Category Archives: Debatable

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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History and Philosophy of Science, even by academic standards, is a somewhat obscure discipline of the humanities.  The march of science and technology often seems to proceed regardless of any commentary, critique, or analysis from historians, philosophers, sociologists, and even policymakers. So why think there is any potential for a history and philosophy of science to become “socially relevant”?

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Physicians are trained in a science of particulars. Your bodily experiences might be unique, your preferences deserving of personal care, and your history worthy of a docudrama… but the medical evidence at your bedside was gathered in a freeze-framed panorama: randomized, controlled, and blinded. This is the science of particulars: big-picture studies that have to be individualized for you. And me. This is evidence-based medicine.

But how does this landscape represent you — person and patient?

Lets begin with semantics. What’s the difference between patient-centered, person-centered, and personalized medicine?

Patient-centered medicine revitalizes a patient’s values, preferences, and autonomy. It brings respect for patient decisions back into the clinical equation.

Person-centered medicine treats patients as… persons. Persons can suffer, worry, and hope unlike their objectified and medicalized counterparts: diseased patients.

Personalized medicine aims to truly be that science of particulars: customizing diagnoses, treatments, and prognoses based on your unique biological (i.e. genetic) architecture. Your SNPs have so much to say.

Do any of these epistemic stances make medicine more than just personalized, but personalizable? I’m not so sure. Lets leave that up for debate.

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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While I love my history and philosophy of science, and find them important for understanding the nature of modern science, I also do my best to engage with one of the only areas of public and political discourse where my historical and philosophical study of science might prove useful – science policymaking. It’s often remarked that science policy has a dual nature, or at least an inherent ambiguity, as the term covers both scientific input on policy-making (“science for policy”), and policy-making for working scientists (“policy for science”).  Within those two very widely defined areas there is everything from crafting environmental policy meant to manage the great lakes and generating epidemiological models to help understand what the best national health strategy is (science for policy) to building and negotiating new innovation frameworks, determining the values behind government granting schemes, and providing and facilitating digital networks for working scientists (policy for science).

With all that in mind, I’m curious to hear what historians and philosophers of science think are the important issues of science policy today, out of all the various issues that could be listed under that vague yet still reasonably narrow banner.

I’m also curious, especially if anyone has strong opinions on this, whether their historical and philosophical context aids them in deciding their position on such policy issues, or whether they choose their stances based on partisanship, ideology, greed, whatever non-academic decision vector.  I’m excited to hear, regardless.

This year, twenty two years after its initiation, the CERN Large Hadron Collider – the largest research project ever carried out in human history – became operational. It is said that it is expected to “address some of the most fundamental questions of physics, advancing humanity’s understanding of the deepest laws of nature,” one of which is confirming the existence of the elusive Higgs boson particle.

Thousands of physicists, engineers, technicians, and computer programmers from forty countries are involved in this project. The cost of the project is estimated at more than five billion(!) Euro. While Europe eventually built the CERN Large Hadron Collider, in 1993 U.S. Congress officially canceled the counterpart American project due to its heavy costs. Are this project and others like it worth their price?

What are we to make of physicists’ claims to be pursuing the “grand theory of everything”? Are such claims to be taken at face value, or are they fuelled by naive and unwarranted reductionism?

If we do find this theory of everything, is it worth the cost? What benefit will this theory have for people other than the esoteric group of specialists who can understand it?

Was this project inevitable? Could there have been cheaper ways to pursue the same questions?

What stand should humanities and social science people, in particular HPS and STS people, take on this issue? Should they ally themselves with their fellow researchers and support their quest for knowledge for its own sake? Should they try to get some of the pouring money for themselves, and insist on there being positions for ethnographers, ethicists and their like in such projects? Or should they use their own knowledge to problematize physicists’ reductionist claims, and question whether this turn physics took was inevitable?

Moreover, in today’s climate, where humanities programs all over the world are fighting for their survival and are required to justify their existence, should humanities people point out that the physicists are the big spenders, and their existence should be justified as well? Should they even claim to be able to deliver the same goods, namely answers to fundamental questions of “life, the universe and everything” for a fraction of the cost?

In the dialogue Meno, Plato raises the question of why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief. While this question is old, only recently has the debate about it resurfaced in contemporary philosophy, where philosophers have noted that leading contemporary theories of knowledge face difficulties with addressing it.

So, do we care about knowledge because of its practical applications? But some of the knowledge we have and seek to have seems to have no such practical application. Maybe we care about knowledge because it facilitates understanding? But it seems that knowledge and understanding may come apart in some cases. Does knowledge have intrinsic value? If so, by virtue of what? Do we have inherent natural curiosity we need to satisfy? Do we care more about scientific knowledge? Have your say.

It is sometimes remarked that, in contrast to the sciences, there is no such thing as “cutting-edge” or “state-of-the-art” research in the humanities, e.g. in the history and philosophy of science.  But this is, at least in some senses, certainly false: the historical research conducted on any area of scientific inquiry is different than the work that precedes it, so it is possible to have research that is more recent than anything else.

What must be meant when people deny the existence of “cutting-edge” research in the humanities is that there is perpetual disagreement in the humanities, whereas the sciences often resolve into long periods of consensus.  In most scientific disciplines, at least on the surface, practicing scientists generally agree about what is modern and acceptable, and what has been left behind and is now dated.  But how clear-cut and stable is this bifurcation of academia’s “two cultures”?  Do the sciences really resolve into substantial consensuses that allow for “state-of-the-art” assertions to be made about what we know on the basis of research in the fields to date?  Do areas of the humanities, specifically the history and philosophy of science, never resolve into similar consensuses, that allow for “state-of-the-art” assertions to be made about what we know on the basis of scholarship in these fields to date?

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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