Kelli Barr

Is it permissible to implicate non-epistemic values in the ‘core’ of scientific reasoning? This paper offers an appraisal of Parker’s (2024) Epistemic Projection Approach (EPA) prescribing acceptable relations between epistemic and non-epistemic values in research conduct. Non-epistemic values are granted a role in determining epistemic characteristics for a research project but are meant to be ‘screened off’ from core research decisions via epistemic projection. This discussion takes the EPA for a test drive. We identify three challenges to its conceptual and practical viability and show how EPA currently lacks resources to address them, indicating a need for further development.

How are we to understand situations where science fails on its own terms? Scientists have blamed perverse incentives for systematic epistemic failures like non-replicability and publication bias, but the exact relationship remains an open question. Let’s assume they are right to blame the (social) system. This paper presents a novel framework for understanding how features of the social organization of science are implicated in collective epistemic failures: the material theory of values in science (MTV). This project is inspired by and follows in the tradition of feminist philosophers of science who have called attention to the need for explanations of systemic, specifically antifeminist, biases in science and for embodied models of scientists as epistemic agents. In the first part, I discuss the replication crisis as involving a particular type of collective action problem: a no-win standoff. The next part introduces the MTV and the explanation it supplies for this phenomenon. In the third section, the MTV is compared to several alternative explanatory strategies, including from the contemporary literature values in science and social epistemology, specifically agent-based computational models. I argue for why my approach is preferable and describe an important revision it entails for the general Mertonian sociological picture invoked in discussions of incentives in science. By way of conclusion, I summarize the philosophical task of the MTV, which is to take seriously the sociological and material conditions constituting scientists’ epistemic agency.

This dissertation takes up the question of the social function of philosophy. Popular accounts of the nature and value of philosophy reinforce long-standing perceptions that philosophy is useless or irrelevant to pressing societal problems. Yet, the increasingly neoliberal political-economic environment of higher education places a premium on mechanisms that link public funding for research to demonstrations of return on investment in the form of benefitting broader society. This institutional situation presents a philosophical problem warranting professional attention. This project offers a diagnosis of the problem and develops a way forward from it. Drawing from Foucauldian archaeological methods, my analysis focuses on the interplay of institutional structures and intellectual practices. Since the early 20th century, departments of philosophy on college and university campuses have been the center of gravity for professional philosophy in the US. Establishing this institutional ‘home' for philosophers drove the adoption of disciplinary practices, norms, and standards for inquiry. But the metaphilosophical assumptions underpinning disciplinarity have become problematic, I argue: they are poor guides for navigating the situation of higher education in the 21st century. Several movements within the profession of philosophy during the 1960s and 70s sought to reverse philosophers' general retreat from public affairs. Applied philosophy, environmental philosophy, and bioethics each offer a case study in attempts to address the problem of societal relevance. However, surveys of the journal literature in each field uncovered few reflections on whether or not individual projects, or the field as a whole, had any impact on the societal problems to which those philosophers turned their attention. This suggests a need for further thinking about implementation – how to institutionalize alternative practices of philosophy that do demonstrate societal relevance. By way of conclusion, I offer some of the necessary groundwork toward a philosophy of implementation, in the form of discussing significant questions and challenges confronting philosophers who aim for societal relevance both in principle and in practice.

Philosophers have argued that stakes affect knowledge: a given amount of evidence may suffice for knowledge if the stakes are low, but not if the stakes are high. By contrast, empirical work on the influence of stakes on ordinary knowledge ascriptions has been divided along methodological lines: “evidence‐fixed” prompts rarely find stakes effects, while “evidence‐seeking” prompts consistently find them. We present a cross‐cultural study using both evidence‐fixed and evidence‐seeking prompts with a diverse sample of 17 populations in 11 countries, speaking 14 languages. Our study is the first to use an evidence‐seeking prompt cross‐culturally, and includes several previously untested populations (including indigenous populations). Across cultures, we do not find evidence of a stakes effect with our evidence‐fixed prompt, but do with our evidence‐seeking prompt. We argue that the divergent results reveal a tension within folk epistemology: people's beliefs about when it is appropriate to ascribe knowledge differ significantly from their actual practice in ascribing knowledge.