Defusing the Democracy Defense

Scientists as Epistemic Representatives

Dan Hicks (they/them)

UC Merced
epistemic-rep.netlify.app

Value-free science and the democracy defense

The value-free ideal (VFI)

“Traditional objectivity”

Social and political values should not influence the “core” of
scientific inquiry:

  • Designing studies
  • Collecting and analyzing data
  • Evaluating hypotheses

Contingency argument

Okruhlik (1994)

  1. Scientific inquiry has many contingent moments, with reasonable alternative possible options.
  2. Each contingent moment is a decision point; that is, it is potentially an unforced choice.
  3. The different options in these contingent moments may have implications and consequences for things that we care about, including ethical and social, as well as political, cognitive, and aesthetic values.
  4. Value judgments should be part of making choices that may have ethical and social implications and consequences.
  5. Thus, value judgments should be made to settle scientific contingencies. (Brown 2020, 63)

Democracy and VFI

Mitchell (2004)1

Steele (2012)2

Betz (2013)3

Feyerabend (1978)4

Dewey (1927)5

Du Bois (1898)6

The democracy defense

  1. (State neutrality) The democratic state should be neutral with regards to the different values and desires held by citizens; the state should not play favorites.
    (Kappel 2014, 5; Lusk 2021, 104; Pamuk 2021, 24 and ch. 3)
  2. If social and political values play a role in the empirical justification of political decisions, then the state would not be neutral.
  3. Therefore, social and political values should not play a role in the empirical justification of political decisions.
  4. (VFI) Therefore, social and political values should not influence the “core” of scientific inquiry that might provide the empirical justification of political decisions.

Neutrality, or technocracy?

Not necessarily neutral

The democratic state should be neutral with regards to the different values and desires held by citizens; the state should not play favorites.

Elizabeth Eckford ignores the hostile screams and stares of fellow students on her first day of school, 6th September 1957. She was one of the nine African-American students whose integration into Little Rock’s Central High School was ordered by a Federal Court following legal action by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Bettmann/Getty Images

DD as a concern about technocracy

A class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge (Dewey 1927, 364)

If scientific assessments incorporate [value] judgments … and political goals are determined in light of research that incorporates such judgments, the values and purposes of scientists will end up preempting or circumscribing democratic deliberation from the outset. (Pamuk 2021, 47)

Participatory replies

Participatory replies

To a proceduralist deliberative democrat, the inclusion of non-epistemic values in empirical justification is politically legitimate to the extent that such values are selected through a process of suitably structured deliberation. …

The setting of these values can proceed via suitably structured deliberations, which as closely as possible, embody the ideals of deliberative democracy.
(Lusk 2021; see also Fernández Pinto and Hicks 2019; Hicks, Magnus, and Wright 2020; Brown 2021; Pamuk 2021)

Problems of scale

small-scale democratic experiments cannot be the only conduits for the democratic scrutiny of expertise, especially since they can only involve a small number of people at a time (Pamuk 2021)

Participants in NASA’s Asteroid Initiative pTA, November 2014 (Tomblin et al. 2015, 8)

Values in the nooks and crannies

[C]limate modeling involves literally thousands of unforced methodological choices. Many crucial processes are poorly understood, many compromises in the name of computational exigency need to be made, and so forth …. They are buried in the historical past under the complexity, epistemic distributiveness, and generative entrenchment of climate models …. The bits of value-ladeness lie in all the nooks and crannies. (Winsberg 2012, 132)

Upshot

  • It’s not that I’m rejecting participatory approaches
  • But they’re not sufficient
  • For scaling up and in everyday scientific practice, we have to rely on scientists’ values and judgments

A representative reply

Technocracy and representation

  • DD as a concern about technocracy:
    A small group substitutes their judgment for that of public
  • But this is just the conceptual challenge of representative democracy
  • So perhaps accounts of legitimate democratic representation would be useful here:

