Values and Policy

Extant accounts of trust in science focus on reconciling scientific and public value judgments, but neglect the challenge of learning audience values. I argue that for scientific experts to be epistemically trustworthy, they should adopt a cooperative approach to learning about the values of their audience. A cooperative approach, in which expert and non-expert inquirers iteratively refine value judgments, better achieves important second-order epistemic dimensions of trustworthiness. Whereas some epistemologists take trustworthiness to be a precondition for the objectivity of science, I suggest that strong objectivity in the standpoint theoretic sense is sometimes a prerequisite for trustworthiness itself.

Recent science funding policy scholars and practitioners have advocated for the use of lotteries, or elements of random chance, as supplementations of traditional peer review for evaluating grant applications. One of the primary motivations for lotteries is their purported openness to innovative research. The purpose of this paper is to argue that current proponents of funding science by lottery overestimate the viability of peer review and thus unduly restrict the scope of lotteries in science funding practice. I further show how this analysis suggests a different way of introducing lotteries into science funding policy.

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 kinds of proposal documents funders require and their relative weighting of them. We illustrate these points by showing how the U.S. federal agency NOAA uses its public service mission to require and heavily weigh arguments to transition new knowledge to agency service providers. We suggest conceptual questions raised by the use of transition arguments.

We examine arguments for and against the use of mechanistic evidence in assessing treatment efficacy and find that advocates of EBM+ and their critics have largely been talking past each other due to difference in focus. We explore aducanumab for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease as a case which may (eventually) speak to the role of EBM+ in pharmaceutical regulation. The case suggests the debate may be more fruitful if philosophers confine debates to particular domains of medical science and weigh in prospectively instead of relying on historical cases where outcomes are known and which are susceptible to hindsight bias.