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The conservation ecologist Robert Lackey (2005, 2013) describes stealth policy advocacy as strategy deployed in the pursuit of “policy-based science.” As a proponent of the value-free ideal, Lackey argues that the adoption of ethical values by scientists (in a professional capacity) undermines t...

Participatory modeling in sustainability science allows scientists to take stakeholders’ interests, knowledge and values into account when designing model-based solutions to sustainability problems, by incorporating stakeholders in the model-building process. This improves the chance of generating...

Michael Soulé, co-founder of the Society for Conservation Biology and its first President, is widely considered to be the founder of conservation biology (Sanjayan, Crooks, and Mills 2000). In setting out his vision for the field, Soulé argued that it is a crisis-oriented discipline like cancer-bi...

Over the past twenty years, philosophers of science have given sustained examination to the role that values play in science, identifying positive roles for both cognitive and noncognitive values. These include value judgments made during research, such as the conceptualization of phenomena, data se...

Recently the topic of values in science has been extremely important in the philosophy of science. Initially, the debates were over whether and what sorts of values are present in the sciences. For example, are they epistemic or non-epistemic? However, if one grants non-epistemic values find their w...

Robustness of climate models is considered by philosophers of climate science to be a crucial issue in determining whether and to what extent the projections of the Earth’s future climate that models yield should be trusted—and in turn whether society should pursue policies to address mitigation...

One of the most important proposed examples of a trophic cascade concerns the reintroduction of grey wolves into Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (Ripple et. al. 2001, 2014, 2015). As the story goes, the reintroduced grey wolves have reduced elk populations, and this has encouraged a variety of plant a...

Philosophers agree that the value-free ideal is neither an accurate nor desirable model for science. Science typically requires non-epistemic value judgments. Debates remain as to what kind of non-epistemic values can legitimately influence science, and in what ways. One proposal is that “when sci...