    Scientists, like elected officials, are representatives of the public

Scientists aren’t elected

This is a role for which [scientists] are neither qualified nor properly authorized. The task of representing public values is delegated to political representatives through elections. Scientists informally claiming this responsibility … would … lack a legitimate formal basis …. (Pamuk 2021, 54)

Recent political theory

  • Informal representation
  • Constructivism
  • Systems of representation

Informal representation

Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy with King, Benjamin Mays, and other civil rights leaders, June 22, 1963; source

Thunberg speaking at the annual climate conference, Austrian World Summit, 2019; source
informal representative
an individual or a group who speaks or acts on behalf of another individual or group in a given context, despite not having been elected or selected by means of a systematized election or selection procedure (Salkin 2021, 5)

Constructivism: Audience uptake

what makes it the case that a party emerges as an [informal representative] … is not their own say-so. Rather, people become IPRs when and because they are selected by others through audience uptake. (Salkin 2021, 3–4)

  • An audience ascribes an actor’s statements or actions to a group.
  • An audience regards an actor as a credible source of information about a group.
  • An audience relies on an actor’s testimony when attempting to understand what a group’s members want, value, or prefer.
  • An audience invites an actor to stand in for a group.

(Adapted from Salkin 2021, 9; see also Saward 2010)

Scientists and the audience uptake criteria

Hansen giving testimony before the United States Congress in 1988; source
Proportion of Freemen and Slaves among American Negroes; source
Roughly a quarter of Americans have an unfavorable view of both Biden, Trump; source

  • An audience ascribes the scientist’s statements or actions to a group.
    • James Hansen: Climate scientist turned activist
  • An audience regards the scientist as a credible source of information about a group.
    • Du Bois at the 1900 Paris Exhibition universelle
  • An audience relies on the scientist’s testimony when attempting to understand what a group’s members want, value, or prefer.
    • Public opinion research
  • An audience invites the scientist to stand in for a group.
    • Any scientist whose research is used in decisionmaking.

Epistemic interdependence

  • The world is far too complex for any one individual to know and understand more than a tiny part.
  • So we are epistemically interdependent:
    We need other people to know things on our behalf.
  • Epistemic representatives are simply the people we entrust to know and understand things on our behalf.
  • Often these people are scientists.

Technocracy and trustworthiness

But isn’t “epistemic representatives” just technocracy again?

the formulation can tacitly legitimize paternalistic claims by representatives to know what is best for their constituents’ interests, often despite their preferences. (Warren 2018, 42)

  • “Preemption” in social epistemology:
    “laypeople” should defer to the judgment of experts

When we discover that an epistemic authority believes that p, we should not make any more use of our own reasoning about p as evidence for or against p. The use of our own reasoning concerning p is to be bracketed. (Grundmann 2021, 140)

Trustworthiness, not deference

when we trust someone … we have optimism about her competence on things in our domain of interaction with her, ‘together with the expectation that the trusted will be directly and favorably moved by the thought that we are counting on her’
(Almassi 2022, 578, quoting Jones)

trust
X (the trustor) trusts Y (the trustee) to do Z


For Y to deserve this trust (be trustworthy):

  1. Y must be competent at doing Z
  2. Y must be responsive to X’s interest in Z

Does RoundUp (glyphosate) cause NHL?

  • EPA regulates pesticides, including glyphosate (RoundUp)
  • Concerns that glyphosate causes non-Hodgkins lymphoma
  • Most of the research used in pesticide regulation is done by pesticide industry scientists or contracted labs (Boone et al. 2014; Lerner 2021)
  • NB: neither appointed nor elected


  • Should I entrust these scientists to determine whether glyphosate causes NHL?
  • In other words, should they be regarded as my epistemic representatives?

Should these scientists be regarded as my epistemic representatives?

