Lecture 9 Flashcards
Commodification of academic science
the commercialization.
- Since the second half of the 19th century: research primarily carried out for its
economic benefit.
Merton’s Ethos of Science
4 famous norms of science (also called “institutional imperatives”) as the backbone of the
ethos of science
- Universalism: the acceptance or rejection of scientific claims should be based on
impersonal criteria. Nationality, religion, sex and other personal qualities of a
scientist should be irrelevant to the evaluation of scientific truth claims. Access to
science should be universal. - Communism: for science: its fruits should not be privately owned, because they
result from an essentially collective effort. - Disinterestedness: individual scientist may have a variety of motivations for
practicing science in the way they do, ranging from a craving for fame and wealth to
a concern for the well-being of humanity. - Organized skepticism: temporary suspension of judgment and the detached scrutiny
of beliefs in terms of empirical and logical criteria. Opposite or organized skepticism:
institutionalized dogmatism.
VSNU (Vereniging voor Samenwerkende Nederlandse Universiteiten)
Code of conduct
for scientific practice: provided a codification of principles of good scientific teaching and research. Mertonian values: - Reliability - Verifiability - Impartiality - Independence - Scrupulousness
Criticism of Merton’s Ethos of Science:
➢ Problem of the abstract nature of the Mertonian ethos and its lack of applicability to
concrete scientific practices.
➢ Many of the codes are unhelpfully vague or ambiguous.
➢ Existence of vagueness don’t make the codes meaningless > it’s a challenge to the
philosophy of science.
Scientific norms should be open to critical discussion, which can be derived from
The values of organized skepticism
- Patterns scientific publications in ways that distinguish the typical scientific article
from the typical work of literature.
- Norm of writing argumentative discourse directs the way scientific report on their
research
Patent
t: intellectual property right to exploit a particular technological invention.
- The right of the patent holder to excuse all other people or instituting from reaping
the economic fruits of this invention.
- 3 main criteria for patentability:
o Novel
o Utility
o Nonobvious to someone skilled in the art
Since the rise of the “entrepreneurial university” patenting in increasingly practiced within
academic science.
- Patenting as one of the novel ways of financing academic research
Scientific communities will be objective to the degree that they satisfy four criteria
necessary for achieving the transformative dimension of critical discourse:
(1) There must be recognized avenues for the criticism of evidence, of methods and of
assumptions and reasoning
a. Avenues for the presentation e.g.’s: journals, conferences, etc.
(2) There must exist shared standards that critics can invoke
a. It must appeal to something accepted by those who hold the position
criticized
(3) The community as a whole must be responsive to criticism
a. This criteria requires that the beliefs of the scientific community as a whole
and over time change in response to the critical discussions taking place
within it.
(4) Intellectual authority must be shared equally among qualified practioners.
a. Intended to disqualify a community in which a set of assumptions dominates
by virtue of the political power of its adherents.
→ criteria for assessing the objectivity of communities.
→ Everyone has a place in the scientific world and should be taken serious (e.g. also
students)
The greater the number of different points of view included in a given community, the more
likely it is that its scientific practice will be objective.
Tekst 3: Bilgrami
Though there is much radical disagreement on the fundamental questions around academic
freedom, these disagreements tend to be between people who seldom find themselves
speaking to each other on an occasion such as this or even, in general, speaking to the same
audience.
→ On this subject one finds oneself speaking only to those with whom one is
measurably agreed, at least on the fundamental issues.
There is a great and recurring tendency in the literature on the subject to appeal to the same
broad arguments and metaphors and intuitions to present the justifications for academic
freedom
It takes roughly the following lines:
5. There is a statement of purpose or goal
6. There is a statement of the conditions for the pursuit of that goal
Mill’s argument
- Its appeal is the appeal of a certain fallibilist epistemology that widely underlies the
classical and orthodox liberal mentality.
Mill’s argument has two premises and a conclusion. - Premise 1: Many of our past opinions, which we had held with great conviction, have
turned out to be false. - Premise 2: So, some of our current opinions that we hold with great conviction may
also turn out to be false. - Conclusion: Therefore, let us tolerate dissenting opinions just in case our current
opinions are wrong, and these dissenting opinions are right.
