Defusing the Democracy Defense
Scientists as Epistemic Representatives
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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)
- Scientific inquiry has many contingent moments, with reasonable alternative possible options.
- Each contingent moment is a decision point; that is, it is potentially an unforced choice.
- 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.
- Value judgments should be part of making choices that may have ethical and social implications and consequences.
- Thus, value judgments should be made to settle scientific contingencies. (Brown 2020, 63)
Democracy and VFI
The democracy defense
- (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) - If social and political values play a role in the empirical justification of political decisions, then the state would not be neutral.
- Therefore, social and political values should not play a role in the empirical justification of political decisions.
- (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.
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
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- 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
- 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)
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- trust
- X (the trustor) trusts Y (the trustee) to do Z
For Y to deserve this trust (be trustworthy):
- Y must be competent at doing Z
- 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?
- These scientists must be competent to determine whether glyphosate causes NHL
- 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
- citizen autonomy,
- citizens’ views of themselves as members of collectivities,
- citizens’ moral/ethical capacities, and
- 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)
Defusing the Democracy Defense
Scientists as Epistemic Representatives
UC Mercedepistemic-rep.netlify.app
References
Footnotes
This conflation of the domains of belief and action confuses rather than clarifies the appropriate role of values in scientific practice. (250-1)
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.
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
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)
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)
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)