Suchergebnisse

Climate change is an ever-increasing threat to humanity, making the need for decision relevant, actionable climate science more and more pressing. With this need comes pressure to articulate what constitutes responsible practice in climate science for decision support. This requires in part understanding the role that values should play in socially relevant science. My aim in this thesis is to develop a deeper understanding of the role of non-epistemic values in climate science for decision support. To achieve this, I bring philosophical discussions of values in science into conversation with elements that are particular to climate science as a practice. I begin by drawing on work by philosophers of science to argue for three ways in which values can be good for science: they can help scientists meet their moral obligations through managing inductive risk; they can promote the multiple aims of research; and the presence of diverse values can promote objectivity. I apply these arguments in the context of climate science for decision support and present a range of examples to show where in the scientific process values can appropriately inform choices that climate scientists make. I then identify and examine three important value-related conflicts that can arise, even when conditions seem right for values to influence choices in science. These conflicts, which have been largely overlooked in philosophical work, include conflicts between epistemic and social values; conflicts related to the multiple roles that scientists might occupy in society; and conflicts between personal values and community values taken to regulate scientific practice. I argue that these conflicts have the potential to make value-based choices difficult to resolve. Some commentators have recently raised the possibility that when value-based disagreements arise climate science could be more like medicine in its management of risk. I take this suggestion seriously and conclude by proposing that climate scientists ought to explicitly embrace some nonepistemic values, such as human security, as constitutive of their field. I respond to potential objections to this proposal, arguing that it would not be a radical change to science, that it would not undermine science's epistemic integrity, and that it need not result in the promotion of politically contentious values. I then discuss how embracing non-epistemic values as constitutive of the field could have implications for practice and could contribute to the development of a code of ethics for climate scientists.

AbstractThis short article offers reflections on an approach to environmental policy and land management forwarded by Peter Kareiva and Emma Fuller. Their approach both mimics evolution in its structure and seeks to manage for evolution in application. They argue this approach is a novel perspective on policy that is more adaptive and flexible in setting realistic conservation goals and objectives. While we agree that their approach is a novel starting point for discussion of ecosystem resilience and adaptive management, we argue that they do not offer the required framework of guiding principles, or—more importantly—a set of values on which to base this particular environmental policy and management approach. We analyze the main driver behind Kareiva and Fuller's article (an evolutionary perspective in regards to policy) with respect to non‐epistemic values and outline key questions that will be important to inform environmental and conservation research, efforts, and policy.

Diskussionen um die Normativität von Sozialforschung gehen häufig von der Vorannahme aus, dass Werte und Fakten einander äußerlich sind. Auf Basis (neo-)pragmatischer Überlegungen schlägt dieser Beitrag demgegenüber die Unhintergehbarkeit von Werten in der sozialwissenschaftlichen Wissensproduktion als möglichen Ausgangspunkt einer Soziologie der Sozialforschung vor. Epistemische Werte erlauben Koordination und Bewertung im Forschungsprozess. Diese Werte sind keine Frage subjektiver Vorlieben, sondern "objektiv". Sie müssen sich im sozialen Vollzug der Forschung zur Bewältigung ungewisser Situationen bewähren und sind als historisch geformte Handlungsressourcen intersubjektiv verfügbar und kritisierbar. Die Frage nach den Werten, die Forschungsprozessen ihre Form geben, wäre damit empirisch (nicht "normativ") zu beantworten. Diese wissenschaftsimmanenten Werte sind nicht von umfassenderen oder tiefer liegenden normativen Ordnungen zu trennen, die im Rahmen der Soziologie der Konventionen als Konventionen bezeichnet werden. Im französischen Neopragmatismus sind die sogenannten Konventionen als alltagspraktische Ressource für die Kritik und Legitimierung untersucht worden. Die Diskussion epistemischer Werte führt daher zwangsläufig zur Frage der Kritik, die ihrerseits nicht mit Bezug auf eine transzendente Wahrheit, sondern nur konkret und "realistisch" beantwortet werden kann.

AbstractTracking technology has been heralded as transformative for animal ecology. In this paper I examine what changes are taking place, showing how current animal movement research is a field ripe for philosophical investigation. I focus first on how the devices alter the limitations and biases of traditional field observation, making observation of animal movement and behaviour possible in more detail, for more varied species, and under a broader variety of conditions, as well as restricting the influence of human presence and observer bias. I reconstruct these as shifts in scope, objectivity, accuracy and fruitfulness. The second transformation is slightly less obvious but equally significant for animal ecology. Tracking devices generate complex data that demands both statistical and biological expertise, which has led to increasingly frequent and intensive collaborations between statisticians and biologists. Based on interviews, I examine how researchers in these interdisciplinary collaborations negotiate the collection, analysis and interpretation of movement data, integrating research interests, methodological constraints, previous field observations, and background theory. Tracking technology is therefore also shifting which disciplinary considerations are brought to bear on research into animal movement and behaviour and how this research is conducted.

