Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-9pm4c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-29T04:30:45.748Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The New Worries about Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2020

Janet A. Kourany
Janet A. Kourany*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, USA
*
Email: jkourany@nd.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Science is based on facts—facts that are systematically gathered by a community of enquirers through detailed observation and experiment. In the twentieth century, however, philosophers of science claimed that the facts that scientists “gather” in this way are shaped by the theories scientists accept, and this seemed to threaten the authority of science. Call this the old worries about science. By contrast, what seemed not to threaten that authority were other factors that shaped the facts that scientists gather—for example, the mere questions scientists pursue. Call this the old nonworries about science. What I suggest is that the old nonworries are turning out to be far more worrisome than the old worries, and I use recent goings-on such as the “Death of Evidence” protests in Canada, the “replication crisis,” and the ongoing feminist critiques of science to illustrate my case. All this raises interesting new questions for philosophers of science to tackle.

Keywords

Values in sciencefeminist science studies“Death of Evidence” protestsreplication crisissocially responsible scienceepistemic affirmative action
Type
Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 52 , Issue 3: Engaging with Science, Values, and Society , April 2022 , pp. 227 - 245
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bacon, Francis. [1603] 1964. “The Masculine Birth of Time.” In The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, edited and translated by Farrington, Benjamin. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.Google Scholar
Bacon, Francis. [1620] 1960. The New Organon and Related Writings. Edited by Fulton, H. Anderson and translated by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath. New York: Liberal Arts Press.Google Scholar
Bacon, Francis. [1627] 2008. The New Atlantis. Project Gutenberg EBook #2434. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2434/2434-h/2434-h.htm.Google Scholar
Baker, Monya. 2016. “1,500 Scientists Lift the Lid on Reproducibility: Survey Sheds Light on the ‘Crisis’ Rocking Research.” Nature 533 (May 26): 452–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Begley, C. Glenn, and Ellis, Lee M.. 2012. “Drug Development: Raise Standards for Preclinical Cancer Research.” Nature 483 (7391): 531–33.Google ScholarPubMed
Berger, Raymond. 1982. “The Unseen Minority: Older Gays and Lesbians.” Social Work 27 (3): 236–42.Google Scholar
Biddle, Justin B. 2020. “On Predicting Recidivism: Epistemic Risk, Tradeoffs, and Values in Machine Learning.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bird, Alexander. 2018. “Understanding the Replication Crisis as a Base Rate Fallacy.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (August 13) axy051. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axy051.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brigandt, Ingo. 2015. “Social Values Influence the Adequacy Conditions of Scientific Theories: Beyond Inductive Risk.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (3): 326–56.Google Scholar
Bush, Vannevar. 1945. Science, the Endless Frontier: A Report to the President. Washington DC: US Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Cannon, Lynn Weber, Higginbotham, Elizabeth, and Leung, Marianne. 1988. “Race and Class Bias in Qualitative Research on Women.” Gender and Society 2 (4): 449–62.Google Scholar
Chung, Emily. 2014. “Foreign Scientists Call on Stephen Harper to Restore Science Funding, Freedom.” CBC News, October 20. https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/foreign-scientists-call-on-stephen-harper-to-restore-science-funding-freedom-1.2806571.Google Scholar
Douglas, Heather. 2015. “Reshaping Science: The Trouble with the Corporate Model in Canadian Government.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 71 (2): 88–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dusenbery, Maya. 2018. Doing Harm: The Truth about How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick. New York: HarperOne.Google Scholar
Economist . 2013. “How Science Goes Wrong.” The Economist (October 21). https://www.economist.com/leaders/2013/10/21/how-science-goes-wrong.Google Scholar
Editorial. 2012. “Death of Evidence: Changes to Canadian Science Raise Questions That the Government Must Answer.” Nature 487 (July 19): 271–72. https://www.nature.com/articles/487271b.Google Scholar
Elliott, Kevin. 2017. A Tapestry of Values: An Introduction to Values in Science. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Elliott, Kevin C. 2020. “A Taxonomy of Transparency in Science.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy.Google Scholar
Engber, Daniel. 2016. “Cancer Research Is Broken: There’s a Replication Crisis in Biomedicine—and No One Even Knows How Deep It Runs.” Slate (April 19). http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/future_tense/2016/04/biomedicine_facing_a_worse_replication_crisis_than_the_one_plaguing_psychology.htmlGoogle Scholar
