Author Archives: Mike Thicke

Barbara Forrest’s “The non-epistemology of intelligent design: its implications for public policy”¹ is at the center of what has been dubbed “The Synthese Affair“. The bulk of her paper is a sustained and often dismissive account of Francis Beckwith’s arguments in support of Intelligent Design. Although I think Forrest’s attacks constitute a relatively minor transgression of academic norms, I find myself perplexed by some (though by no means all, or even many) of her substantive arguments. I will be teaching a unit on Intelligent Design for an undergraduate course this year, so the purpose of this post is to sort out my ideas on some issues. I would greatly appreciate feedback.

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In Heather Douglas’s Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal (you can find a video of Douglas speaking about her book here), she claims that there is no practical way to draw a distinction between scientists-as-scientists and scientists-as-advisors. That is, you cannot cleanly separate the descriptive, empirical claims of scientists from their prescriptive advice. Mainstream philosophy of science, she claims, has gone astray since the 1940s in supporting a view of science as value-free, and scientists as detached and objective. Douglas not only argues that we need to acknowledge the unavoidable value-ladenness of science, but that values are not necessarily a negative influence on science. Rather, scientists have an ethical obligation to make value judgments in their work.

Here is one of her examples:

Suppose a scientist is examining epidemiological records in conjunction with air quality standards and the scientist notices that a particular pollutant is always conjoined with a spike in respiratory deaths. Suppose that this pollutant is cheap to control or eliminate (a new and simple technology has just been developed). Should the scientist make the empirical claim (or, if on a science advisory panel reviewing this evidence, support the claim) that this pollutant is a public health threat? Certainly, there is uncertainty in the empirical evidence here. Epidemiological records are always fraught with problems of reliability, and indeed, we have only a correlation between the pollutant and the health effect. The scientist, in being honest, should undoubtedly acknowledge these uncertainties. To pretend certainty on such evidence would be dishonest and deceptive. But the scientist can also choose whether or not the emphasize the importance of the uncertainties (81).

Douglas presents this as a slam-dunk case, and has constructed the situation, by assuming a cheap and easy fix, to be unproblematic. However, I find the implications of this argument deeply troubling.

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Since the early 2000s, academics, particularly in the United Kingdom, have advocated and attempted to implement a boycott of Israeli academic institutions and/or academics themselves. This boycott has been compared, by both its advocates and detractors, with a similar boycott targeted at South Africa in the early 1990s.

Twice this year debates have erupted on PHILOS-L, the European philosophy listserve, related to the academic boycott. The first, in early January, was prompted by a call for applications to a new Israeli educational institution. The second, in early March, was prompted by a link to Judith Butler’s recent talk as part of “Israeli Apartheid Week” in Toronto. A common point in both of these threads was the special nature of academia in relation to boycotts. There is, the argument goes, something intrinsic to the nature of academic freedom that makes academic boycotts, separate from economic boycotts or sanctions, particularly problematic.

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A couple weeks ago we linked to a letter in Science calling for climate scientists to engage the public and media more vigorously, in order to “counter misinformation and deception.” As Greg Lusk mentioned in his post, this is similar to Evelyn Fox Keller’s call for increased engagement by historians and philosophers of science. However, Keller wasn’t just calling for more engagement, but better engagement. She argued that science is perceived as an elitist enterprise—a perception encouraged by scientists themselves—but in reality the scientific arguments are possible to frame in understandable and accessible terms.

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In a recent debatable Curtis asked if history and philosophy of science can be applied in socially relevant ways. The consensus answer seems to be “yes”. For instance, Rebekah Higgitt wrote,

In my view history and philosophy of science are always socially relevant for demonstrating the processes by which science is created, where science ‘sits’ within society, and how and why it – or aspects of it – have achieved their current levels of authority.

Since at least the days of the Vienna Circle, historians and philosophers in the western tradition have held to the tacit assumption that clear and careful analysis of science will contribute to a more rational society. This belief in a close link between politics and the study of science has been echoed by such figures as John Dewey, Karl Popper, and Philip Kitcher. Earlier, and more pessimistically, Thomas Hobbes believed that society would collapse if there was not an absolute monarch to make final pronouncements on scientific (and other) matters.¹

Recent events might suggest that Hobbes was on to something, as it seems that society is losing its capacity for rational debate. Browsing blogs on opposite² sides of the ideological spectrum reveals incommensurable world views on a scale never envisaged by Thomas Kuhn. Who would have thought we’d ever have competing encyclopedias? John Stewart’s “Rally to Restory Sanity” was an attempt to address this problem:

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Near the end of his wildly popular 1975 tome, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, E.O. Wilson declared that it was time for biologists to, at least temporarily, take over the study of ethics from the likes of Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls.¹ In Philip Kitcher’s classic reply, he identified four ways biology could possibly inform ethics. The first is that science could just explain how people come to accept ethical principles and make ethical judgements. The fourth is that science can be a source of ethical principles: science can tell us how we ought to behave.²

Wilson, at least in Sociobiology, could be read as merely arguing for the first way, which isn’t very controversial. However, Kitcher, considering Wilson’s further work, argued that Wilson actually endorsed all four ways. This interpretation makes sense given that Wilson wanted biology to take over ethics, not just contribute to its study. As far as I am aware, most philosophers agree with Kitcher, following David Hume, that the fourth way is simply not possible. Nothing we could ever conceivably learn from biology could inform us about which fundamental ethical principles we ought to adopt.

Now, 35 years after Wilson, we have Sam Harris:

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