Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 43 (2012) 218–220

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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

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Essay Review

Mind the gap

Stephen JohnDepartment of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, UK

When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

Science, Policy and the Value-free Ideal, Heather Douglas, Uni-versity of Pittsburgh Press (2009). 210pp., ISBN: 9780822960263.

In the preface to this book, Heather Douglas expresses the hopethat her arguments will be of interest to philosophers of science,scientists and policy-makers. I cannot judge what scientists andpolicy-makers will make of this work. However, both the qualityof the substantive arguments for this book’s conclusion—that sci-entific research should not be insulated from social and ethical val-ues—and its methodological claim—that philosophy of scienceshould not ignore science’s social role—mean it is of great interestfor philosophers of science, political philosophers and sociologistsof science. As a bonus, it is very clear.

The book sets out to attack on the ‘‘Value-Free-Ideal’’ (VFI): that‘‘social, ethical and political values should have no influence overthe reasoning of scientists, and that scientists should proceed intheir work with as little concern as possible for such values’’(p.1).1 If ‘‘the reasoning of scientists’’ is interpreted broadly, then thisideal is preposterous: ethical values are clearly relevant to decidingwhat to research or research on human subjects (as Douglas con-cedes to proponents of the VFI). The VFI is concerned with whatwe might call narrowly scientific reasoning: the characterisation ofdata, interpretation of evidence and acceptance of theories (p.102).Douglas claims that this ideal has dominated philosophy of sciencesince the mid-1950s (Chap.3). This is unclear, particularly given thatDouglas lists few proponents of the VFI, and suggests both that somephilosophers who are normally thought of as strictly demarcatingscience and politics (including Hempel and Nagel) held more com-plex views and that some philosophers with complex views aboutthe science/politics interface (most notably, Hugh Lacey) espousethe VFI. However, assessing Douglas’s assessment of her targets isa rather scholastic pastime: she is surely correct that many philoso-phers of science hold that ethical and political values are improper in

0039-3681/$ - see front matter � 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2011.10.007

E-mail address: sdj22@cam.ac.uk1 All page references are to the work under review.2 At least, if we deny the distinction between contexts of discovery and of justification,3 At other points, she discusses theories, rather than hypotheses (eg, p.2). It is rather a sh

does not consider scientific modelling, particularly given the uses made of models in poli

narrowly scientific reasoning.2 Furthermore, Douglas’s positive viewis independently interesting. Therefore, the rest of this review willreconstruct and criticise Douglas’s positive arguments. For reasonsof space, it will ignore her interesting discussions of many issues(including the history of scientific advising and the sociology ofthe Science Wars) and will stress points of disagreement (specifi-cally, I will not discuss her novel account of objectivity).

Douglas conceptualises scientific research as aiming ‘‘to gener-ate hypotheses about the world and to gather evidence from theworld to test those hypotheses’’ (p.1).3 However, data underdeter-mines theory acceptance: it provides ‘‘evidential support’’, not ‘‘cer-tainty’’ (p.2). One response to this problem would be to say thatscientists do not (or should not) accept theories outright, but(should) report degrees of evidential support. However, Douglas as-sumes that scientists do not (perhaps cannot) simply report episte-mic probabilities (I return to this below). Therefore, there is an‘‘inductive gap’’ between the evidence scientists collect and the the-ories they accept.

‘‘Values’’ close this gap. Douglas lists four kinds of values: epi-stemic, cognitive, social and ethical (Chap.5). ‘‘Epistemic values’’,such as being internally consistent, are, she suggests, not truly val-ues; rather, they are ‘‘limits’’ to scientific inquiry, in the sense thatwe must reject any theory which fails to meet these conditions, gi-ven the ‘‘ultimate goal of research, which is true (or at least reli-able) knowledge’’ (p.93). Douglas rejects a view which she claimsis held by defenders of the VFI: that, beyond epistemic values,we should appeal to (and only to) ‘‘cognitive values’’ (such as sim-plicity, explanatory power and scope) to justify theory acceptance.Although she agrees that we should prefer theories which displaycognitive values, the fact that a theory is simpler than a second isnot a reason to think that theory more likely to be true. Rather, itprovides a reason to investigate that theory first, because simplertheories are easier to work with (Chap.5). In Douglas’s terminology,

as, I assume, Douglas does.ame, although understandable given the book’s already ambitious scope, that Douglascy-making.

S. John / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 43 (2012) 218–220 219

‘‘cognitive values’’ properly play only an indirect, not a direct role inscientific research: they help us identify the most efficient orderfor theory testing.

