News

Scientific consensus plays a crucial role in public life. In the face of increasing science denialism, scientists are under pressure to present themselves as a united front to combat misinformation and conspiracy theories. However, the drive for consensus also has negative epistemic consequences, su...

Current institutional structures for ethics in science focus on oversight—gatekeeping or regulatory compliance. These structures ensure scientists make the ethical decisions deemed appropriate and sanction scientists who do not, and are viewed as external to the research agendas scientists choose ...

In the mid-twentieth century, as mainstream scientific opinion turned away from eugenics and the most explicit versions of race science, two organizations were formed to preserve and continue research in defense of white supremacy. The Pioneer Fund has supported and the journal Mankind Quarterly has...

This presentation explores the relationship between values in scientific and technological research, on the one hand, and features of the organizations that conduct that research, on the other. Organizational features to be highlighted include organizational aims and strategies, organizational struc...

Efforts to rationalize racial injustice and colonialism by appealing to the epistemic authority of science — race science — have waxed and waned over the last several decades. Even when it is regarded as discredited or pseudoscientific, race science has been actively maintained on the fringes of...

Most previous scholarship on the topic of values in science has focused on individuals. The time is now ripe to study how values permeate science through institutional systems. In order to move this scholarship forward, the present paper develops a taxonomy of major ways in which institutional syste...

Philosophers of science and scholars in science and technology studies have recently focused their attention on civic participation in research processes, commonly described as ``citizen/participatory science'' (Irwin 1995, Curtis 2018). This paper provides evidence from an exemplary case of such pa...

In this paper we examine “gain of function” (GOF) research in virology, which results in a virus that is substantially more virulent or transmissible than its wild antecedent. We examine the typical animal model, the ferret, arguing that it does not easily satisfy potential desiderata for an ani...

Acknowledging that scientific research today is mainly conducted in the private sphere with commercial interests (or values) in mind, becomes crucial for understanding the roles of values in science today, as well as to imagining ways of counteracting some of the undesirable influence of such values...

Race science recruits scientific work in the biological, behavioral, and social sciences in the service of legitimating the presupposition that there are biological races which map on to social racial systems. But the biological structure of human populations is not synonymous with particular racial...

This talk will provide commentary from the perspective of political philosophy about the other papers in the session. In particular, I will apply insights from democratic theory about the nature of representation and its corresponding responsibilities, the epistemic and moral value of deliberation, ...

Parts of the politically conservative block in the United States have a long history of “science denialism”. As a means to explore the nature of the New Demarcation Problem (Holman and Wilholt, 2022) and its relation to the original Popperian demarcation problem this paper considers an example o...

This paper shows how institutional values influence the design and evaluation of arguments in funding proposals for scientific research. We characterize a general argument made within proposals and several kinds of subarguments that contribute to it. We indicate that funders’ values inform the kin...

We have previously argued that masking, censoring, or ignoring scientific dissent can be detrimental for several ethical and epistemic reasons, even when such dissent is considered to be normatively inappropriate (de Melo-Martín and Intemann 2018). Masking dissent can be inappropriately paternalist...

Directly after the release of Nicholas Wade’s *A Troublesome Inheritance*, population geneticists, biologists, and biomedical researchers wrote an open letter to the *New York Times* stating that “We reject Wade’s implication that our findings substantiate his guesswork." Given their clear den...

The general consensus amongst philosophers is that values play an integral role in scientific inquiry. This requires a reorientation towards delineating legitimate from illegitimate values in science, or the new demarcation problem. Although it has been argued that alternatives to the value-free ide...