Kevin Elliott

This response addresses the excellent responses to my book provided by Heather Douglas, Janet Kourany, and Matt Brown. First, I provide some comments and clarifications concerning a few of the highlights from their essays. Second, in response to the worries of my critics, I provide more detail than I was able to provide in my book regarding my three conditions for incorporating values in science. Third, I identify some of the most promising avenues for further research that flow out of this interchange.

Recent efforts to argue that nonepistemic values have a legitimate role to play in assessing scientific models, theories, and hypotheses typically either reject the distinction between epistemic and nonepistemic values or incorporate nonepistemic values only as a secondary consideration for resolving epistemic uncertainty. Given that scientific representations can legitimately be evaluated not only based on their fit with the world but also with respect to their fit with the needs of their users, we show in two case studies that nonepistemic values can play a legitimate role as factors that override epistemic considerations in assessing scientific representations for practical purposes

We argue that the analysis of cognitive attitudes should play a central role in developing more sophisticated accounts of the proper roles for values in science. First, we show that the major recent efforts to delineate appropriate roles for values in science would be strengthened by making clearer distinctions among cognitive attitudes. Next, we turn to a specific example and argue that a more careful account of the distinction between the attitudes of belief and acceptance can contribute to a better understanding of the proper roles for values in a case study from paleoanthropology.

Although many philosophers have employed the distinction between “direct” and “indirect” roles for values in science, I argue that it merits further clarification. The distinction can be formulated in several ways: as a logical point, as a distinction between epistemic attitudes, or as a clarification of different consequences associated with accepting scientific claims. Moreover, it can serve either as part of a normative ideal or as a tool for policing how values influence science. While various formulations of the distinction may contribute to a normative ideal, they have limited effectiveness for regulating how values influence science.

In recent papers and a book, Heather Douglas has expanded on the well-known argument from inductive risk, thereby launching an influential contemporary critique of the value-free ideal for science. This paper distills Douglas’s critique into four major claims. The first three claims provide a significant challenge to the value-free ideal for science. However, the fourth claim, which delineates her positive proposal to regulate values in science by distinguishing direct and indirect roles for values, is ambiguous between two interpretations, and both have weaknesses. Fortunately, two elements of Douglas’s work that have previously received much less emphasis provide resources for developing a more promising approach for regulating values in science

A number of scholars have recently drawn attention to the importance of iteration in scientific research. This paper builds on these previous discussions by drawing a distinction between epistemic and methodological forms of iteration and by clarifying the relationships between them. As defined here, epistemic iteration involves progressive alterations to scientific knowledge claims, whereas methodological iteration refers to an interplay between different modes of research practice. While distinct, these two forms of iteration are related in important ways. Contemporary research on the biological effects of nanomaterials illustrates that methodological iteration can help to “initiate,” “equip,” and “stimulate” epistemic iteration.

Ethicists widely accept the notion that scientists have moral responsibilities to benefit society at large. The dissemination of scientific information to the public and its political representatives is central to many of the ways in which scientists serve society. Unfortunately, the task of providing information can often give rise to moral quandaries when scientific experts participate in politically charged debates over issues that are fraught with uncertainty. This paper develops a theoretical framework for an “ethics of expertise” (EOE) based on the notion that scientists have responsibilities to provide information in a way that promotes autonomous decision-making on the part of the public and its representatives. Moreover, insofar as the principle of informed consent has developed in biomedical ethics as a way for physicians to promote autonomous decision-making on the part of their patients, this paper suggests that the informed-consent concept may suggest a set of criteria and guidelines that can help scientists to fulfill their similar ethical responsibilities to the public. In order to illustrate how the resulting EOE could provide practical guidance for scientific experts, the paper examines a case study involving the dissemination of information about the low-dose biological effects of toxic chemicals and carcinogens.

Philosophers of science readily acknowledge that nonepistemic values influence the discovery and pursuit of scientific theories, but many tend to regard these influences as epistemically uninteresting. The present paper challenges this position by identifying three avenues through which nonepistemic values associated with discovery and pursuit in contemporary pollution research influence theory appraisal: (1) by guiding the choice of questions and research projects, (2) by altering experimental design, and (3) by affecting the creation and further investigation of theories or hypotheses. This analysis indicates that the effects of these values are sufficiently complex and epistemically significant to merit further attention. †To contact the authors, please write to: Kevin Elliott, Department of Philosophy, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208; e‐mail: [email protected] . Daniel McKaughan, Department of Philosophy, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467; e‐mail: [email protected].

