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//******** Do Scientists Make Value Judgements? - November 14th, 2019 *******//
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- Strangely silent? That means it's QUIZ TIME!
    - *the routine drill of ripping paper, writing upon said paper, and then passing around the papers has been completed*
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- Let's start off with a little background on what we'll be talking about today and the next few class periods: broadly, the interaction of science and values
    - Kuhn talked about this a bit when we're evaluating hypotheses across paradigms, and how we can't use purely logical algorithms to choose which hypotheses we're gonna go with and (therefore) that there's a mix of objective and subjective factors
        - Kuhn himself thought this terminology of values as just being "subjective" was a bit problematic and imprecise (coming a tad too close to relativism), but the gist holds
    - While this used to be a scandalous topics, modern science handbooks - like the National Academy of Science's "On Being a Scientist" - often say that values and particularly ethics is INSEPARABLE from science!
        - What do they mean by this? They'll often say that "science is built on a foundation of trust," and that because science involves cooperation it cannot function in separation from ethics
            - To name a few examples, being a scientist inherently involves: 
                - Learning from teachers and mentors (whom you trust are teaching you correctly)
                - Selecting research problems (cooperating with others + trusting societal or ethical judgement of what problems are important)
                - Applying for funding (trusting the process is fair, using ethical values to judge proposal, etc.)
                - Publishing research results and papers (involves ethical norms between the publisher, scientist, and reviewers)
                - Applying your research to practical technologies or policies
            - Throughout this process, there are a bunch of norms that NEED to be upheld for science to function at all; imagine what science would be like if you couldn't rely on the honesty of research papers! It would break down!
        - This book in particular identifies 3 obligations all scientists and engineers have:
            - Honoring the trust colleagues place in them
            - Obligations to themselves
            - Obligations to society (avoiding irresponsible actions, not abusing public trust, etc.)
    - The modern view, then, is that science is value-laden in lots of ways - but are there parts of science that can or should remain "value free?"
        - Traditionally, people have wanted to say YES: the valuation of hypotheses! We should avoid letting ANY biases try to come in here, since we want to be as objective as possible

- Richard Rudner - from our reading today - starts by examining this traditional view in his 1950s paper
    - Rudner argues that in the traditional view, science means trying to avoid letting our personal feelings and biases and values get involved in our science; we're still "human beings," but we should try and put all that stuff aside to do objective science
        - As he puts it, EVERYONE acknowledges that scientists make value judgements as PEOPLE; what he argues for is that scientists "qua scientists" - acting as scientists - also inherently make value judgements
    - What's Rudner's main argument here? It's often known as the "argument from inductive risk," and goes like this:
        - The "scientist qua scientist" accepts and rejects hypotheses
        - No scientific hypothesis is ever verified with 100% certainty
            - There's always a risk of being wrong whenever we accept or reject a hypothesis, as we've mentioned before
        - The decision to accept or reject a hypothesis depends on if the evidence is sufficiently strong
        - Whether or not the evidence is SUFFICIENTLY strong to accept/reject a hypothesis is a value judgement
            - As Rudner says, how high this bar is "is a function of the importance of making a mistake in accepting or rejecting a hypothesis, typically in an ethical sense"
            - Many scientific fields use a 95% confidence interval as their standard, but importantly that's just a convention; there's no objective reason why it was set there
        - Therefore, scientists make value judgements as scientists
    - So, here's the question: is this a valid, sound deductive argument?
        - It seems to be valid; if the premises all hold, then we've literally got a premise that says "scientists do this thing, and that thing means value judgments"
        - Many people would think it's a sound argument, too - but that 1st premise? It provides a little bit of wiggle room to...

- Richard Jeffrey, who tries to avoid Rudner's argument completely by claiming that scientists SHOULDN'T accept or reject hypotheses
    - Instead, he claims 
    - As Jeffrey himself recognizes, though, his own theory has some pretty big shortcomings: practicing scientists DO say they accept and reject hypotheses quite often, it "presupposes a satisfactory theory of probability" to , and

- While Rudner believes that scientists should still try to be objective, he thinks we have to recognize that values are inherent in the scientific process, and to that end we should explicitly recognize which judgements we're making

- Is that all we can do? We'll talk about that plenty more next week