WHEN & WHERE
Friday, March 28, 2025
3pm-5pm Pacific Time
Buchanan D324, 1866 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1
Although many have argued that science as an institution should be generally trusted by the public, others have noted that there are lots of reasons for distrust between the public and science. This focuses our attention on what should be considered trustworthy science, how to generate that kind of science, and how to signal its presence. I will argue that there are three interrelated bases for grounding the trustworthiness of any particular piece of science, and that these bases can be utilized by the non-expert to assess the trustworthiness of scientific expertise. These bases are 1) a method for detecting the presence of expertise, 2) an assessment of the expert community with which the expert is engaged, and 3) shared relevant social and ethical values. With this view, scientific expertise is capable of being assessed for trustworthiness by the non-expert. These bases provide reasons for trustworthiness in both cases of expert consensus and dissensus. I will conclude with implications for the practices and institutions of science for fostering trustworthy science.
Speaker:
Dr. Heather Douglas, Professor of Philosophy, Michigan State University
Dr. Heather Douglas’s work has been pivotal to current debate about the implications of recognizing that ‘value free’ ideals of objectivity are untenable; scientists and their institutions cannot exclude social, contextual values from inquiry and its results. In Science, Policy and the Value-Free Ideal (2009) she focused on questions about the roles values can (and should) legitimately play in science, a line of argument she has since developed in terms of a number of controversial policy issues, including research ethics, scientific freedom and regulation, science funding, and science-informed risk governance.
In her current work Dr. Douglas addresses questions about the role of scientific expertise in the context of democratic policy and decision making. She gave the 2016 Descartes Lectures, The Rightful Place of Science, and she recently published an article on “The Social Contract for Science and the Value-free Ideal” with T. Y. Branch (2024). Dr. Douglas has also edited several collections on science, policy and values, and authored reports on industry funding guidelines and on local decarbonization strategies, including one for the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Energy.
A Science and Technology Studies Colloquium, funded by the Public Humanities Hub-supported Research Cluster, Reasonable Trust: Fostering Humanities Methods in Public Engagement with Science and Technology.