Science, Values, and Democracy

Posts below this one reflect readings and discussions from HUHI 6305: Science, Values, and Democracy in Fall 2009. To read those posts from the beginning, start here.

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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, Money & Policy

Knowledge is the number one commodity in a post-industrial society. Thus, it is only natural that the way knowledge is obtained and how it is applied would become big business under this circumstance. Almost every major university traverses the tricky arena of intellectual property and supports the entrepreneurial endeavors of their faculty, students and staff [...]

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Paper Topic: The Dover Decision in Philosophical Perspective

Abstract In 1989 a contentious textbook entitled Of Pandas and People was published by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, a Christian non-profit organization based in Richardson, Texas.  The authors of the book, Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon, have some training in scientific fields (Davis – zoology; Kenyon – biophysics) and are the Professor [...]

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Research Proposal: Jennifer Culver

Advances in technology raise concerns about power and the ability to distinguish what is “real.”

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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 [...]

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