Once upon a time scientists were
heroes of the intellect. In a world rife with political struggle and religious
bigotry science provided the Only Path to Truth. Science was also thought to
provide a path — perhaps the only one — from truth and nothing but the truth.
Whereas religious thought and other contemptible branches of speculation —
generally known as metaphysics — were value-laden through and through,
scientists ultimately stuck to what they saw.

One has doubts if anyone ever really held this
view of science — a strawman of particularly low-quality sort of straw — but
it has been convenient to foist it on the logical empiricists and other
opponents of a more realistic (as opposed to realist) view of the scientific
enterprise.

Science after all is an activity which even
philosophers have known to be a far more social context-dependent affair, ever
since Kuhn and the Strong Program people landed  on planet Plato and firmly
entrenched themselves.

All of this may lead one to ask, is science
value free? The logical positivists professed to want to have nothing to do
with values in the laboratory or in front of the blackboard. Neither did the
scientists — or so the positivists claimed. Social constructivists think
otherwise. Not merely the way the enterprise of science is run, but even the
questions scientists ask, the methods they use and so on are determined by the
values the (a) scientific community holds.

The pertinent question here seems to be what is
actually meant by the adjective phrase ‘value free’. In his book Is Science
Value Free? Hugh Lacey claims that the concept of the value-freeness of
science has three constituents. Value-freeness involves impartiality,
the idea that what theories are accepted must not involve non-cognitive values,
neutrality, the notion that theories must not make a difference to the
values one holds and autonomy, the idea that only scientists themselves
should decide what research to pursue and how to go about it. 

Lacey uses a considerable amount
of time to distinguish between cognitive values and moral and social values.
Cognitive values, such as explanatory power and being aimed at truth, are and
ought to be writ large on scientific theories. If the acceptance of theories is
to involve impartiality, as according to Lacey it must, then theories should
manifest the cognitive values to a high degree. Moral, social, aesthetic and
political values on the other hand, must not be involved in the acceptance of
theories and neither should they make a difference to how the business of
science is conducted.

All three theses, science should
be impartial, science should be neutral and scientists should be autonomous are
either revised or rejected. Autonomy is more or less straightforwardly directed
to the dustbin of utopian history and philosophy of science. Or perhaps one
might as well say dystopian HPS, since surely it would be a very bad thing if
research practices were not constrained by moral values. Curiously moral
considerations of this kind are not exactly the most salient items on Lacey’s
list of reasons to reject the autonomy thesis as he sees it. Lacey actually
formulates the autonomy thesis in terms of non-interference from outside,
which would seem to leave open the possibility of scientists themselves setting
moral boundaries to their business. This surely is how it should be, but the
problem is that viewing autonomy in terms of non-interference only does
not provide any substantive considerations on anything the purportedly
autonomous party could or could not do. It is not surprising, then, that Lacey
finds he has to reject the idea of autonomy of science on the ground that "[v]alues
pervade, and must pervade scientific practices and (in significant part)
account for the direction of inquiry and for the kinds of possibilities
attempted to be encapsulated in theories" (p.256). He has to say this
given first that science is in various ways permeated by values and second that
he somehow seems to overlook the simple idea that moral self-regulation by the
science community would not reduce science’s autonomy by one jot.

This lack of attention for moral
self-regulation should not, however, be mistaken for a lack of attention for
values per se. According to Lacey science along the metaphysical lines
of Galileo and the epistemological lines of Bacon is driven by the value the
control of nature. Hence it does not allow for science driven by other values.
Values that could drive science as well as the value of control are those which
are espoused by feminism or such ideals as helping the developing world or
green ideals. This seems to me to be important insight. It is especially
important that Lacey explicitly presents science as a potential ally of various
emancipation movements. I do not see however, why this view should be taken to
imply that science is not autonomous. For if it is not autonomous on these
grounds — science must involve non-scientific values — there is no reason not
to say that only a purely moral agent would be autonomous. And there is no such
thing as a purely moral agent.

The neutrality thesis is not
rejected but altered. On the changed formulation theories should be compatible
with at least some value systems. The argument for this is that some theories,
or rather theories formed along the lines of some strategies, have consequences
for what one can rationally believe about a certain topic. This means that a
theory cannot be said to sit easy with every value-system. This is perhaps a
matter of wanting to have one’s cake and eat it, but it is precisely the point
that there is no need to gobble up neutrality wholesale.

Impartiality is kept virtually
intact. Lacey says that "impartiality remains a defensible and, I believe,
obligatory value of scientific practices" (p.258). The point is that the
acceptance of theories should turn solely on their cognitive value. The fact
that the scientific strategy — what sort of explanation one looks for, hence
which cognitive values one holds most store by — one chooses is partly a
matter of one’s values does not mean that theories under consideration relative
to such a strategy are themselves judged on non-cognitive grounds.

One final point should conclude
this review. Hugh Lacey’s entire argument revolves around considerations about
the limits of what he terms materialist strategies: the Galilean (and Baconian)
view of science as matter of what one may roughly call physicalism. One wonders
therefore why the book is not entitled Materialist Strategies — which,
if superficially more abstract, would certainly have more of a bite to it than Is
Science Value Free?. Could it be that Lacey or his publisher Routledge
feared the book might be mistaken for a perhaps outdated kind of treatise in
political philosophy?  

© 2006 Sjoerd van Hoorn

Sjoerd van Hoorn MA teaches
philosophy of social science at the Free University (Vrije Universiteit) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Categories: Philosophical