Science and society practice questions.

Heather Douglas allows social and moral values an indirect role in the appraisal of evidence, but never a direct one. Which use of a value does her distinction rule out?

• Treating the desirability of a result as itself a reason to believe it.
• Demanding more evidence before accepting a claim whose error would be costly.
• Weighing the consequences of a false negative when setting a threshold.
• Choosing to investigate a pollutant because a community is worried about it.

Answer: Treating the desirability of a result as itself a reason to believe it.

In the direct role a value works as a reason for the claim itself, which Douglas rejects as wishful thinking; in the indirect role it only settles how much evidence is enough before acceptance is reasonable. The other options are that indirect role, which Douglas defends against a value-free ideal that barred values from the internal stage altogether, and the choice of research problem, the one use the ideal never claimed to govern.

Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway describe campaigns that funded contrarian studies and repeatedly called for further research before any regulation could be considered. On their analysis, what was the strategic point of that activity?

• To refute the prevailing theory by developing a better confirmed rival to it.
• To satisfy Popper's demand that every theory be exposed to attempted falsification.
• To widen participation in enquiry by funding laboratories outside the mainstream.
• To make a settled consensus look like an open dispute.

Answer: To make a settled consensus look like an open dispute.

The tactic exploits a real feature of enquiry, that evidence is never complete, in order to manufacture the appearance of controversy and so postpone a decision. It is not falsificationism: Popper requires that a theory be testable, not that action be deferred until doubt has become impossible.

A ministry meets public resistance to a new vaccination programme by publishing more technical information, assuming that the opposition is caused by ignorance. Critics call this the deficit model. What do they say it misses?

• That non-specialists are unable to follow technical material of any kind.
• That opposition may express distrust of institutions rather than missing facts.
• That scientific findings should never be communicated to non-specialist audiences.
• That the ministry cannot know whether its own programme is effective.

Answer: That opposition may express distrust of institutions rather than missing facts.

The objection is not that the public already knows enough, but that the model misdescribes the problem as a shortage of facts in individual heads when trust, interests and the past conduct of institutions are doing the work. Dialogue models of science communication were proposed as the alternative to precisely this diagnosis.

Helen Longino argues that objectivity is a property of scientific communities rather than of individual investigators. Which condition does her account therefore make central?

• That each researcher sets aside her background assumptions before observing.
• That every hypothesis is tested by an experiment capable of decisively refuting it.
• That criticism has recognised venues and is actually taken up.
• That the community shares one paradigm throughout a period of normal science.

Answer: That criticism has recognised venues and is actually taken up.

Longino holds that background assumptions cannot be eliminated, so objectivity has to be produced socially by transformative criticism instead of by purifying individual minds. The refutation option belongs to Popper and the paradigm option to Kuhn, both of whom locate the achievement somewhere other than in the community's critical practices.

A scientific committee reports that a pesticide raises the incidence of a disease by a measurable amount and concludes from this finding alone that its use ought to be prohibited. A philosopher objects to the inference itself. What is the objection?

• The measured increase may have been produced by chance rather than by the pesticide.
• Committees of experts have no standing to make recommendations to elected governments.
• A premise about which level of risk is acceptable is needed to reach the conclusion.
• Causal claims of this kind cannot be established outside laboratory conditions.

Answer: A premise about which level of risk is acceptable is needed to reach the conclusion.

The gap is between a finding and a norm: without an evaluative premise fixing what risk is worth accepting against what benefit, no policy conclusion follows from the evidence. The objection is therefore not that the science is weak, which would be a complaint about the finding rather than about the step taken from it.

An arrangement in which political decisions are taken by engineers, economists and other technically trained specialists in virtue of that training, rather than by representatives accountable to citizens, is best described as

• technocracy, since authority is claimed on the basis of technical expertise
• epistocracy, since the vote is restricted to those who pass a competence test
• meritocracy, since positions are allocated according to talent and effort
• bureaucracy, since decisions are taken by an administrative apparatus following rules

Answer: technocracy, since authority is claimed on the basis of technical expertise

Technocracy names a distribution of political authority to those who know how things work, so merely relying on expert advice does not amount to it. Epistocracy is its neighbour and restricts political power to the competent quite generally rather than to technical specialists; the difficulty both face is that expertise settles what will happen if a policy is adopted, not what ought to be pursued.