Science and Values – 1. The Challenge for the Philosopher

Don Howard

Science, by which I mean also the technologies that flow from and inform it, is a form of social practice. It has evolved distinct institutions and a distinct sociology. It has accumulated and refined an array of formal techniques and instrumental means for knowledge production and certification. That it is also socially embedded, affected by and affecting every aspect of human life, is a trivial truth. The only question, albeit a large one, is, “How?” By what means, in which respects, and to what extent does science change our world and does the world change science? Some changes are obvious, as with the accelerating transformation of material culture effected by science, and changes in our understanding of self, the worlds our selves inhabit, their relation to one another, and the relation of both to nature and spirit. Other changes, and the manner of the change, are less so, as with the content and modes of production of scientific knowledge. Does it make a difference when science is done in a democracy? Does it make a difference when research is funded by the private sector rather than the state? Is science neutral, objective, and above the fray? Understanding how science affects and is affected by its surround is necessary if we wish to effect intelligent control over science and the part of human life that it touches, which is well nigh the whole of the human experience.

Philosophers of science are supposed to understand the structure, methods, and interpretation of science. But apart from modest progress on the formal side and a few helpful insights in the foundations of some individual sciences, philosophy’s record from the early twentieth century has been, until late, rather spotty. In the main, when it comes to all but the more formal questions, philosophers of science have handed the task to their colleagues in history and sociology. History has given good service. Fans of technical history of science have been a tad disappointed in recent decades, but otherwise the history of science is a thriving field, with an expanding scope and a healthy plurality of approaches. Historians have taught us much about how science works and how it lives in its many contexts. But history remains, for the most part, a descriptive, narrative, or hermeneutic enterprise, deliberately eschewing critique and normativity. We may argue about how good a job the sociologists have done since the advent of the “strong programme” (“strong” = context shapes the content of science, not just its aims and institutions) some thirty plus years ago. Instead let’s thank them for forcing everyone to take the question of context seriously and for unsettling our lazy assumptions about the distinctive superiority of science among other social practices, its objectivity, and its social detachment. Subversion of prejudice is a form of critique, but sociology of science, like history of science, remains a largely descriptive, not critical enterprise.

Which brings us back to the challenge for the philosophers of science, my native tribe. Until late, we have struggled to say much that is helpful about the embedding of science in society because we were in thrall to an ideology of value neutrality and the social detachment of science, wrongly think these to be necessary conditions for scientific objectivity. We used to credit logical positivism for this deep insight into objectivity, citing Hans Reichenbach’s distinction between the “context of justification” and the “context of discovery,” the latter being the dustbin into which history, sociology, and all interesting questions about context were cast, the former being the sandbox in which elite philosophers of science alone were allowed to play. Now we regard such dogma not as insight, but as blindness, and the newer historiography explains it as not just the conclusion of a bad argument but as the discipline’s defensive response to political persecution before (Hitler) and after (Joe McCarthy) the Second World War. Weak inductive evidence for the new historiography is afforded by the fact that, curiously, philosophers of science began to overcome their fear of values talk at about the same time that the Berlin Wall came down.

Today, one is happy to report, everyone is eager to get on the science and values bandwagon. There are conferences, books, anthologies, special issues of journals, albeit, as yet, no prizes. Philosophers of science are eager to learn about science policy. They now invite historians and sociologists to their meetings, and they try hard to be respectful, even as they struggle to figure out exactly how empirical evidence bearing on the actual practice of science is supposed to inform their philosophers’ questions. But that is precisely the problem, for what the philosophy of science still lacks are tools for theorizing the manner and consequences of the social embedding of science.

This is not for want of trying. Our feminist colleagues have been at it for thirty or more years. They have taught us a lot about episodes where science has been more deeply affected by its social embedding – read now its “gendering” – than many of us had or wanted to think. Among them there is a proliferation of analytical frameworks, from feminist empiricism to standpoint theory, difference feminism, and postmodernist feminism, each of which has taught us new ways to query once-settled pieties. Phil Kitcher is probably the most prominent philosopher of science otherwise to have taken the plunge, borrowing ideas from John Rawls to think about the place of science in democracy while holding onto what some think are rather shopworn notions of truth and realism (perhaps also a shopworn notion of democracy). Most interesting to me are those projects that mine the past for fresh insights on science, values, and social embedding, as with Heather Douglas’s re-reading of Richard Rudner, Tom Uebel’s rehabilitation of Otto Neurath, and Matt Brown’s resuscitation of John Dewey (more on all of which anon). New theoretical ideas emerge, thus, from attentive history that is more than mere antiquarianism and rational reconstruction.

Lots of commotion. Still we lack, by my lights, the kinds of theoretical tools needed to answer the “How?” question posed above: “By what means, in which respects, and to what extent does science change our world and does the world change science?” We need a theory of science that integrates the history, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and even biology of science and scientists into a comprehensive project. In its critical and reformist aspects this theory of science must learn to be normative not just after the fashion of the inductive logician but also in the way of the political theorist and the moral theorist. Promotion of the common good should be the guiding principle. And it would be fun it if could even be a bit utopian.

The next post will set us on our way with a more specific list of necessary conditions for the possibility of such a theory of science.

Author: Don Howard

Don Howard is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and the former director and a Fellow of Notre Dame's Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values. A physicist and philosopher of science by training, he works now on a wide array of topics in the history and philosophy of modern physics, the history of the philosophy of science, and science and technology ethics. Foremost among his more specific interests of late are Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, the history of the philosophy of science, the ethics of emerging weapons technologies, robot ethics, AI ethics, and the ethics of responsible technology innovation and entrepreneurship. View all posts by Don Howard