The combination of government’s significant involvement in science, science’s significant effects on the public, and public ignorance raise important challenges for reconciling scientific expertise with democratic governance. Nevertheless, there have recently been a variety of encouraging efforts to make scientific activity more responsive to social values and to develop citizens’ capacity to engage in more effective democratic governance of science. This essay introduces a special issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal on “Science, Expertise, and Democracy,” consisting of five papers that developed from the inaugural Three Rivers Philosophy conference held at the University of South Carolina in April 2011. The pieces range from a general analysis of the in-principle compatibility of scientific expertise and democracy to much more concrete studies of the intersection between scientific practices and democratic values in areas such as weight-of-evidence analysis, climate science, and studies of locally undesirable land uses

Both scientists and philosophers of science have recently emphasized the importance of promoting transparency in science. For scientists, transparency is a way to promote reproducibility, progress, and trust in research. For philosophers of science, transparency can help address the value-ladenness of scientific research in a responsible way. Nevertheless, the concept of transparency is a complex one. Scientists can be transparent about many different things, for many different reasons, on behalf of many different stakeholders. This paper proposes a taxonomy that clarifies the major dimensions along which approaches to transparency can vary. By doing so, it provides several insights that philosophers and other science studies scholars can pursue. In particular, it helps address common objections to pursuing transparency in science, it clarifies major forms of transparency, and it suggests avenues for further research on this topic.

Private companies provide by far the most funding for scientific research and development. Nevertheless, relatively little attention has been paid to the dynamics of industry‐funded research by philosophers of science. This paper addresses this gap by providing an overview of the major strengths and weaknesses of industry research funding, together with the existing recommendations for addressing the weaknesses. It is designed to provide a starting point for future philosophical work that explores the features of industry‐funded research, avenues for addressing concerns, and strategies for making research funded by the private sector as fruitful as possible.

This paper examines how ethically significant assumptions and values are embedded not only in environmental policies but also in the language of the environmental sciences. It shows, based on three case studies associated with contemporary pollution research, how the choice of scientific categories and terms can have at least four ethically significant effects: influencing the future course of scientific research; altering public awareness or attention to environmental phenomena; affecting the attitudes or behavior of key decision makers; and changing the burdens of proof required for taking action in response to environmental concerns. The paper argues that deliberative forums, research-ethics training, and conceptual work by environmental philosophers could all promote more ethically sensitive responses to these features of scientific language

The discovery and ongoing investigation of microRNAs suggest important conceptual and methodological lessons for philosophers and historians of biology. This paper provides an account of miRNA research and the shift from viewing these tiny regulatory entities as minor curiosities to seeing them as major players in the post-transcriptional regulation of genes. Conceptually, the study of miRNAs is part of a broader change in understandings of genetic regulation, in which simple switch-like mechanisms were reinterpreted as aspects of complex cellular and genome-wide processes. Among them are the activities of small RNAs, previously regarded as non-functional. Methodologically, the miRNA story suggests new ways of characterizing biological research that should prove helpful to philosophers of science who seek to develop more pluralistic, pragmatic models of scientific inquiry. miRNA research displays iterative movements between multiple modes of investigation that include not only the proposal and testing of hypotheses but also exploratory, technology-oriented and question-driven modes of research. As an exemplary story of scientific discovery and development, the miRNA case illustrates transitions from genetics to genomics and systems biology, and it shows how diverse configurations of research practice are related to major scientific advances

Environmental ethicists have devoted considerable attention to discussing whether anthropocentric or nonanthropocentric arguments provide more appropriate means for defending environmental protection. This paper argues that philosophers, scientists, and policy makers should pay more attention to a particular type of anthropocentric argument. These anthropocentric indirect arguments defend actions or policies that benefit the environment, but they justify the policies based on beneficial effects on humans that are not caused by their environmental benefits. AIAs appear to have numerous appealing characteristics, and their weaknesses do not provide compelling reasons to avoid them. Elucidating these arguments should inspire social scientists and philosophers to study the range of situations in which AIAs can be ethically and effectively employed and the extent to which they increase or diminish public support for environmentalism

