Abstract
While few would question the importance of the objectivity of science for providing a well-supported factual basis upon which policy decisions can be reliably made, it is far from clear what scientific objectivity is or how it should be achieved. In recent decades, questions regarding the objectivity of science have become increasingly salient in framing public debates about science and science policy: for example, can we trust medical research when it is funded by pharmaceutical companies? Or, whose research in climate science meets the standards of scientific objectivity? At the same time, the objectivity of science has become an increasingly important topic among historians and philosophers of science, as well as researchers in related fields in science and technology studies. In the wake of Karl Popper’s (1972) account of objective knowledge and Thomas Kuhn’s (1977) landmark analysis of scientific values in connection with issues of scientific objectivity and rationality, philosophers of science have attempted to clarify questions concerning the role of values in theory choice, the distinction between epistemic (or “cognitive”) and non-epistemic (or “social”) values, and the ways in which different kinds of values (including non-epistemic values) contribute to the objectivity of science. By contrast, historians of science have offered rich historical analyses that aim to clarify the changing historical meanings of objectivity by examining the emergence of particular scientific ideals in specific episodes in the history of science. These historical studies have revealed the complex, multifaceted, and ultimately contingent nature of the ideals that contribute to our current notions and understandings of scientific objectivity. Finally, sociologists and anthropologists of science have offered analyses that explicitly bring into question specific understandings of scientific objectivity as, for example, the disinterestedness or value neutrality of scientific work, by revealing the role of social processes—including the workings of structures of credit, rhetorical practices in science, and the pressure of funding regimes—in the production of scientific knowledge. Taken together, these investigations offer compelling reasons for thinking that scientific objectivity is much more complicated than one might have imagined. Two emergent themes from the science and technology studies literature are especially important in this regard.
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For a classic account of the value-free ideal, see Proctor (1991). For more recent elaborations of various philosophical perspectives on the value-free ideal, see Lacey (1999), Machamer and Wolters (2004), Kincaid et al. (2007), and Douglas (2009). For an account of the development of sociology of scientific knowledge by one of its most distinguished practitioners, see Shapin (1995). The Darwin industry cannot be summarized effectively, but a sense of the variety of approaches to contextualizing Darwin’s achievements can be seen in Ruse and Richards (2008).
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For the charge against the science and technology studies community see, for example, Koertge (2000) and Gross and Leavitt (1994). An examination of both the work discussed at length and the degree to which that work is actually understood in such scholarship indicates that the views decried were never actually endorsed by the leading members of the science and technology studies community.
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The classic texts on underdetermination are Duhem (1906/1954) and Quine (1951/1980). For a more comprehensive and critical discussion of the underdetermination thesis, see Harding (1976), Newton-Smith (1980), Laudan (1990), Laudan and Leplin (1991), Earman (1993), Leplin and Laudan (1993), Kukla (1993), Hoefer and Rosenberg (1994), Gillies (1993, ch. 5), Stanford (2001, 2006), and Intemann (2005).
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Longino’s advocacy of theoretical pluralism is intended to address the inherently value-laden nature of scientific knowledge, but it is also motivated to address a more general problem, viz., the situated and contextual nature of knowledge. The situatedness of knowledge is, of course, a longstanding feminist concern and the motivation for the standpoint theories of Harding (1986, 1991) and others.
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Some high-profile instances of concern about the pharmaceutical industry and its relations to medical research can be found in Healy and Cattell (2003), Angell (2004), and Elliott (2010). For population health more generally, two recent exposés by prominent historians of science are Oreskes and Conway (2010) and Proctor (2012).
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Acknowledgements
This volume grew out of a series of initiatives of the Situating Science: Humanist and Social Scientific Studies of Science knowledge Cluster Grant, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). This multi-year, multi-site grant is administered at the University of King’s College/Dalhousie University in Halifax; Gordon McOuat is the principal investigator and Emily Tector is the project manager. This grant brought two of the editors, Jonathan Tsou and Flavia Padovani, to the University of British Columbia as postdoctoral fellows and funded the Objectivity in Science Conference in June 2010. The third editor, Alan Richardson, is the BC node manager for this grant and would like to thank McOuat and Tector for their support and Nissa Bell and Simone Dharmaratne for their able assistance in all matters of grant administration at UBC. All the efforts around this project including conference organization and the preparation of this volume were aided by the project research assistant, Dani Hallet. While this project was on-going, Alan Richardson had the good fortune to supervise the dissertation by Jill Fellows on objectivity entitled “Making Up Knowers: Objectivity and Categories of Epistemic Subjects” (UBC 2011)—the final product and the conversations leading to it have substantially informed his understanding of the recent literature on objectivity. Flavia Padovani wishes to acknowledge financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation grant PA00P1–134177 and would also like to thank the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics for providing stimulating environment where part of this work has been carried out. Jonathan Y. Tsou is grateful for research support from the Center of Excellence in the Arts and Humanities (CEAH) at Iowa State University.
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Tsou, J.Y., Richardson, A., Padovani, F. (2015). Introduction: Objectivity in Science. In: Padovani, F., Richardson, A., Tsou, J. (eds) Objectivity in Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 310. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14349-1_1
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