tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post2771008608476374930..comments2023-04-21T20:55:22.881-04:00Comments on It's Only A Theory: A worry about arguments for values in scienceGabriele Contessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13607158011908969169noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-44171106491379144832012-03-12T13:05:40.469-04:002012-03-12T13:05:40.469-04:00Mark - The debate generally starts out from empiri...Mark - The debate generally starts out from empirical evidence, though usually the evidence is historical and sociological rather than psychological. As a descriptive matter, there have been cases where values definitely have played a role in science, even in hypothesis testing, including cases generally regarded as progressive. The main philosophical question is the normative one, about whether eliminating values as an ideal is preferable. I'd like to weigh in and say that this is not a worthwhile ideal, and that values must play a role in good science; indeed, a more thorough role than these two arguments would naturally lead to. <br /><br />There is perhaps a secondary descriptive question here, which is whether we should interpret the actual role of values in science as a detriment to progress whose role in the progressive cases is eliminable in principle (or, to put it differently, that the actual process happily approximates the "right" process, which would be value free) or whether the values were a needed ingredient for the progress to be made.Matthew J. Brownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00730262274655726070noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-3997783073536922502012-03-11T13:03:12.599-04:002012-03-11T13:03:12.599-04:00It's entirely likely that (i) this is obvious ...It's entirely likely that (i) this is obvious OR (ii) totally irrelevant; but...<br /><br />Questions of value-freedom with respect to hypothesis testing immediately remind me of psychological work on what is called 'confirmation bias'-- there's a large literature (and a lot of debate) on exactly how this works, but one formulation is that we (the royal 'we'... scientists included) are more likely to seek information which would confirm rather than deny a currently considered hypothesis. Two very relevant papers here are Snyder and Swann (1978) and Klayman and Ha (1987).<br /><br />I'm embarrassed to admit that I'm so out of the philosophy of science loop that I'm unsure of whether the main question here is descriptive or normative-- if I'm correct in understanding that there are philosophers of science who believe that hypothesis testing can take place in a value-free vacuum, citing this (the confirmation bias stuff, I mean) empirical evidence might be really important.<br /><br />As a matter of curiosity, I wonder-- how much of the philosophical debate makes contact with this kind of empirical evidence?Mark Pattersonhttp://sds.hss.cmu.edu/src/g_students.phpnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-87700512387057557562012-02-28T23:06:46.740-05:002012-02-28T23:06:46.740-05:00"There will always be a trade-off between dif..."There will always be a trade-off between different risks (e.g. Type I and Type II errors) and which risks are worth taking is always ineliminably a value judgment."<br /><br />Which is perhaps why the "cult of statistical significance P<0.05" is/was entrenched: a convention on controlling Type I error at this arbitrary level removed one entry point for value judgements in study design and interpretation.<br /><br />The hierarchies of strength of evidence for support of a theory, and for causation, in epidemiology and medicine, are ordered by their robustness to the effect of the values both of the experimenter and other scientists.David Duffyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12142997170025811780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-55275644797882203872012-02-27T11:06:46.956-05:002012-02-27T11:06:46.956-05:00I am tempted to agree and disagree with the claim ...I am tempted to agree and disagree with the claim about priority, read in two different ways.<br /><br />1. The risk or gap arguments don't apply to pure mathematics. Proofs in Euclidean geometry do not depend on value commitments, because the theorems follow deductively from the postulates. The difference for science is that inferences from evidence are either ampliative or rely on contingent material postulates. So the involvement of values in inference is not a universal feature of inference, but a special feature of contingent inference about the world. So (in this sense) inference is prior to the influence of values.<br /><br />2. For scientific inference, though, value-free inference does not make sense even as a limiting case. There will always be a trade-off between different risks (e.g. Type I and Type II errors) and which risks are worth taking is always ineliminably a value judgment. So there is no possible ampliative inference without values. One is not prior to the other.<br /><br />Neither of these seem like a shortcoming of the risk and gap arguments, however. So maybe you have something else in mind?P.D. Magnushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07799239684943144310noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-85814006771449239092012-02-27T09:30:20.152-05:002012-02-27T09:30:20.152-05:00This is interesting, but surely the point of value...This is interesting, but surely the point of value-freeness as an ideal is that it's something that should guide our epistemic choices whenever it is possible. Saying that it is *sometimes* impossible, or otherwise heavily constrained does not seem to tell against the ideal as a general principle of practical reasoning. I'm a big fan of ought implies can, but you need to endorse an unreasonable variant of that principle in order to justify the dismissal of the ideal on the basis of its imperfect realisation.deontologisticshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16652214325422205917noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-22990909983802262872012-02-27T05:11:12.725-05:002012-02-27T05:11:12.725-05:00Hi Matt,
Thanks for an interesting post. I share y...Hi Matt,<br />Thanks for an interesting post. I share your concern that, as stated, this might not seem like a real worry, though I think you can fix that. Here's the main problem (as I see it): the paragraph presumes that the reader takes the value-free ideal to be an inherently bad thing. It seems to me that the Science and Values folks frequently put the bulk of their dialectical efforts into arguing that value-laden science is not inherently bad. However, this is still consistent with value-free science being inherently good (indeed, even better than value-laden science, as would be the case if value-freedom were an ideal). That being said, I suspect that there are consequences of the value-free ideal that some find undesirable (I'm blanking on what these might be right now, because it's 5AM), and if these consequences were rendered explicit in your introduction, I think you'd motivate your problem in a more compelling manner. Under this assumption the problem would amount to this: given the lexical priority of evidence over values, there will be contexts in which these pernicious consequences of the value-free ideal ought to be accepted.KKhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07535420083612229353noreply@blogger.com