In denying a direct role for values, Douglas’s position is weakerthan that of many who think that values play a role in inference.However, she also thinks, contra the VFI, that social values (suchas social stability) and ethical values (such as avoiding harm) canlegitimately play an indirect role in inference. Specifically, thesevalues help us to resolve the ‘‘problem of inductive risk’’ of settingthe proper trade-off between ‘‘false positives’’ and ‘‘false nega-tives’’ when deciding whether to accept or reject a theory (Chaps.3 and 4). Douglas’s view is not that arguments such as ‘‘p wouldbe beneficial to humanity, therefore p’’ are valid. Rather, it is thatsomething like ‘‘if the consequences of me failing to accept p when,in fact, p is true would be very bad (ethically, socially), then I willaccept that p on the basis of weak evidence’’ is acceptable.

Although Douglas does not explore these options, presumablyother values could play this role or we could use unjustified con-ventional standards. Why, then, think that social and ethical valuesought to set epistemic standards for acceptance? Douglas’s answeris that ‘‘making empirical claims should be considered as a kind ofaction with often identifiable consequences to be considered’’ andwhen performing such actions we all have a moral responsibility toconsider the consequences of different kinds of error (p.70). Forexample, the evidence I require before making the factual claim‘‘there could be a bomb in that briefcase’’ may differ if I am in anempty classroom vacated by an absent-minded colleague and if Iam in a crowded train station. This general moral responsibilitynot to make ‘‘reckless or negligent’’ empirical claims cannot beoff-loaded onto others; therefore, scientists need to consider con-sequences of error when closing the inductive gap (Chap.4).

As well as this striking conclusion, Douglas’s book is methodo-logically interesting. She not only argues that philosophers of sci-ence should pay greater attention to how scientists and policy-makers do interact, but also assumes that the best argument forthe VFI appeals to social values: that ‘‘keeping science as far awayas possible from social and political concerns would be the bestway to ensure science’s reliability’’ for policy-making purposes(p1). One might worry that starting from social reasons to keep sci-ence value-free loads the dice in Douglas’s favour: had she started,for example, from the claim that value-free science is the best wayto generate the intrinsically valuable good of true beliefs, then hertask might be harder. However, Douglas has clearly identified acore, albeit difficult to express, concern underlying the VFI: thatscience with values is not much use for humans deciding how tolive up to their values. Defenders of the VFI ignore such concernsonly at the cost of making it mysterious why science is both fundedand used in society.

As I have indicated, this is an admirable and exciting book.However, some key issues are ambiguous. These include Douglas’sepistemological views (see the quotation above which seems tosuggest that there is reliable but false knowledge); how certainclaims relate to one another (for example, Douglas’s endorsementof Longino’s work and her claim that simplicity is a cognitivevalue); how precisely the main arguments hold together (could adefender of the VFI concede that values should only play an indi-rect role, but that only cognitive values should play that role?);and whether arguments are descriptive or normative (I was un-clear whether Douglas thinks that ethical values are currently usedto solve the problem of inductive risk but only implicitly, or thatother values are used, but ethical values ought to be). Furthermore,as other reviewers have noted (for example Fagan, 2009), it isunclear how far Douglas’s arguments can be extended beyond‘‘regulatory science’’, and the book displays a puzzling ‘‘Americanexceptionalism’’ (not only in its history of science advising andits account of democratic oversight procedures, but in its failure

to discuss the increasingly international nature of many researchprojects). However, such concerns are unavoidable when a bookis as ambitious as this one, and could, I am sure, be clarified by fur-ther work.

A more fundamental worry concerns two of Douglas’s keypremises in her arguments for the role of ethical values in resolvingthe problem of inductive risk: that scientists must accept or rejectclaims; and that acceptance and assertion are subject to the samemoral norms. The first assumption can be undermined in one oftwo ways: first, we might argue, that scientists do not have to ac-cept claims outright, but might, instead, simply report evidentialsupport. (In this context, it is puzzling that Douglas mentions theIPCC’s report on climate change, the conclusions of which are artic-ulated in probabilistic form.) In response, Douglas suggests that weface a problem of inductive risk in coming to decide which proba-bilistic claims we should assert (for example, at p.55 and p.85).However, it is unclear that this response is compatible with herclaim that the more overwhelming the evidence in favour of a the-ory, then the less the role for value judgments (p.107), whichseems to imply that evidential support is separable from valueconsiderations.