  1. These scientists must be competent to determine whether glyphosate causes NHL
  2. These scientists must be responsive to my interest in whether glyphosate causes NHL


  • If these scientists are not responsive, then whether or not they’re competent
  • They’re not trustworthy
  • And so shouldn’t be regarded as my epistemic representatives

A representative reply to the democracy defense

Informal representation
Representatives don’t need to be elected
Constructivism
They can simply be treated as representatives by an audience
Epistemic interdependence
Scientists often serve as our epistemic representatives
But what about technocracy?
Trustworthiness
Representatives (political and epistemic) must be both competent and responsive to the publics they represent

Technocracy and constituent assessment

Warren’s “two loci of judgment”

Warren’s response to the worry about paternalism:

two loci of judgment must be robust for democratic representation to occur:

  • The representative must be responsive to the represented, which involves judgments about their interests as affected by a relevant collectivity.
  • The represented must judge in what ways and how well they are represented by a representative, especially insofar as their interests are affected by a relevant collectivity. (Warren 2018, 43)

Constituent assessment

Democratic representation requires constituents to actively assess their representatives:

decisions about being represented … are kinds of political judgments. They comprise democratic citizenship. (Warren 2018, 43)

“[T]he represented” need to be conceived as entities “capable of action and judgment.” (47, quoting Pitkin)

How do representative, democratic political systems promote these constituent assessments of their representatives?

How to promote constituent assessment?

Democratically representative political systems can contribute to

  1. citizen autonomy,
  2. citizens’ views of themselves as members of collectivities,
  3. citizens’ moral/ethical capacities, and
  4. citizens’ capacities for discursive accountability.
    (Warren 2018, 47; see also Mansbridge 2018, 300)

Back to epistemic representation

citizens’

autonomy → epistemic autonomy
views of themselves as members of collectivities → epistemic collectivities
moral/ethical capacities → epistemic capacities
capacities for discursive accountability → capacities for holding experts accountable

How can political systems promote these capacities? How can socio-epistemic systems promote these capacities?

Representation 🤝 Participation

  • epistemic autonomy
  • epistemic collectivities
  • epistemic capacities
  • capacities for holding experts accountable

The middle way I have in mind combines the emphases on citizen participation, the importance of science, and the value of the division of epistemic labor. It requires us to reconceive democracy along participative–democratic lines as a kind of collective inquiry, an idea central to the work of John Dewey (Dewey 1927; Bohman 1999). (Brown 2021, 211)