Eysenck, Hans J. 1971. The I.Q. Argument: Race, Intelligence, and Education. New York: Library Press.Google Scholar
Ferber, Marianne A., and Nelson, Julie A., eds. 1993. Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fernandez Pinto, Manuela. 2018. “Democratizing Strategies for Industry-Funded Medical Research: A Cautionary Tale.” Philosophy of Science 85 (5): 882–94.Google Scholar
Feyerabend, Paul. 1965. “Problems of Empiricism.” In Beyond the Edge of Certainty: Essays in Contemporary Science and Philosophy, edited by Colodny, Robert G.. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Gamble, Eliza Burt. 1894. The Evolution of Woman, an Inquiry into the Dogma of Her Inferiority to Man. London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.Google Scholar
Gero, Joan, and Conkey, Margaret. 1991. Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Goldenberg, Maya. 2015. “Whose Social Values? Evaluating Canada’s ‘Death of Evidence’ Controversy.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (3): 404–24.Google Scholar
Guttinger, Stephan. 2018. “A New Account of Replication in the Experimental Life Sciences.” Philosophy of Science 86 (3): 453–71.Google Scholar
Hanson, Norwood Russell. 1958. Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hastings, Conn. 2017. “Are Replication Studies Unwelcome?” Frontiers (May 1). https://blog.frontiersin.org/2017/05/01/are-replication-studies-unwelcome.Google Scholar
Havstad, Joyce C. 2020. “Archaic Hominin Genetics and Amplified Inductive Risk.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoag, Hannah. 2011. “Canadian Research Shift Makes Waves.” Nature 472 (269). https://www.nature.com/news/2011/110419/full/472269a.html.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hoag, Hannah. 2012. “Canadian Budget Hits Basic Science.” Nature (March 30). https://www.nature.com/news/canadian-budget-hits-basic-science-1.10366.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holman, Bennett, and Geislar, Sally. 2018. “Sex Drugs and Corporate Ventriloquism: How to Evaluate Science Policies Intended to Manage Industry-Funded Bias.” Philosophy of Science 85 (5): 869–81.Google Scholar
Hooke, William. 2015. “Reaffirming the Social Contract between Science and Society.” Eos 96 (March 17). https://doi.org/10.1029/2015EO026333.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hubbard, Ruth. 1979. “Have Only Men Evolved?” In Women Look at Biology Looking at Women: A Collection of Feminist Critiques, edited by Hubbard, Ruth, Henifin, Mary Sue, and Fried, Barbara. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman.Google Scholar
Jensen, Arthur R. 1985. “The Nature of the Black–White Difference on Various Psychometric Tests: Spearman’s Hypothesis.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8 (2): 193–263.Google Scholar
Johnson, Lyndon B. 1965. “To Fulfill These Rights” (commencement address, Howard University, June 4). https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/commencement-address-at-howard-university-to-fulfill-these-rights.Google Scholar
Johnson, Paula A., Fitzgerald, Therese, Salganicoff, Alina, Wood, Susan, and Goldstein, Jill. 2014. Sex-Specific Medical Research: Why Women’s Health Can’t Wait: A Report of the Mary Horrigan Connors Center for Women’s Health and Gender Biology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. https://www.brighamandwomens.org/assets/bwh/womens-health/pdfs/connorsreportfinal.pdf.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Sarah. 2017. “Six Months Later, the March for Science Tries to Build a Lasting Movement.” The Washington Post, October 23. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/10/23/six-months-later-the-march-for-science-tries-to-build-a-lasting-movement/?utm_term=.7f9d9fb22413.Google Scholar
King, Martin Luther Jr. 1964. Why We Can’t Wait. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Kingston, Anne. 2015. “Vanishing Canada: Why We’re All Losers in Ottawa’s War on Data.” Maclean’s, September 18. https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/vanishing-canada-why-were-all-losers-in-ottawas-war-on-data.Google Scholar
Kourany, Janet A. 2020a. “What Grounds Do We Have for the Validity of Scientific Findings? The New Worries about Science.” In What Is Scientific Knowledge? An Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology of Science, edited by McCain, Kevin and Kampourakis, Kostas. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kourany, Janet. 2020b. “Might Scientific Ignorance Be Virtuous? The Case of Cognitive Differences Research.” In Science and the Production of Ignorance: When the Quest for Knowledge Is Thwarted, edited by Kourany, Janet and Carrier, Martin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kourany, Janet. 2021. “Bacon’s Promise.” In Science, Freedom, Democracy, edited by Hartl, Péter and Tuboly, Ádam Tamás. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Krishna, Venni V. 2014. “Changing Social Relations between Science and Society: Contemporary Challenges.” Science, Technology, and Society 19 (2): 133–59.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Thomas. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Likwornik, Helena. 2015. “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? The Interweaving of Values and Science.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (3): 382–403.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Linnitt, Carol. 2013. “Harper’s Attack on Science: No Science, No Evidence, No Truth, No Democracy.” Academic Matters (May 30). https://academicmatters.ca/harpers-attack-on-science-no-science-no-evidence-no-truth-no-democracy.Google Scholar
