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728DRUG FACTS, VALUES, AND THE MORNING-AFTER PILLPublic Affairs Quarterly 35 (1): 51-82. 2021.While the Value-Free Ideal of science has suffered compelling criticism, some advocates like Gregor Betz continue to argue that science policy advisors should avoid value judgments by hedging their hypotheses. This approach depends on a mistaken understanding of the relations between facts and values in regulatory science. My case study involves the morning-after pill Plan B and the “Drug Fact” that it “may” prevent implantation. I analyze the operative values, which I call zygote-centrism, resp…Read more
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570The Error Is in the Gap: Synthesizing Accounts for Societal Values in SciencePhilosophy of Science 85 (4): 704-725. 2018.Kevin Elliott and others separate two common arguments for the legitimacy of societal values in scientific reasoning as the gap and the error arguments. This article poses two questions: How are these two arguments related, and what can we learn from their interrelation? I contend that we can better understand the error argument as nested within the gap because the error is a limited case of the gap with narrower features. Furthermore, this nestedness provides philosophers with conceptual tools …Read more
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234The FDA Ought to Change Plan B’s LabelContraception 106. 2022.This commentary defends 3 arguments for changing the label of levonorgestrel-based emergency contraception (LNG EC) so that it no longer supports the possibility of a mechanism of action after fertilization. First, there is no direct scientific evidence confirming any postfertilization mechanisms. Second, despite the weight of evidence, there is still widespread public misunderstanding over the mechanism of LNG EC. Third, this FDA label is not a value-free claim, but instead it has functioned li…Read more
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212Broadening the scope of our understanding of mechanisms: lessons from the history of the morning-after pillSynthese 198 (3): 2223-2252. 2021.Philosophers of science and medicine now aspire to provide useful, socially relevant accounts of mechanism. Existing accounts have forged the path by attending to mechanisms in historical context, scientific practice, the special sciences, and policy. Yet, their primary focus has been on more proximate issues related to therapeutic effectiveness. To take the next step toward social relevance, we must investigate the challenges facing researchers, clinicians, and policy makers involving values an…Read more
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159Race and Gender in ReserchIn Ezio Di Nucci, Ji-Young Lee & Isaac A. Wagner (eds.), The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Bioethics, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2022.This chapter explores two of the most studied and most damaging aspects of such societal influence on science: racial and gender biases. We discuss two major domains of biological and medical research involving race and gender: cognitive differences research and reproductive health science. In each case, we explore the influence of sexist values like androcentric bias—where researchers focus on men and male bodies as the alleged “norm”—and racist values like white supremacy—where researchers pri…Read more
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69Drug Labels and Reproductive Health: How Values and Gender Norms Shape Regulatory Science at the FDADissertation, Indiana University. 2019.The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is fraught with controversies over the role of values and politics in regulatory science, especially with drugs in the realm of reproductive health. Philosophers and science studies scholars have investigated the ways in which social context shapes medical knowledge through value judgments, and feminist scholars and activists have criticized sexism and injustice in reproductive medicine. Nonetheless, there has been no systematic study of values and gende…Read more
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39On the pursuitworthiness of qualitative methods in empirical philosophy of scienceStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 98 (C): 29-39. 2023.While the pursuitworthiness of philosophical ideas has changed over time, philosophical practice and methodology have not kept pace. The worthiness of a philosophical pursuit includes not only the ideas and objectives one pursues but also the methods with which one pursues them. In this paper, we articulate how empirical approaches benefit philosophy of science, particularly advocating for the use of qualitative methods for understanding the social and normative aspects of scientific inquiry. Af…Read more
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38Still no pill for men? Double standards & demarcating values in biomedical researchStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 91 (C): 66-76. 2022.Double standards are widespread throughout biomedicine, especially in research on reproductive health. One of the clearest cases of double standards involves the feminine gendering of reproductive responsibility for contraception and the continued lack of highly effective, reversible methods for cisgender men. While the biomedical establishment accepts diversity and inclusion as important social values for clinical trials, their continued use of inequitable standards undermines their ability to …Read more
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33Imposing Values and Enforcing Gender through Knowledge: Epistemic Oppression with the Morning-after Pill's Drug LabelHypatia 37 (2): 315-342. 2022.Among feminist philosophers, there are two lines of argument that sexist values are illegitimate in science, focusing on epistemic or ethical problems. This article supports a third framework, elucidating how value-laden science can enable epistemic oppression. My analysis demonstrates how purported knowledge laden with sexist values can compromise epistemic autonomy and contribute to paternalism and misogyny. I exemplify these epistemic wrongs with a case study of the morning-after pill during …Read more
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30Pesticides, Neurodevelopmental Disagreement, and Bradford Hill’s GuidelinesAccountability in Research 1 (24): 30-42. 2017.Neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism affect one-eighth of all U.S. newborns. Yet scientists, accessing the same data and using Bradford-Hill guidelines, draw different conclusions about the causes of these disorders. They disagree about the pesticide-harm hypothesis, that typical United States prenatal pesticide exposure can cause neurodevelopmental damage. This article aims to discover whether apparent scientific disagreement about this hypothesis might be partly attributable to question…Read more
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27Values as heuristics: a contextual empiricist account of assessing values scientificallySynthese 201 (6): 1-29. 2023.Feminist philosophers have discussed the prospects for assessing values empirically, particularly given the ongoing threat of sexism and other oppressive values influencing science and society. Some advocates of such tests now champion a “values as evidence” approach, and they criticize Helen Longino’s contextual empiricism for not holding values to the same level of empirical scrutiny as other claims. In this paper, we defend contextual empiricism by arguing that many of these criticisms are ba…Read more
Christopher ChoGlueck
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
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New Mexico Institute of Mining and TechnologyAssistant Professor
Indiana University, Bloomington
Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine
PhD, 2019