References

Almassi, Ben. 2022. “Relationally Responsive Expert Trustworthiness.” Social Epistemology 36 (5): 576–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2022.2103475.
Betz, Gregor. 2013. “In Defence of the Value Free Ideal.” European Journal for Philosophy of Science 3 (2): 207–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-012-0062-x.
Boone, Michelle D., Christine A. Bishop, Leigh A. Boswell, Robert D. Brodman, Joanna Burger, Carlos Davidson, Michael Gochfeld, et al. 2014. “Pesticide Regulation Amid the Influence of Industry.” BioScience 64 (10): 917–22. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biu138.
Brown, Matthew. 2020. Science and Moral Imagination: A New Ideal for Values in Science. University of Pittsburgh Press.
———. 2021. “Against Expertise: A Lesson from Feyerabend’s Science in a Free Society?” In Interpreting Feyerabend: Critical Essays, edited by Jamie Shaw and Karim Bschir, 191–212. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108575102.011.
Dewey, John. 1927. The Public and Its Problems. H. Holt.
Du Bois, W.E.B. 1898. “The Study of the Negro Problems.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 11 (1): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/000271629801100101.
Fernández Pinto, Manuela, and Daniel J. Hicks. 2019. “Legitimizing Values in Regulatory Science.” Environmental Health Perspectives 127 (3): 035001. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP3317.
Feyerabend, Paul. 1978. Science in a Free Society. Verso Books.
Grundmann, Thomas. 2021. “Facing Epistemic Authorities: Where Democratic Ideals and Critical Thinking Mislead Cognition.” In The Epistemology of Fake News, edited by Sven Bernecker, Amy K. Flowerree, and Thomas Grundmann, 0. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198863977.003.0007.
Hicks, Daniel J., P. D. Magnus, and Jessey Wright. 2020. “Inductive Risk, Science, and Values: A Reply to MacGillivray.” Risk Analysis 40 (4): 667–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13434.
Kappel, Klemens. 2014. “The Proper Role of Science in Liberal Democracy,” May.
Lerner, Sharon. 2021. “The Department of Yes: How Pesticide Companies Corrupted the EPA and Poisoned America.” The Intercept (blog). June 30, 2021. https://theintercept.com/2021/06/30/epa-pesticides-exposure-opp/.
Lusk, Greg. 2021. “Does Democracy Require Value-Neutral Science? Analyzing the Legitimacy of Scientific Information in the Political Sphere.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 90 (December): 102–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2021.08.009.
Mansbridge, Jane. 2018. “Recursive Representation.” In Creating Political Presence: The New Politics of Democratic Representation, edited by Dario Castiglione and Johannes Pollak, 298–338. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo29203064.html.
Mitchell, Sandra D. 2004. “The Prescribed and Proscribed Values in Science Policy.” In Science, Values, and Objectivity, edited by Peter Machamer and Gereon Wolters, 245–55. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. http://books.google.com/books?id=hM8Vrot7zpUC.
Okruhlik, Kathleen. 1994. “Gender and the Biological Sciences.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 20: 21–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/00455091.1994.10717393.
Pamuk, Zeynep. 2021. Politics and Expertise: How to Use Science in a Democratic Society. Princeton University Press.
Salkin, Wendy. 2021. “The Conscription of Informal Political Representatives*.” Journal of Political Philosophy 29 (4): 429–55. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12246.
Saward, Michael. 2010. The Representative Claim. OUP Oxford.
Steele, Katie. 2012. “The Scientist Qua Policy Advisor Makes Value Judgments.” Philosophy of Science 79 (5): 893–904. https://doi.org/10.1086/667842.
Tomblin, David, Richard Worthington, Gretchen Gano, Mahmud Farooque, David Sittenfeld, and Jason Lloyd. 2015. “Informing NASA’s Asteroid Initiative: A Citizen Forum.” http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/ecast-informing-nasa-asteroid-initiative_tagged.pdf.
Warren, Mark E. 2018. “How Representation Enables Democratic Citizenship.” In Creating Political Presence: The New Politics of Democratic Representation, edited by Dario Castiglione and Johannes Pollak, 39–60. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo29203064.html.
Winsberg, Eric. 2012. “Values and Uncertainties in the Predictions of Global Climate Models.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 22 (2): 111–37. https://doi.org/10.1353/ken.2012.0008.

Footnotes

  1. This conflation of the domains of belief and action confuses rather than clarifies the appropriate role of values in scientific practice. (250-1)

  2. A significant worry is that scientists’ specialist knowledge permits or rather forces them to infringe on the role of those democratically elected to decide what is good for society.

  3. As political decisions are informed by scientific findings, the value free ideal ensures — in a democratic society — that collective goals are determined by democratically legitimized institutions, and not by a handful of experts

  4. Laymen can and must supervise Science … it would not only be foolish but downright irresponsible to accept the judgment of scientists and physicians without further examination. If the matter is important, either to a small group or to society as a whole, then this judgment must be subjected to the most painstaking scrutiny. (96)

  5. A class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge … No government by experts in which the masses do not have the chance to inform the experts as to their needs can be anything but an oligarchy managed in the interests of the few. (364-365)

  6. The frequent alliance of sociological research with various panaceas and particular schemes of reform, has resulted in closely connecting social investigation with a good deal of groundless assumption and humbug in the popular mind …. The new study of the American Negro must avoid such misapprehensions from the outset, by insisting that historical and statistical research has but one object, the ascertainment of the facts as to the social forces and conditions of one eighth of the inhabitants of the land. (16-17)