In her book Democracy and Truth: The Conflict between Political and Epistemic Virtues, Snjezana Prijic Samarzija advocates a stance that not only political, but also epistemic values are necessary for justification of democracy. Specifically, she mounts defense for one particular type of public deliberation on epistemic grounds. In this paper, l will discuss the following issue: What connects this type of public deliberation to the wider context of (epistemic) justification of democracy? I will attempt to explain why Prijie Samarzija's stance can be understood as a version of deliberative epistemic instrumentalism and to discuss the role played by the public deliberation within this framework.

In the article, I am concerned with the epistemic justification of democracy: what does the epistemic justification of democracy consist of, and how can we assure that democracy indeed generates decisions of the highest epistemic quality? However, since it is impossible to speak about the epistemic justification of democracy without considering its relation to political justification, and their tension, this article will also question the relationship between epistemic and political justification. I endorse a position called the hybrid stance, not only because I think that, when justifying democracy, we need to consider both the political value of fairness and the epistemic values of truth-sensitivity and truthconduciveness, but because I believe we should appropriately harmonize them. While the advocates of epistemic proceduralism hold that it best harmonizes the political and epistemic values of democracy, I argue that they do not separate epistemic values as intrinsically different from the political. On the other hand, even if we accept that epistemic justification is tied to intrinsically truth-respecting practices, the question remains which decision-making processes best satisfy this demand. In simpler terms, we must inquire how to divide epistemic labor between citizens and experts. I will try to show that the optimal model needs to preserve both the epistemic potential of the diversity present in the collective intelligence of citizens, and the epistemic potential of the factual knowledge embodied by the individual intelligence of experts.

In her book Democracy and Truth: The Conflict between Political and Epistemic Virtues, Snježana Prijić Samaržija advocates a stance that not only political, but also epistemic values are necessary for justification of democracy. Specifically, she mounts defense for one particular type of public deliberation on epistemic grounds. In this paper, I will discuss the following issue: What connects this type of public deliberation to the wider context of (epistemic) justification of democracy? I will attempt to explain why Prijić Samaržija's stance can be understood as a version of deliberative epistemic instrumentalism and to discuss the role played by the public deliberation within this framework.

Within the context of the discussion about value-free science ideal, Heather Douglas claims that in several cases non-epistemic values are needed for good reasoning in science. In this article I aim at recovering her viewpoint in order to examine the research driving to the Genetic Grandparent Inclusion-Probability Index, a crucial element to restitute the identity of children who were abducted during Argentinean dictatorship (1976-1983). Thus, my purposes are (i) to reconstruct Douglas´ main theoretical contributions, specifically her reasons to reject the ideal as well as the distinction between direct and indirect roles for values in science; and (ii) to analyze the scientific paper resulting from the "Grandparent-Inclusion Index" research. The main hypothesis is (iii) that several decisions of this research, particularly the establishment of what is to be considered sufficient evidence, should be explained by reference to social, ethical and political values. Both because of the non-epistemic consequences of the inquiry related to its inductive risk and because such inquiry is a case in which there is legitimate and necessary integration between epistemic and non-epistemic values and that it is also a case in which Douglas' criteria of objectivity is reached. By virtue of these reasons, the significance of Douglas' contribution to the analysis of the relationship between science and politics is emphasized. ; En el marco de la discusión sobre el ideal de ciencia libre de valores, Heather Douglas afirma que en muchos casos los valores tradicionalmente denominados no-epistémicos son necesarios para un buen razonamiento en ciencia. En este artículo propongo retomar su enfoque para examinar la investigación que condujo a la elaboración del "índice de abuelidad", elemento clave en la restitución de identidad de niños/as apropiadas durante la última dictadura en Argentina (1976-1983). Así, los propósitos son (i) reconstruir las principales contribuciones teóricas de Douglas a la discusión, especialmente sus razones para rechazar el ideal y su distinción entre roles directo e indirecto de los valores en ciencia; y (ii) analizar la publicación resultante de la investigación sobre el "índice de abuelidad". La hipótesis que anima el artículo es (iii) que dadas las consecuencias no-epistémicas de la investigación asociadas a su riesgo inductivo, varias de las decisiones metodológicas, en particular respecto a la ponderación de la suficiencia de la evidencia, se explican por referencia a valores sociales, morales y políticos, de modo que dicha investigación es un caso de legítima y necesaria integración entre valores epistémicos y no-epistémicos y que respeta los parámetros de objetividad establecidos por Douglas. Todo ello permite, finalmente, enfatizar la relevancia del aporte de Douglas para abordar las relaciones entre ciencia y política.