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, [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

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.

Read Full Post »

Heather Douglas on Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal

Heather Douglas‘s new book, Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal, adds significantly to the historical story we’ve been exploring for the past couple of weeks. As with Reisch, Howard, and Richardson, Douglas shows us that the “traditional” approach to philosophy of science in which issues of value are rejected or simply left out is of [...]

Read Full Post »

On the Sokal Hoax

[Editor's note: The following is a guest post from Sabrina Starnaman, Ph.D. candidate in Literature at UC-San Diego and currently a visiting scholar at UT-Dallas. I asked Sabrina to write this post because she comes out of that part of the humanities that Sokal was most attacking: literature and cultural studies. Sabrina kindly agreed, and [...]

Read Full Post »

Pragmatism, Positivism, Science, and Values in the 1930′s

This week, we’re discussing the first four chapters of George Reisch’s book, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science, Don Howard’s “Two Left Turns Make a Right” (from Logical Empiricism in North America, which also has several other great essays), and Alan Richardson’s “Engineering Philosophy of Science: American Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism in the [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

Kitcher’s Science, Truth, and Democracy

Philip Kitcher’s Science, Truth, and Democracy aims to give much-needed attention to those questions which, in his estimation, philosophy of science ought to be able to answer: “the ethical status of various kinds of scientific research, the impact that science has had on our values, [and] the role that the sciences play in contemporary democracies”(xi).  These [...]

Read Full Post »

The Play of Values Within the Core Areas of Scientific Research

Here’s my preliminary thoughts on today’s reading, Part I of The Challenge of the Social and the Pressure of Practice: Science and Values Revisited, The Play of Values Within the Core Areas of Scientific Research. First off, let me say, for those of you who made it through all the readings, good work! I realize [...]

Read Full Post »

Why “science”, “values”, and “democracy”?

By way of explaining the rationale behind the course—and by extension, this blog—it might be helpful to examine the triad of terms that define our topic.

Read Full Post »