Tag Archives: science and values

Dispatches from Pittsburgh

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Greetings from Pittsburgh, PA, somewhere on the border between the neighborhoods of Squirrel Hill and Greenfield. It is nearing the end of my first full day of a roughly 8 month adventure. I’m here for my sabbatical year and on a visiting fellowship at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, one of the most important institutions in the field still in operation. It’s an honor to be invited to be a visiting fellow. I’m planning to go in tomorrow morning to get acquainted with the Center, fill out paperwork, and properly start my visit.

Since arriving in Pittsburgh, I’ve done a significant amount of walking (and I hope to do a lot more). I have gone grocery shopping and to Target. I’ve figured out the transit system, more or less. I’ve cooked two meals in my rental apartment, which is seeming more homey by the hour.

My plan, while I am here, is to write a book on science & values. It is the area I’ve been working in most since I finished my dissertation, and one where I’ve slowly developed my ideas in bits and pieces in my philosophical articles over the last 7 years. I think I’m finally ready to put it all together, and I think it will take a book to do it. The book will also be informed by the work on ethical decision-making in engineering research and design that I’ve been engaged with for the past several years with my collaborators at UT Dallas.

The book is engaged primarily with the current debates about values in science, but it draws on two other influences. One is the pragmatism of John Dewey, particularly his views on the logic of inquiry, the nature of values, and the role of science in society. The other is the philosophy of science in practice, a tradition that includes (in my view) the early Thomas Kuhn, the later Paul Feyerabend, Norwood Russell Hanson, Nancy Cartwright, John Dupré, and Hasok Chang, and also closely connected with the work of, among others, Peter Galison and Bruno Latour.

The tentative title of the book is “Science and the Moral Imagination.” I’m sure I will post again about the content of the book. The basic ideas behind the project are (1) that the scientific quest for knowledge and the ethical quest for a good life and a just society are deeply interrelated pursuits, ultimately inextricable from one another; (2) that scientific inquiry involves a series of interlocking, contingent, and open choices, which can only be resolved intelligently and responsibly through a process of value judgment; and, (3) that “research ethics” or “responsible conduct of research” should be a process not merely of compliance with prior given principles or edicts, but should involve the creative projection of consequences (in the broadest sense), and evaluation of those consequences. It is this latter (clumsily expressed) point that I hope to capture with the phrase “moral imagination.” To put the point differently, I seek to explicate and defend an ideal for science according to which “seekers of knowledge” ought to “use their creativity to make the world a better place in which to live.”

What I’m reading this week: John Dewey & Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics by Steven Fesmire and Science, Values, and Democracy (Descartes Lecture Draft) by Heather Douglas.
What I’m writing: My commentary on Heather’s Lecture #1 on “Science and Values,” and my presentation for the Descartes Lectures Conference. (Why did I say I would do both??)
Other stuff I’m working on: Learning my way around Pittsburgh; establishing a routine; improving my diet and exercise; getting into the habit of blogging more.
What I’m doing for fun: Walking; reading The Waste Lands by Stephen King; meeting new people.

A question of authorship

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I am trying to finish my paper on William Moulton Marston, and I am having significant difficulty deciding how to credit the scientific writings usually attributed to Marston alone. Here’s how I describe the problem in the paper:

Marston’s work and his personal relationships were deeply intertwined. Elizabeth Holloway held steady work most of her life, including a long editorial stint at Encyclopedia Britannica, supporting Marston when he was having trouble finding (and keeping) work. She was not only an inspiration and silent collaborator in much of Marston’s work; he often gave her credit. In Emotions of Normal People he reports on the results of experiments they had designed and performed together (370); elsewhere he reports that she “collaborated very largely” with him on the book (Lepore, 144). She is a credited co-author of the textbook Integrative Psychology. Olive Byrne received a master’s degree in psychology from Columbia, and she pursued but did not complete her PhD there (Lepore 124-5). Emotions of Normal People incorporated not only the research that Byrne had assisted Marston with at Tufts, but her entire master’s thesis on “The Evolution of the Theory and Research on Emotions” (Lepore 124-8). When it comes to authorship, Lepore points out:

[T]here is an extraordinary slipperiness.. in how Marston, Holloway, and Byrne credited authorship; there work is so closely tied together and their roles so overlapping that it is not difficult to determine who wrote what. This seems not to trouble any of them one bit. (ibid 127).

Thus, when examining the work of “William Moulton Marston,” it is crucial to keep in mind that said work is likely a collaborative production of (at least) Marston with Holloway or Byrne, if not both. It is tempting, then, to refer to “Marston, Holloway, and Byrne” or “Marston et al.” or “the Marstons” when describing “Marston’s” psychological contributions.

After this point, and throughout the paper, I have to discuss Marston’s record of publications, his psychological theories, his experiments, and so on. Currently, I refer to “Marston” in discussing works which list him as sole author, as well as the ideas cited in those works, and “Marston et al.” only in his one major co-authored publication (co-authored with Elizabeth Holloway Marston and C. Daly King). I’m unhappy with this approach, but also feel that doing one of the other things suggested above would be rather cumbersome.

