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Dec 02 2008

Institutionalizing epistemic standards

Published in science, research, policy, epistemology, dissent by Tuomas Kuronen

On Monday, a workshop took place at the LSE CPNSS as a part of project called ‘Contingency and Dissent in Science'. The day was loaded with four speakers, all hovering around the topic matter. All the presenters provided interesting insights to the general matter; due to the limitations of this account, I am going to concentrate on one of them.

Dr Justin Biddle gave an intriguing presentation of the evolution of the epistemic standards in the pharmaceutical industry. Initiated by the commercialisation trend of the industry, three issues soon emerged: conflict of interest, contract research and institutionalised technology transfer between universities and profit-seeking companies. The change in epistemology appeared slightly later. Not surprisingly, research started to become skewed towards the ‘profitable'.

Thus, ‘the funding effect' with all its side effects started to realise, effectively undermining the established norm of organised scepticism in science, at least in that particular field. Lastly, he moved on by using Arthur Kantrowitz's ‘science court' model in making mixed decisions. Two interesting issues concerning these decisions were raised: there are no two opposing sides in the issue and there is no strict value/fact distinction.

Now, this kind of research has obvious echoes to the orgtheory/management scene as well. Concentrating on the practical inseparability of facts and values, it seems that this, if anything, steers research heavily. If facts cannot be separated from values because of the skewed interpretation of the state of affairs, what is the rôle of science? Moreover, how is rigorous scientific work to be conducted, if no independent scientist exists anymore? Or how is reliable data obtained, if companies are either sitting on relevant data or formulating the research questions?

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written by Esa Mononen, January 20, 2009, 09:13

Geometry unites men, social science divides them.

Purpose...
written by Tuomas Kuronen, December 14, 2008, 22:50

To be honest, I think that social science holds no purpose, at least not in the general sense of the word.

First, I want to distinguish between ‘the social’ of science and ‘social science’. Whereas social science can be seen as an intellectual (?) endeavour to understand the dynamics of a social reality, the social dimension of conducting science can be applied to practically every field. Epistemic standards seem to be one of the issues that get their share of external influence.

The point you mention, shared values/viewpoint, is an intriguing one. We can hypothesise and speculate all we want about ‘objective’, ‘real’ etc, but we cannot escape the value-ladenness of our observation, interpretation and drawing of ‘conclusions’. The extent the values behind this behaviour are shared, or even can be, is highly disputable.

Naturally, if a scientist openly admits that his objective in his scientific pursuits is to advance the competitiveness of the company that gracefully provides data for him and thereby benefit the national economy where he resides, fine.

But this is exactly the point what is meant by the skewing of epistemic standards. For in the example case, it seems rather implausible to imagine the scientist to publish results detrimental to the firm.

Calling this science is another thing.

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written by E. Mononen, December 14, 2008, 13:37

What do you think is the purpose of (social) sciences?

I guess the social nature of science means that reality analysis and theory production twines around some shared value(s)/ viewpoint. This mission (e.g. freeing individuals of constraints, adding economic value) determines which writings are selected and how interpreted.

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