Epistemic Integrity and Trust in Science: the Failure of Value Neutrality
Year: 2023
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: The value-free ideal (VFI) is a notion that the consideration of social, ethical, and political values has a detrimental effect on the development of scientific practice and that such values should be excluded from scientific reasoning. However, proponents of the VFI do not hold that science can or should be entirely free from social and ethical values. Reliance on various value judgments is an inevitable and legitimate move in ‘’external’’ stages of science such as selection of research problems, standards for methodologically responsible research, and dissemination of scientific results. But when it comes to the “internal” phase of science which includes data characterization, assessment of available evidence, acceptance of hypotheses, model development, publishing results, etc., scientists should rely solely on the values that are scientific in their nature. It is believed by VFI proponents that only this kind of regulation of values in scientific practice would protect the epistemic integrity of science and preserve the public’s trust in the reliability of its results. The main aim of this talk is to identify some sources of concern for the idea that VFI is a viable framework for providing a significant degree of protection of scientific integrity. We will argue that VFI focus on the legitimacy/illegitimacy of values considering the different stages of scientific endeavor is too narrow and fails to address the underlying organizational and epistemic issues as these factors can significantly influence the credibility of scientific results. Finally, we conclude that we should be cautious toward VFI, not only because it is insufficient to protect the epistemic integrity of science, but also because it falls short of capturing and countering some pressing sources of public mistrust.
Author: Pavličić, Jelena
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7028120876