Perhaps the fact that Marston, Holloway, and Byrne didn’t care much about it means I shouldn’t care much either. But what was expedient in their time is much more blatantly sexist in ours. Obviously, the citations in the bibliography should remain as they are, but the discussions in the text are a different story.

Three Direct Roles for Values in Science: A Sketch of a Sketch

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Heather Douglas (2000, 2009) has argued that inductive risk requires that scientists make value judgments in the “internal” processes of scientific reasoning, e.g., data characterization and interpretation and judging whether the evidence supports a hypothesis, but that the role for value judgments must be limited to an indirect role. There has been some controversy about just what the direct/indirect roles distinction amounts to (Elliott, Steele), but the basic idea is easy enough to understand: something plays a direct role in a decision if it acts as a reason for deciding one way or the other; it plays an indirect role if it instead helps determines second-order questions about the uptake of reasons, e.g., about what counts as a reason or about determining the necessary weight of reasons before deciding.
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Values, Assumptions, and the Science of Consciousness

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This is a repost of a post I did on the Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology site, in response to Robert Sawyer’s talk. I’ve posted the video here at the top for those who are interested. 

There were many interesting things brought up by Robert Sawyer in his interesting talk and the various discussions.  I’m glad that we had him as a guest at the Center.  One topic that caught my eye was his focus on the nascent science of consciousness and the associated ideas of human vs. machine intelligence.  I’d like to share some thoughts about the science of consciousness in relation to larger issues of values in science.

From my perspective on the intersection of values with medicine, science, and technology, one very interesting question about different approaches to consciousness is the way that that the starting assumptions in each approach reflect different value-perspectives.  This is especially pressing in an area like consciousness studies, where philosophical considerations loom so large, and there is so little unambiguous data or uncontroversial interpretation of the facts to constrain theorizing.  Critical engagement with the values implicit in such assumptions can be a powerful tool in assessing current approaches and suggesting alternatives, as has been powerfully shown by, among others, feminist scientists and feminist philosophers of science like Ruth Doell and Helen Longino.

I’m “thinking out loud” on some of this, so please bear with me, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

To even hope and try for a science of consciousness is to prefer explanation, understanding, human progress in the present, etc. to mystery, faith, the ineffable, salvation in the hereafter, etc.  This may seem to be a trivial move, but I think it isn’t.  For example, in various writings, Stephen Jay Gould defended the idea of non-overlapping magisteria, which laid issues of ultimate meaning and moral value orthogonal to the proper realm of science.  Gould went so far to say that the idea of the soul was not a scientific hypothesis for proof or refutation.  If this doesn’t strictly imply a stance on the possibility of a science of consciousness, it certainly suggests one.

More interesting, perhaps, is the way that specific proposals for a science of consciousness still implicate issues of value.  Take the premise of Sawyer’s WWW books, that the internet might become an intelligent, conscious entity.  Now, this is a consciousness far different from ourselves: it has no body, no ordinary physical needs or activities of the sort that the human brain spends most of its time dealing with.  While of course it has inputs and outputs, those aren’t tied to embodied perception or motor-activity.  And the only other actual forms of intelligence we encounter (if any!) are creatures more like ourselves, in fact even more tied to their embodiment: apes, monkeys, dolphins, etc.  On the other hand, what Sawyer is suggesting, in effect, is that any sufficiently complex information-processing system with the right features could become conscious.

Now, if an entity like the internet can become conscious, this presents a challenge to biologically/evolutionary-based accounts of consciousness, in which the best guess is that the conscious mind came about because it conveys some adaptive advantage to living creatures.  This need not be understood as the claim that all our mental activity is aimed at survival (such a view was demolished by evolutionary psychologist William James as early 1878), but it is crucial on such views to understand that the reason we have a conscious mind is because of the survival advantage it gives us, and that impacts the kind of thing consciousness is and its structure, makes both tied to our embodied, living activities.

Beyond this simple disagreement, perhaps, is a difference of values.  Saying that consciousness is neither embodied nor a property of activity creates a separation of mind and body, theory and practice, thought and activity and insists that mind, theory, thought are the kinds of things that matter to an intelligent, conscious entity.  John Dewey (another early American psychologist) frequently argued that such a preference was reflective of class divisions going back to ancient Greece, where the slaves labored and the wealthy contemplated.  Dewey argued that a more inclusive look at the breadth of human experience showed that intelligence, mind, consciousness, etc. were all practices aimed at the getting of needful things, the improvement of life, the direction of activity.  Even the most apparently contemplative activity, when functioning properly, ought to be seen as rendering some practice more intelligent, as guiding some matter of embodied need or satisfaction.

It seems to me that certain views of consciousness which tie it to the brain and ignore the body, or focus on the individual to the exclusion of the social element in experience, might be open to similar critiques, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.