Second, even without pursuing this issue, we might note thatthere is a difference, under-explored by Douglas, between decidingthat the evidence is insufficient to accept a theory as well-estab-lished and rejecting the theory. I presume that this distinction isnecessary for Douglas’s own view about the proper role of ‘‘cogni-tive values’’: the fact that a theory is horribly complicated does notmean it should therefore be rejected, but, rather, that it should beplaced on the backburner while we consider a simpler theory first(unlike a theory which is discovered to be internally inconsistent).This concern relates to the second assumption: that the norms gov-erning acceptance and assertion are identical. Imagine that a scien-tist is faced with a body of evidence, relevant to whether or notenvironmental degradation is occurring. Imagine, further, thatthe evidence is very mixed. Douglas seems to assume that the sci-entist is faced with the following choice: either accept the claim orreject it, and report this result accordingly. However, I suggest thatthe scientist has three ‘‘epistemic’’ options: to accept the claim; toreject the claim; or to withhold judgment. I do not know whatnorms should guide such reasoning. It is clear, however, that with-holding judgment is compatible with reporting: ‘‘the evidence ispretty hard to judge, but it certainly suggests that, given the poten-tial costs of failing to act on that claim if it’s true, it’s reasonable toact as if environmental degradation is occurring’’.

If so, one could agree with Douglas that scientists have seriousobligations to communicate carefully in the face of uncertaintybecause making empirical claims is an action to be governed bymoral norms, but deny that this obligation concerns what theyshould accept, rather than or as well as what they should assert.This proposal may seem less neat than Douglas’s own. However,I suggest that a serious problem which does arise at the interfaceof science and policy-making is precisely that an option which isavailable to scientists—to place a claim on the backburner to awaitfurther corroboration—is not available to policy-makers—forwhom failing to accept a claim is equivalent to rejecting that claim.It is precisely this gap between the realms of theoretical and prac-tical reasoning which the unscrupulous can easily exploit, by sub-tly treating scientists’ concerns about an absence of evidence asevidence of absence. Therefore, scientists may have an obligationto communicate results even when they do not themselves acceptthose results, because only asserting what they accept may bereckless or negligent. Douglas is right, then, that the problem ofinductive risk is central to understanding the relationship betweenscience and policy, but the proper response to this problem may bea better account of norms of assertion, which need not rest on orimply an account of norms of acceptance.

220 S. John / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 43 (2012) 218–220

These concerns relate to a final worry about the work as a wholethat Douglas seems to assume that taking social and ethical valuesseriously involves considering those values in each and every deci-sion we make. However, at least at two points, the book quicklymoves over various ‘‘social’’ worries about such constant re-assess-ment of our standards: first, Jeffrey’s worry that it would beimpractical for the scientist to consider the costs of error associ-ated with every possible use of some claim she makes (p.55); sec-ond, concerns about predictability which limit the role for ‘‘expertjudgment’’ in regulatory agencies’ ‘‘inference guidelines’’ (p.144).Douglas responds to both of these concerns rather quickly. How-ever, both worries point to a potentially deeper problem: that evenif a system where scientists do not constantly consider the possibleconsequences of error is morally second-best, it may still be thebest system all-things-considered. That is to say, one might con-cede that in a perfect world, scientists would listen to Douglas,but that in the real world, there are costs of doing so, in terms ofthe information scientists would need to collect or the predictabil-ity of policy-making, relevant to a thorough-going consideration ofthe social role of science.

To conclude, then, let me note one specific form such a worrycould take. Douglas notes, rightly, that scientists have epistemicauthority in our society, and, furthermore, that we believe that

such authority is related to their isolation from society. I was nevercertain, though, why Douglas is certain that one can remove theVFI and retain the authority of science. Specifically, I suggest thefollowing possible problem. In general, scientists are remarkablyconservative in the inferences they are willing to make, generallytreating false positives as far worse than false negatives. MaybeDouglas is right that such an attitude is immoral. However, itmay be that part of the source of scientists’ authority rests,precisely, on the fact that they are immorally epistemicallyconservative: they can be relied upon to avoid at least one kindof error—false positives—even if they generate false negatives.Implementing Douglas’s proposals might, then, undercut the veryconditions which make widespread, systemic social trust in sciencepossible. I do not know whether these claims are true, but theypoint to one way in which the best—a fully morally responsive sci-ence—might be the enemy of the good—a science people rely on.Maybe such concerns are misplaced, but if any book is a usefulstarting point for thinking through such issues, then it is this one.

References

Fagan, M. B. (2009). Review of ‘‘Science, Policy and the Value Free Ideal’’ Notre DamePhilosophical Reviews, (04/09/2009) <http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=18306>Accessed 19.07.11.