The idea is that ‘market place of ideas’ keeps us honest.
Mill’s argument is based on an induction (‘meta-inductive argument’) - His induction goes from an observation about our past beliefs about the world to a
conclusion about our present and future beliefs
There is an extraordinary ambition in this argument.
• It it does not aim to convince us to adopt a value (the value of free speech) on the
basis of any other moral or political values.
• It hopes to convince us on grounds that are, in that sense, value-free - Its appeal is the appeal of a certain fallibilist epistemology that widely underlies the
classical and orthodox liberal mentality.
Mill’s argument has two premises and a conclusion. - Premise 1: Many of our past opinions, which we had held with great conviction, have
turned out to be false. - Premise 2: So, some of our current opinions that we hold with great conviction may
also turn out to be false. - Conclusion: Therefore, let us tolerate dissenting opinions just in case our current
opinions are wrong, and these dissenting opinions are right.
The idea is that ‘market place of ideas’ keeps us honest.
Mill’s argument is based on an induction (‘meta-inductive argument’) - His induction goes from an observation about our past beliefs about the world to a
conclusion about our present and future beliefs
There is an extraordinary ambition in this argument.
• It it does not aim to convince us to adopt a value (the value of free speech) on the
basis of any other moral or political values.
• It hopes to convince us on grounds that are, in that sense, value-free
A primary aim of universities is to pursue the truth in our various disciplinary inquiries and
that the point of pedagogy is to try and present the truth we have found by presenting
evidence and argument for it
‘Balance’
’ in the academy is nothing other than a synonym for the idea that we must look at
all the evidence before coming to our convictions.
Bilgrami Three different phenomena
There is far too much dogmatism in the academy
- Especially in the social sciences and even in the humanities
Dogmatism: the tendency to lay down principles as undeniably true, without consideration
of evidence or the opinions of others.
- Dogmatism constitutes a threat to academic freedom by returning to the paradox of
the preface.
Three different phenomena:
1. There is academic dishonesty –to recognize evidence or argument that goes against
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2. There is the inability to even recognize the force of counterevidence and
counterargument. → academic or intellectual obtuseness.
3. There is the suppression of those who present counterevidence and
counterargument that one has recognized to be so, and one has dishonestly evaded.
→ academic unfreedom.
The dogmatism that interests Bilgrami is found in submerged forms of academic exclusion
(when we circle the wagons around our own frameworks for discussion so that alternative
frameworks for pursuing the truth simply will not even become visible on the horizon of our
research agenda.)
- These are cases in which a discipline discourages the development of frameworks
outside of a set of assumptions on which there is mainstream consensus
Does science have a ‘self-cleaning’ capacity?
According to Bruno Latour:
- Politics, economics, technology, science, and other institutional features together
form a network of power.
- Science is not a tightly organized march towards the truth, but a messy, struggleridden human activity in which everything revolves around persuasiveness.
➔ Notice the connections to Kuhn
A scientific fact is based on different elements a web of power:
e.g.,theories, devices, statistics, measuring instruments, fellow researchers,
maintenance assistants, research engineers, institutes, politics, and (a lot of) money.
There can be no facts without the network.
Q: Which factor plays the most important role in the network?
If the acceptance of scientific knowledge depends on:
- Paradigms (Kuhn)
- The social struggle for power between scientists
- The web of power of science & technology & economics & politics & society
: Can we trust scientific knowledge to be objective? Even reliable?
Perhaps yes; through a forum of experts (using feedback mechanisms) which ‘guarantees’
the reliability of science
If science is ‘self-cleaning’, we can envision that as a kind
of ‘knowledge filter’:
- Frontier science
o Supervision, exchange of ideas, critical
discussions, presentations and comments - The institutionalized “forum of experts” (act of
quality control)
o Manuscript to editors of a journal; sent to
(anonymous) peers; verdict (accept, revise,
reject) - Creation of manuscript; public dissemination
Q: But,can we conclude that the final product is:
a) Knowledge that is true
b) Knowledge that is reliable
c) knowledge that as achieved consensus?
Q: What does Latour’s account of web of power indicate about the possibility of a
knowledge filter?