The role of values in scientific research has become an important topic of discussion in both scholarly and popular debates. Pundits across the political spectrum worry that research on topics like climate change, evolutionary theory, vaccine safety, and genetically modified foods has become overly politicized. At the same time, it is clear that values play an important role in science by limiting unethical forms of research and by deciding what areas of research have the greatest relevance for society. Deciding how to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate influences of values in scientific research is a matter of vital importance.Recently, philosophers of science have written a great deal on this topic, but most of their work has been directed toward a scholarly audience. This book makes the contemporary philosophical literature on science and values accessible to a wide readership. It examines case studies from a variety of research areas, including climate science, anthropology, chemical risk assessment, ecology, neurobiology, biomedical research, and agriculture. These cases show that values have necessary roles to play in identifying research topics, choosing research questions, determining the aims of inquiry, responding to uncertainty, and deciding how to communicate information. Kevin Elliott focuses not just on describing roles for values but also on determining when their influences are actually appropriate. He emphasizes several conditions for incorporating values in a legitimate fashion, and highlights multiple strategies for fostering engagement between stakeholders so that value influences can be subjected to careful and critical scrutiny.

The potential for financial conflicts of interest (COIs) to damage the credibility of scientific research has become a significant social concern, especially in the wake of high-profile incidents involving the pharmaceutical, tobacco, fossil-fuel, and chemical industries. Scientists and policy makers have debated whether the presence of financial COIs should count as a reason for treating research with suspicion or whether research should instead be evaluated solely based on its scientific quality. This paper examines a recent proposal to develop criteria for evaluating the credibility of research without considering its source of funding. It concludes that proposals of this sort are likely to be either ineffective or impractical in many cases. Nevertheless, this does not imply that all research funded by those with an interest in the outcome must be placed under a cloud of suspicion; there are conditions under which research is at much more serious risk of being corrupted than in other cases, and attention to these conditions can guide productive responses to financial COIs

We argue that environmental aesthetics, and specifically the concept of aesthetic integrity, should play a central role in a public environmental philosophy designed to communicate about environmental problems in an effective manner. After developing the concept of the “aesthetic integrity” of the environment, we appeal to empirical research to show that it contributes significantly to people’s sense of place, which is, in turn, central to their well-being and motivational state. As a result, appealing to aesthetic integrity in policy contexts is both strategically and morally advisable. To provide a concrete illustration of the ways in which such appeals can play a role in policy making, we examine a specific case study in which attention to aesthetic integrity contributed to blocking a proposed development. The case yields at least four lessons: (1) aesthetic integrity can be a practically effective framing device; (2) local deliberative settings are particularly conducive for addressing it; (3) it can serve as an umbrella under which multiple other issues can be brought to the fore; and (4) judgments about aesthetic integrity need not be entirely objective in order for them to play a productive role in the policy sphere.

Robert Proctor has argued that ignorance or non-knowledge can be fruitfully divided into at least three categories: ignorance as native state or starting point; ignorance as lost realm or selective choice; and ignorance as strategic ploy or active construct. This chapter explores Proctor’s second category, ignorance as selective choice. When scientists investigate poorly understood phenomena, they have to make selective choices about what questions to ask, what research strategies and metrics to employ, and what language to use for describing the phenomena. This chapter focuses especially on the selective choice of language for describing and categorizing phenomena in the face of uncertainty. Using several case studies from recent pollution research, I show that linguistic choices are especially significant when we have severely limited knowledge, because those choices can emphasize and highlight some aspects of our limited knowledge rather than others. These selective emphases can in turn influence societal decision making, and they can exacerbate the selectivity of our knowledge by further steering scientific research in some directions rather than others. I conclude with some suggestions for developing scientific language in socially responsible ways, even in the face of significant ignorance and uncertainty.

