Nosmo- Thanks! Let me know what you think …

Praj- Thanks, keep up the good work!

Andrew- I don’t recall saying that any of your work was crap, however, your statements about STS might be interpreted in the opposite manner.

Thanks all!

Regarding the connection between scientific judgment and normative values: My example of the nuclear engineers illustrates that when there is a strong connection between the scientific question and a political question, scientific judgment can be strongly influenced (possibly unconsciously) by normative values.

There is an extensive literature on problems with expert judgment being biased (though not necessarily by normative considerations) and overconfident [See, e.g., B. Fischhoff et al., "Lay Foibles and Expert Fables in Judgments about Risk," American Statistician 36, 240-55 (1982) and P. Slovic et al., "Decision Processes, Rationality and Adjustments to Natural Hazards." in G.F. White (ed.), "Natural Hazards: Local, National and Global," (Oxford, 1974), 187-204]. I’m with Andrew on the thought that ultimately hard data can overcome the effects of bias, but I don’t share his faith that while uncertainty prevails the invisible hand will operate in the scientific community as it does in the marketplace to ensure that individual biases almost always cancel one another.

I am working up a post that goes into this in greater depth, but it’s way too long and needs to be edited down to manageable size. I was sloppy in eliding the two kinds of judgments in my earlier post and Andrew caught me out at it, but I’m not backing away from my opinion that the prominent role for scientific judgments in WG1 is an open door for normative values to influence the scientific content. I do owe you who disagree with this a solid argument for you to challenge or refute.

Here are a few answers to your questions:
I acknowledge that values sometimes enter into scientific inquiry. Jonathan’s example of regulatory science and Lisa’s example of craniometry are both convincing.

What I object to is the sweeping statement that this is a universal law, like F=ma, that applies everywhere.

I do think science should serve the public good. The way society interfaces its values with a value-free scientific community is through the funding agencies. The funding agencies make the normative choices of what science is most important, and then deploys resources such that the scientific community is directed to answer those questions.

In fact, much of what I suppose you would identify as “values” in science I would argue come not from scientists or the scientific community but from the funding agencies. I study climate because it’s interesting, sure, but also because NASA pays me to study it. If the money disappeared, I’d pick something else to study.

I also agree that we seem, to some extent, to be talking past each other. I think this represents a fundamental limitation of blogging — it’s inability to easily resolve nuanced positions. Nuance tends to be lost rapidly.

Thanks again.

Thanks for your response. But I made more than a symmetry argument. I cited specific examples of STS scholarship that have implications for how we scientists do our work. I guess I’m still confused about your point. A few yes/no questions would clarify: are you sweeping aside all of STS because you disagree with some scholars who argue that values enter climate science? (If so, you’re quite bold!) Are you arguing that parents of autistic children have nothing useful to offer? That lay-citizen input has have never improved clinical drug trials? That issues of trust and authority don’t matter as long as we produce objective facts? That science appreciation and literacy will increase if people only learned more scientific facts from professional scientists? Again, these are also the types of issues that STS scholars research. Whether scientific facts are embedded with values is just a small part.

Scientists get very emotional and protest strongly whenever anyone suggests that science and values intersect or that science in practice isn’t the same as science in principle. In the process we distort a field that has much to to offer. The examples I listed earlier are just the beginning. If you believe, as I suspect you do, that science should serve the public good, then i don’t see how we can avoid the values-based questions that our research impacts. If STS is to help both science and society, then at the very least scientists should be willing to listen. I get the impression that you’re not ready to do even that.

Perhaps we need a new way of discussing this topic because I think we’re speaking past each other. The question of whether science is truly objective and value free is a wonderful academic question and great for the purpose of intellectual masturbation. I think that Roger and Dan would both agree you that there is a difference between scientific and value-laden judgments. But they would add that oftentimes the distinction is uninteresting, meaningless and distracts from more important issues. When they speak of values and science, I take it to mean more the scientific enterprise as a whole and its role in democratic decision-making and discourse. In this analysis, values are very much a part of science whether or not they affect specific observations or measurements. When scientific research has social implications, and if we want to contribute to our country and our world, we have to confront broader values that exist. I think you missed this point in Sarewitz’s essay.

