Goldenberg, Maya J. (2015) Whose Social Values? Evaluating Canada’s “Death of Evidence” Controversy. In: UNSPECIFIED.

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Abstract

With 20th- and 21st-century philosophy of science’s unfolding acceptance of the nature of scientific inquiry being value-laden, the persistent worry has been that there are no means for legitimate negotiation of the social or non-epistemic values that enter into science. The rejection of the value-free ideal in science has thereby been coupled with the specters of indiscriminate relativism and bias in scientific inquiry. I challenge this view in the context of Psillos’s (2015) recent expression of such concerns with respect to Canada’s “death of evidence” controversy. Specifically, Psillos worries that as constructivist accounts of science demoted the previously secure status of evidence for drawing justified conclusions in science, we were left with no rational delineation between the right and wrong values for science. The implication for the death of evidence controversy are that we may have no rational grounds for claiming that the Canadian government is wrong to interfere with scientific enterprise. But he does offer another avenue for reaching the conclusion that the wrong social values are directing the current stifling of some sectors of Canadian science. Psillos draws from standpoint epistemologies to devise a salient defense of “valuing evidence” as a universalizable social value. That is, government bodies ought to enable scientific research via adequate funding as well as political non-interference (Psillos 2015). In this paper, I counter that (i) non-epistemic values can be rationally evaluated and that (ii) standpoint epistemology’s universalizable standpoint provides an inadequate framework for negotiating social values in science. Regarding (i), I draw from the evidence-based medicine debate in philosophy of medicine and from feminist empiricist investigations into the science-values relationship in order to make the argument for empirically-driven value arbitration. If social values can be rationally chosen in the context of justification, then we can have grounds for charging the Canadian leadership with being “at war with science”. (ii) I further argue that my recommended empiricist methodology is preferable to Psillos’s search for universalizable perspectives for negotiating social values in science because the latter method permits little more than the trivial conclusion that evidence is valuable to science.

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Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (UNSPECIFIED)
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Goldenberg, Maya J. mgolden@uoguelph.ca
Additional Information:	Penultimate draft of a paper forthcoming in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy
Keywords:	evidence, social values, feminist epistemology of science, feminist science studies, evidence-based medicine
Subjects:	General Issues > Feminist Approaches Specific Sciences > Medicine General Issues > Values In Science
Depositing User:	Maya Goldenberg
Date Deposited:	03 Aug 2015 16:33
Last Modified:	03 Aug 2015 16:33
Item ID:	11600
Subjects:	General Issues > Feminist Approaches Specific Sciences > Medicine General Issues > Values In Science
Date:	2015
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/11600

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