application in the public realm. The essay concludes with implications for realizing a more political Political Science by way of taking a phronetic approach.

This paper evaluates the application of evidentiary standards originating from evidence-based medicine in nutrition advice. It shows that it is problematic to criticize nutrition recommendations for not being based on randomized controlled trials. Due to practical, ethical and methodological and reasons, it is difficult to conduct rigorous randomized controlled trials for acquiring evidence that is relevant for achieving the goals of population-level nutrition recommendations. Given the non-epistemic goals of the dietary recommendations, criteria of acceptable evidence should be adapted to the goals of the practice and the practical, ethical, and methodological constraints of the situation.

This paper focuses on the debate of underdetermination in science, and asks the descriptive question: is objectivity possible in science? I introduce the problem of underdetermination in science and articulate a related argument presented by philosopher Helen Longino against the possibility for objectivity (traditionally understood) in science. In opposition to Longino, I aim to salvage the possibility of important objectivity. I begin from Likelihoodism – a normative view about the form that evidential reasoning should take. After presenting different defenses of that view, I show how it implies a descriptive claim – the Likelihood Principle – that opposes Longino’s cynicism about the descriptive possibility of objectivity in science. The Likelihood Principle compares the likelihoods of two hypotheses in relation to a body of evidence and says which hypothesis (if any) is consequently favored. I argue that “favours” be interpreted as “objectively favours”, implying it is possible for some evidence to objectively favour one hypothesis over another without appeal to values. In addition to arguing that we should then infer a descriptive objectivism from this, I interpret a case-study using the Likelihood Principle to illustrate how applications of it can be objective. I discuss what follows for the debate in the values and science literature, including what follows with respect to Longino’s views.

The scientific community takes for granted a view of science that may be called standard empiricism.  This holds that the basic intellectual aim of science is truth, nothing being presupposed about the truth, the basic method being to assess theories with respect to evidence.  A basic tenet of the view is that science must not accept any thesis about the world as a part of scientific knowledge independent of evidence, let alone in violation of evidence.  But physics only accepts unified theories, and persistently rejects infinitely many ad hoc rivals that fit the phenomena even better.  In persistently rejecting these infinitely many empirically more successful rival theories, physics thereby makes a substantial assumption about the universe – it is such that all ad hoc theories are false – an assumption that is accepted implicitly independently of evidence, even in a sense against the evidence.  That contradicts standard empiricism.  The scientific community needs to adopt a new conception of science that represents the assumption of physics as a hierarchy of assumptions, thus facilitating the improvement of the assumption that is made, as science proceeds.

Normatively inappropriate scientific dissent prevents warranted closure of scientific controversies, and confuses the public about the state of policy-relevant science, such as anthropogenic climate change. Against recent criticism by de Melo-Martín and Intemann of the viability of any conception of normatively inappropriate dissent, I identify three conditions for normatively inappropriate dissent : its generation process is politically illegitimate; it imposes an unjust distribution of inductive risks; it adopts evidential thresholds outside an accepted range. I supplement these conditions with an inference-to-the-best-explanation account of knowledge-based consensus and dissent to allow policy makers to reliably identify unreliable scientific dissent.

We outline the perspective of ‘critical neuroscience’: a stance of informed critique pertaining to neuroscientific methods, practices, concepts, discursive effects, formative backstories, and societal impacts. Critical neuroscience brings together work from various vantage points with the aim to engage neuroscience practitioners as well as decision makers, stakeholders and the public to convince them of the feasibility of a vigilant critical stance towards the entirety of the ‘Neuro complex’, including its impacts on scholarship, academia and wider society. The text is a programmatic outline which traces major lines of influence and theoretical backgrounds and sketches working examples. It is an invitation to neuroscientists and critical scholars from different fields to engage in collaborative reflection on the present and future of human neuroscience in its varied and dynamic socio-cultural surroundings. The chapter is a revised and updated version of chapter 1 of our volume Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience (Wiley-Blackwell 2012).

Philosophers have recently argued, against a prevailing orthodoxy, that standards of knowledge partly depend on a subject’s interests; the more is at stake for the subject, the less she is in a position to know. This view, which is dubbed “Pragmatic Encroachment‎” has historical and conceptual connections to arguments in philosophy of science against the received model of science as value free. I bring the two debates together. I argue that Pragmatic Encroachment and the model of value-laden science reinforce each other. Drawing on Douglas’ argument about the indispensability of value judgments in science, and psychological evidence about people’s inability to objectively reason about what they care about, I introduce a novel argument for Pragmatic Encroachment.

Stella Ghervas (2018). "'European Values': Decoding the Palimpsest of EU Treaties", 25th International Conference of Europeanists, Council for European Studies, Chicago, March 2018.

Abstract
"In the wake of the economic and political crisis that gripped the EU in recent years, advocates of "ever greater union" have increasingly relied on ethical justifications for the European integration. The founding treaties have called not only for a common market but a "community of values" , notably "peace, reconciliation, democracy, and human rights". Among them, peace has been a mainstay—and a successful one—for several decades. Despite this, the European leadership has regularly shown extraordinary self-doubt in times of crisis. Why this paradox? This paper argues that such questioning is intrinsic to the European system of political values, none of which are unique per se, but which form a distinctive combination. Taking an approach over the longue durée, the paper will examine the following questions: Why in the face of all odds and dramatic failures, have political leaders periodically attempted new projects for the peaceful unification of the Old Continent? Conversely, why are those values flagging today? It will also argue that the ideal of peace, if adequately rekindled, has the potential for drawing the political leaders and citizens of the member states back to a pan-European polity. It will end by exploring the political opportunities, but also the real risks, inherent in the fulfillment of European values, at a time of fragmentation and pressure, both internal and external."