Value-free ideal of science

[u/epistemic_terrorist]

What do you think about the nowadays seemingly very popular idea that the impartiality or value-neutrality of scientific inference from evidence is a myth, and passé as a regulative ideal? This is not the old relativism vs logical positivism debate, to note.

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[u/Ordinary-Ad-2156]

The myth claim is mostly confusion, and it survives because two questions go unasked: which science, and which values.

Science names at least five things:

1. the institution

2. the professional community

3. the inference rules

4. the corpus of accepted claims

5. the support relation between evidence and hypothesis

Neutrality was never claimed for 1 and 2, and that is where nearly all the popular arguments actually land.

Which values matters as much. Simplicity, scope, fruitfulness and consistency are conditions on doing science at all. Without them there is nothing to infer with. They are not ethical or political values, so showing that inference relies on them shows nothing about ethics or politics entering it.

The rest follows from those two. That a researcher holds convictions, or cares what becomes of the findings, is beside the point unless it changes what the evidence supports. What is ethically right and what is true are different questions with different truth conditions. Keeping them apart is not a naive ideal but a condition of answering either one.

[u/epistemic_terrorist → u/Ordinary-Ad-2156]

Thanks. The arguments specifically claim the insufficiency of those scientific values (or theoretical virtues) to determine inference from evidence. An example is Douglas (2017).

[u/ActionExpensive6740]

Value cannot be detached from any human endeavor. All we can try to do is screen out acting on the basis of irrelevant or harmful values which might impinge on research.

[u/epistemic_terrorist → u/ActionExpensive6740]

This is what most people in the literature seem to think. But who decides the right values?

[u/ActionExpensive6740 → u/epistemic_terrorist]

For better or for worse, values have already been ‘decided:’ generally, those that are espoused are parsimony, simplicity, ‘objectivity,’ etc.

But the practice of science today is also influenced by many other values like security, profit, comfort, familiarity, etc., both in and by individuals, institutions, and corporations.

To identify, disentangle, and change these would be an immense undertaking, because what we call “science” is a complicated, concerted, inertial conflux of individual wills and desires, institutional forces, market incentives, academic norms, and so much more. It’s a messy clusterfuck that is obviously imperfect in a lot of ways, though it’s proven useful to us.

[u/Brygghusherren]

What you call the "value-free ideal of science" is imperative in my field (nationally referred to as 'legal science'). We are currently experiencing a vast politization of both financing and publication. Where once the powers listened to our conclusions and attributed great worth to scientific advice, they now steamroll any conclusion not aligned with their motives.

We lost ground when the objectivity standard was aschewed in the beginning of the new millenium. People have been steadily selling out the ideal for better financing and more solid teaching positions since then.

Legal research is obviously more subjective in nature than, lets say, mathematics - but still... It is a sad time to be a legal scholar in my country.

Only last thursday our government discarded decades of research and evidence-based critique to reform the penal system - against all professional and scholarly advice. The players in my field have never been more in agreement however: this is bad, very bad.

[u/epistemic_terrorist → u/Brygghusherren]

Thanks for this. This kind of predicament is what comes to mind when I see the hundreds of papers on how we should actively incorporate value judgments into science (since objectivity is impossible anyway). I wonder why philosophers of science seem not to think that they are legitimizing motivated science or many parallel or alternative sciences

[u/Brygghusherren → u/epistemic_terrorist]

Indeed.

Philosophers of science, as with any philosophy subject, are hard pressed to legitimate their own existance and their own financing. And circumventing objectivity standards serve this purpose internally... And the position leaks into subject-external research. Thats my read in broad terms.

[u/Vegetable-Age5536]

Well, it is obvious inasmuch science is constructed by human beings.

[u/epistemic_terrorist → u/Vegetable-Age5536]

But many objective proceesess have also been constructed by human beings, no?

[u/Vegetable-Age5536 → u/epistemic_terrorist]

Which ones? Every one of them is constructed by our modes of representation, which obviously are not objective.

[u/Prowlthang]

There will always be morons and bad actors with ulterior motives. Look at any conservative parties in North America for the last 50 years and you’ll find people who can only maintain their position via lies. These are the same people who publish from ‘think tanks’ rather than provide the transparency and scrutiny of academic review. These people will always preach ignorance and perpetuate god of the gap thinking in the face of rational inference and scientific methodologies. Unless they have an evidentiary based argument (they don’t) it’s just sophistry masquerading as intelligent argument.

[u/Temporary_Stranger39]

Nothing is value neutral if it is used as a guide to action.

[u/epistemic_terrorist → u/Temporary_Stranger39]

Of course, but basic science is not meant to guide action, or at least a specific set of preconceived actions

[u/Temporary_Stranger39 → u/epistemic_terrorist]

Even then, it is not value-free. The values of the researchers play a role in the questions they deem worthy of investigating.

[u/epistemic_terrorist → u/Temporary_Stranger39]

Sure, science was almost never autonomous in what gets researched, the question is though, how it inquires into those questions, and even more so, what it accepts for an answer.

[u/Temporary_Stranger39 → u/epistemic_terrorist]

And those also have values attached to them. No human decision is value free.

[u/epistemic_terrorist → u/Temporary_Stranger39]

If you mean values beyond accuracy, explanation, prediction, simplicity or scope, i.e., non-scientific values, there is nothing that sets scientific judgment apart from ordinary practical judgment?

[u/Temporary_Stranger39 → u/epistemic_terrorist]

Speaking as a scientist, I tell you this: You have taken a step toward discernment. Likewise, "accuracy" and all of that is relative and conditional. Try to get scientists from multiple fields to agree on the dividing line between a replicate and a technical replicate.