Socially Robust Knowledge and Expertise

Well, it’s been far too long since I’ve blogged. My apologies to all and sundry. Tonight I will try to sum up where we’ve been the last few weeks and how the readings for tomorrow relate to the issues from the previous week. Lately we’ve winded our way from Heather Douglas’s new book, Science, Policy, [...]

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Heather Douglas responds…

We spent the last three weeks of class discussing Heather Douglas’s new book, Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal. In the course of our discussions, a number of burning questions came up. I sent some of those questions to Professor Douglas, and she kindly agreed to answer our questions. Q: Are there not more compelling [...]

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Douglas v. Bending Science

By way of both further discussion of Heather Douglas’s book and introductory remarks on Bending Science: How Special Interests Corrupt Public Health Research, I’d like to raise a few questions about McGarity’s and Wagner’s approach on the basis of some of the distinctions given to us by Douglas. In particular, I’m concerned that McGarity and [...]

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Douglas and Chang on the Value of Cognitive Values

While most of it is not directly relevant to the issues in this class, Hasok Chang’s 2004 book, Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress, is one of the better works of history and philosophy of science in the last several years. In it, Chang traces several different aspects of the attempt to create, standardize, expand, [...]

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Heather Douglas, part II

In this week’s readings (chapters 4-6 of the book), Heather Douglas makes good on a lot of the titillating suggestions from last week. Before switching to discuss that, let me bring out some nagging questions from last week’s post and class discussion. Then I’ll bring up some important points for this week’s readings.

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Science, Truth, and Democracy – Part II

I didn’t manage a follow-up to my post on the first part of Kitcher’s book. This is actually a topic I’ve written about, so you can see my thoughts on Kitcher in the early sections of that paper. I seem to have failed to convince anybody in class that “curiosity” is not a good way [...]

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The Play of Values Within Core Science part II

Time to finish up my thoughts on the first section of The Challenge of the Social and the Pressure of Practice. If you haven’t done so, you might want to read my earlier post first. I hope you’ll share your thoughts as well. One thing we don’t want to do in this complex and controversial [...]

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