It’s important to note the article is titled “Excess of Objectivity”, not “Excess of Subjectivity.” In the introduction itself Dan highlights that “the success and impact of science is argument enough for the validity of its method and results.” These controversies are intractable precisely because objective scientific facts can be mapped onto divergent values. In such situations, facts hinder rather than assist.

Roger, Dan: I hope I’ve represented your views correctly. Please correct me if I was wrong.

Regards,

It does seem odd that we are very uncertain what Roger thinks about this. Which I think supports Andrews first comment about the STS community (or at least Roger) doing a bad job of convincing scientists.

(Roger you will be happy to know that I broke down and ordered your book. I’m hoping it helps.)

I appreciate the symmetry argument you are making in your post. However, I think you miss one thing: one goal of the STS community should be to convince scientsts like me as well as policymakers that STS ideas have merit.

Without buy-in from scientists and policymakers, STS will have little or no practical impact in the larger world.

I, on the other hand, do not care at all what STS scholars think of my climate research. It does not change the impact of my work whether Roger et al. think it’s crap or not.

Thus, the symmetry is broken: the burden of proof is squarely on them to convince scientists, not on scientists to understand STS. As I said in my original message, STSers need to come up with better arguments if they want to convince the wider world.

Of course, if they don’t care whether scientists and policymakers understand their theory, then they should just keep doing what they’re doing.

Regards

I think we basically agree on this now.

I also find myself in the odd — perhaps even unprecedented — situation of agreeing with Mark Bahner.

However, I somehow doubt that Roger or Dan Sarewitz would agree with the three of us. Perhaps Roger will weigh in and let us know.

Regards

I’m getting in late on this discussion, but I’m troubled by the people (e.g. Jonathan) who seem to be grouping what I’d call “scientific judgment” into “value-laden statements.”

For example, suppose I say that I think that global warming will help cockroaches, seals***, and shippers using the Northwest passage, and say that global warming will hurt polar bears. That’s a “scientific judgment.” It’s got nothing to do with my values.

***Seals are judged to benefit, because there will be fewer polar bears to eat seals.

http://www.stemnet.nf.ca/CITE/pb_p_diet.PDF

It’s only when I get into saying that bad resulting from hurting polar bears exceeds the good coming from helping cockroaches, seals, and shippers using the Northwest passage that I’ve slipped into a “value-laden judgment.”

P.S. Aha! Judging from Jonathan’s just-posted comments, I think we’re all in agreement. That’s good.

You’re absolutely right that there’s no single STS perspective, but a wide diversity of opinions on how culture and values shape science. I find STS accounts that try to cram all of science into one cultural picture completely unpersuasive. My experience working in a number of different areas of science, from quantum optics to surgery, is that different scientific communities have very different ways of doing science and very different standards of evidence, so I am wary of attempts to write grand unified theories of how science works.

From my perspective, trying to force Newton’s laws into a picture that says they’re culturally relative or possess normative content is possible, but only in a tendentious, trivial, and pointless sense. I’m happy to say that Newton’s laws are the truth (let’s leave aside details about relativity and quantum mechanics). But Newton’s laws are settled science and it’s not very interesting to start a new research project to test them once more.

I agree that the vast majority of science is uncontaminated with any significant (or interesting) normative issues. But often (although not always) in politically sensitive matters, such as climate change and the health effects of pollutants, the answers to the scientific questions we care most about are those most likely to be caught up in and influenced by partisan or normative concerns, whereas in those places where science is most reliable, it may “merely sound the [same old] alarm with greater precision.” [Sarewitz, Frontiers of Illusion, p. 86]

I agree, though, with your criticism that my previous comment about expert judgment confused scientific norms (judgments about what’s good and bad science) with social and political norms (judgments about how we ought to behave). I was sloppy in my thinking and writing. I think there is a connection between scientific and social/political norms, but I did not support that assertion. I will get back to that in a future post.

For me, the merits of STS are not that it has much to tell scientists about how to do science—it doesn’t and besides, scientists are doing very well at their research without any help from STS—but that it might help the political process make better use of science. Thus, I have absolutely no desire to convince working scientists that their laboratory work is somehow “biased.” What I want is to contribute to better ways for the fruits of that work to be useful in helping a democratic public participate in making informed decisions.