. The potential for financial conflicts of interest to influence scientific research has become a significant concern. Some commentators have suggested that the development of standardized study protocols could help to alleviate these problems. This paper identifies two problems with this solution: scientific research incorporates numerous methodological judgments that cannot be constrained by standardized protocols; and standardization can hide significant value judgments. These problems arise because of four weaknesses of standardized guidelines: incompleteness, limited applicability, selective ignorance, and ossification. Therefore, the standardization of study designs should not serve as an alternative to addressing the interests and power relations that pervade science policy-making. Policy makers should take at least two steps to prevent powerful interest groups from co-opting standardized guidelines. First, their development and review should be made as transparent as possible and should be subjected to broadly-based deliberation. Second, standardized guidelines should be supplemented with efforts to scrutinize the conditions under which financial COIs tend to have the most worrisome effects so that additional steps can be taken to eliminate and mitigate those conditions.

: This paper examines the epistemological warrant for a toxicological phenomenon known as chemical hormesis. First, it argues that conceptual confusion contributes significantly to current disagreements about the status of chemical hormesis as a biological hypothesis. Second, it analyzes seven distinct concepts of chemical hormesis, arguing that none are completely satisfactory. Finally, it suggests three ramifications of this analysis for ongoing debates about the epistemological status of chemical hormesis. This serves as a case study supporting the value of philosophical methodologies such as conceptual clarifica-tion for addressing contemporary scientific disputes, including policy-related scientific disputes that may be heavily in(integral)uenced by social and political factors

While the science and values literature has seen recurrent concerns about wishful thinking, there have been few efforts to characterize this phenomenon. Based on a review of varieties of wishful thinking involved in climate skepticism, we argue that instances of wishful thinking can be fruitfully characterized in terms of the mechanisms that generate them and the problems associated with them. We highlight the array of mechanisms associated with wishful thinking, as well as the fact that it can be evaluated both from epistemic and ethical perspectives. We argue that it is doubtful that a single unified definition of wishful thinking can be developed. Moreover, the concept of wishful thinking can problematically focus excessive attention on individual and epistemic problems in science, to the exclusion of social and ethical problems.

Relatively few thinkers have attempted to develop a systematic ‘ethics of expertise’ (EOE) that can guide scientists and other technical experts in providing information to the public. This paper argues that the prima facie duty to disseminate information in a manner that does not damage the self-determination of decision makers could fruitfully serve as one of the core principles of an EOE. Moreover, this duty can be fleshed out in promising ways by drawing on the concept of informed consent, which guides medical clinicians in preserving the self-determination of their patients. The paper applies the resulting ethical framework to recent policy discussions about hydrogen fuel-cell (HFC) vehicles, both because they have received a good deal of research funding and because their merits have been hotly debated. It concludes that technical experts providing information about HFC vehicles should be especially cognizant of three issues: (1) important alternatives to hydrogen technology that need to be addressed, (2) major false beliefs that should be prevented or corrected, and (3) significant framing effects that could influence the recipients of information

The biological effects of low doses of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals are currently a matter of significant scientific controversy. This paper argues that philosophers of science can contribute to alleviating this controversy by examining it with the aid of a novel account of scientific anomaly. Specifically, analysis of contemporary research on chemical hormesis (i.e., alleged beneficial biological effects produced by low doses of substances that are harmful at higher doses) suggests that scientists may initially describe anomalous phenomena in terms of multiple distinct "characterizations," each of which is compatible with current empirical evidence. By focusing attention on this feature of scientific anomalies, philosophers of science can alleviate the controversy over low-dose chemical effects in at least two ways: (1) they can pinpoint the significant ways in which particular characterizations frame the controversy, and (2) they can identify the methodological value judgments at stake in researchers' choice of characterizations.

Economist Frank Knight drew a distinction between decisions under risk and decisions under uncertainty. Despite the significance of this distinction for decision theory, we argue that there has been inadequate attention to the difficulties involved in classifying decision situations into these categories. Using the risk assessment of carbon nanotubes as an example, we show that it is often unclear whether there is adequate information to classify a decision situation as being under risk as opposed to uncertainty. We conclude by providing two suggestions for responding to these difficulties: treating decisions as real-world experiments; and promoting broadly based deliberation about quantitative information.