Values Without Facts In my experience, science studies scholars earn their livelihood criticising scientists who fail to appreciate how scientific enterprises are embedded within society, social norms, or cultural values. Roger Pielke, a scholar cited in STS and professor at… Read More ›
experts
Constructive Critique: Social Value in Science Fact, Part I, Edward Sudall
Some science studies scholars support creationist schooling (Steve Fuller), support free-thinking climate denialist think-tanks (Bruno Latour), lawyers’ dominance above scientists’ evidence and embrace media’s post-truth turn (Sheila Jasanoff), lament top-down reassurances of harmless mobile phone radiation (Jack Stilgoe), believe values… Read More ›
Coalitions of Trust: Using Epistemic Teams to Identify Experts, Jamie Carlin Watson
I appreciate the opportunity to continue this conversation on how non-experts might identify and, thereby, come to trust experts. While so much of contemporary philosophical discussion might be called destructive—attempts to defeat an “opponent’s” claims through counterexample—this forum has been… Read More ›
What Did We Learn From L’Aquila? Scientist Citizens and Public Communication, Pamela Pietrucci and Leah Ceccarelli
We enter this conversation precisely to continue this productive exchange on the lessons to be learned from L’Aquila, grounding our response to both DeVasto and Felbacher-Escamilla on our previous work about the same case published in 2019 in Rhetoric &… Read More ›
There are Disagreements and Disagreements: A Reply to Wagemans, Martin Hinton
An argument without an audience is pointless, and an argument without an arguer is no more than a potential set of sentences. In his response to my earlier paper (Hinton 2019) on the ability of argumentation theory to deal with… Read More ›
Experts, Citizens, and Evidence: Who Manages What? Ivan E. Gómez-Aguliar
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has an unusual daily routine. Monday through Friday he leads a press conference from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. He fields a range of questions on his government’s new policies. Almost a month ago,… Read More ›
Balancing the Normativity of Expertise, Markus Seidel
In his paper “Towards a Balanced Account of Expertise” (2018) Christian Quast aims “to argue against a widespread tendency to conflate expertise with either the individual possession of relative competences or a certain role ascription” (2018, 397). Instead, he claims… Read More ›
Why We Should Come Off the Fence When Experts Disagree, Jean H.M. Wagemans
Martin Hinton in “Why the Fence Is the Seat of Reason When Experts Disagree” (2019) discusses the use of the theory of argument schemes and their associated critical questions in the situation when experts disagree about a certain matter. In… Read More ›
Objective Expertise and Functionalist Constraints (Part Two), Michel Croce
Author Information: Michel Croce, University of Edinburgh, michel.croce@ed.ac.uk. Croce, Michel. “Objective Expertise and Functionalist Constraints.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 5 (2019): 25-35. The pdf of the article gives specific page references. This essay is published in… Read More ›
Objective Expertise and Functionalist Constraints (Part One), Michel Croce
Author Information: Michel Croce, University of Edinburgh, michel.croce@ed.ac.uk. Croce, Michel. “Objective Expertise and Functionalist Constraints.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 5 (2019): 25-35. The pdf of the article gives specific page references. This essay is published in… Read More ›