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Natural history collections are repositories of diverse information, including collected and preserved biological specimens. These specimens are sometimes integrated into conservation decision-making, where some practitioners claim that specimens may be necessary for conservation. This is an oversta...

The demarcation problem has been one of the most important problems in philosophy of science for centuries. Still, the problem has never been solved. The failures, in fact, have been so numerous and so diverse and they have gone on for so long that Larry Laudan issued a death warrant for the problem...

Traditional theories of health and disease have a tendency to focus on either the evaluative aspect of health at the cost of capturing its descriptive character or they focus on the descriptive character at the cost of capturing its evaluative aspect. We provide a naturalistically respectable accoun...

Philosophers of science tend to adjudicate debates about the value-free ideal by appealing to case-studies of value-laden science. Interpreting case-studies, however, faces a methodological challenge: measuring the causal impact of values where values interact with myriad causal factors. This challe...

Arthur Jensen (1923-2012) was one of the most prolific and well-cited psychologists of the twentieth century. We have two pictures of Arthur Jensen. The first is the meticulous and careful psychologist crowned “a king among men” by his colleagues. The second Jensen repeatedly voiced eugenicist c...

This symposium considers various aspects of “The New Demarcation Problem” (i.e., distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate uses of values in science). Ty Branch and Heather Douglas argue that a successful solution must also renegotiate the scientific social contract. Bennett Holman expl...

The sciences make progress through inquiries that address human problems. Many of those problems are practical, although some arise from detached curiosity. I think of this progress as pragmatic (Kitcher 2017): improving problematic situations, rather than aiming towards some goal (e.g. the fundamen...

Scholarship on values in science has exploded in recent years. Nevertheless, with the exception of some work on topics like patent policies, funding structures, and corporate influences on science, most scholarship on science and values has focused on the influences of values on individual scientist...