March for Science. 2017. “The Science behind the March for Science Crowd Estimates.” https://medium.com/marchforscience-blog/the-science-behind-the-march-for-science-crowd-estimates-f337adf2d665.Google Scholar
Mazure, Carolyn, and Jones, Daniel. 2015. “Twenty Years and Still Counting: Including Women as Participants and Studying Sex and Gender in Biomedical Research.” BMC Women’s Health 15 (94). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12905-015-0251-9.Google ScholarPubMed
Meinert, Curtis L. 1995. “The Inclusion of Women in Clinical Trials.” Science 269 (5225): 795–96.Google ScholarPubMed
Munro, Margaret. 2015. “Canadian Budget Pushes Applied Research.” Nature 520 (7549). https://www.nature.com/news/canadian-budget-pushes-applied-research-1.17305.Google ScholarPubMed
Nosek, Brian. 2018. “Center for Open Science: Strategic Plan.” https://osf.io/x2w9h/?_ga=2.229634078.387483559.1586144282-1348813086.1586144282.Google Scholar
Nosek, Brian A., Camerer, Colin F., Dreber, Anna, Holzmeister, Felix, Ho, Teck-Hua, Huber, Jürgen, Johannesson, Magnus, Kirchler, Michael, Nave, Gideon, and Pfeiffer, Thomas. 2018. “Evaluating the Replicability of Social Science Experiments in Nature and Science Between 2010 and 2015.” Nature 2 (August 27): 637–44.Google Scholar
Oh, Sam S., Galanter, J., Thakur, N., Pino-Yanes, M., Barcelo, N. E., White, M. J., de Bruin, D. M., Greenblatt, R. M., Bibbins-Domingo, K., Wu, A. H., Borrell, L. N., Gunter, C., Powe, N. R., and Burchard, E. G.. (2015). “Diversity in Clinical and Biomedical Research: A Promise Yet to Be Fulfilled.” PLoS Medicine 12 (12), e1001918. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001918.Google ScholarPubMed
Open Science Collaboration. 2015. “Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science.” Science 349 (6251).Google Scholar
Osborne, Newton G., and Feit, Marvin D.. 1992. "The Use of Race in Medical Research." Journal of the American Medical Association 267 (2): 275–79.Google ScholarPubMed
Ovseiko, Pavel V., Greenhalgh, Trisha, Adam, Paula et al. 2016. “A Global Call for Action to Include Gender in Research Impact Assessment.” Health Research Policy and Systems 14(50), https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-016-0126-z.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pedwell, Terry. 2012. “Scientists Take Aim at Harper Cuts with ‘Death of Evidence’ Protest on Parliament Hill.” The Globe and Mail, July 10. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/scientists-take-aim-at-harper-cuts-with-death-of-evidence-protest-on-parliament-hill/article4403233.Google Scholar
Perez, Caroline Criado. 2019. Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. New York: Abrams Press.Google Scholar
Popper, Karl. [1935] 1959. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchinson. Originally published as Logik der Forschung. Vienna: Verlag von Julius Springer, 1935.Google Scholar
Price, Michael. 2011. “To Replicate or Not to Replicate?” Science (December 2). https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2011/12/replicate-or-not-replicate.Google Scholar
Psillos, Stathis. 2015. “Evidence: Wanted, Alive or Dead.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (3): 357–81.Google Scholar
Reid, Pamela Trotman. 1993. “Poor Women in Psychological Research: Shut Up and Shut Out.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 17 (2): 133–50.Google Scholar
Rohe, Wolfgang. 2017. “The Contract between Society and Science: Changes and Challenges.” Social Research: An International Quarterly 84 (3): 739–57.Google Scholar
Rosser, Sue. 1994. Women’s Health—Missing from U.S. Medicine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Schiebinger, Londa. 1999. Has Feminism Changed Science? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Schiebinger, Londa et al. 2020. “Designing Health and Biomedical Research.” Gendered Innovations in Science, Health and Medicine, Engineering, and Environment. International Collaborative Project. http://genderedinnovations.stanford.edu/methods/health.html.Google Scholar
Sheldrake, Rupert. 2015. “The Replicability Crisis in Science.” Nature (September 1). https://www.sheldrake.org/essays/the-replicability-crisis-in-science.Google Scholar
Sherman, Linda Ann, Temple, Robert, and Merkatz, Ruth B.. 1995. “Women in Clinical Trials: An FDA Perspective.” Science 269 (5225): 793–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Teresa. 2012. “Scientists Stage Mock Funeral to Protest Cuts to Research.” Canada.com, July 11. http://www.canada.com/business/Scientists+stage+mock+funeral+protest+cuts+research/6913396/story.html.Google Scholar
Smith-Spark, Laura, and Hanna, Jason. 2017. “March for Science: Protesters Gather Worldwide to Support ‘Evidence.’” CNN.com. https://www.cnn.com/2017/04/22/health/global-march-for-science/index.html.Google Scholar
Weisman, Carol S., and Cassard, Sandra D.. 1994. “Health Consequences of Exclusion or Underrepresentation of Women in Clinical Studies (I).” In Women and Health Research, vol. 2, edited by Mastroianni, Anna C., Faden, Ruth, and Federman, Daniel, 35–40. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.Google Scholar