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This post is a continuation of my earlier post from December.
Last week President Obama give this excellent speech to the National Academy of Sciences. He pledged to invest 3% of GDP for science research (basic and applied research). He also vowed to improve education in math and science. This represents the largest investment in scientific research and innovation in American history. With such a monumental investment being made in science one has to wonder: what do we (i.e. political philosophers) have to say about all this? Is such an investment just or unjust? And why?
Surely the National Academy of Sciences are part of the “basic structure” of society and thus an investment of this scale must raise some important questions of justice that we can contribute some insights to. Do we have some developed ideas about such issues? Do we equip the students we teach with the tools for thinking rationally and critically about such issues?
Here is an exercise I hope you might entertain trying. Imagine that a reporter has contacted you about President Obama’s investment in science and innovation. You are asked, as a political philosopher interested in issues of justice, to offer some comments about this policy. Please consider using the “comments” section to this post below to add your insights and thoughts. I think this might be a useful exercise to help stimulate interest in this neglected area of the field.
Cheers,
Colin
If you are really struggling to come up with anything to say here are some basic questions to consider to help get the juices flowing: (1) What is science? (2) what is science for? and (3) how large are the stakes involved between the worst possible science policies a government could implement and the best policies? (and what constitutes the worst and best here?)
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1 - Tuesday, 19 May 2009 at 11:35 pm
Patrick S. O'Donnell
I simply want to recommend a book that I’ve found quite useful for thinking about nos. 1 and 2 , namely, the late John Ziman’s Real Science (2000). He nicely distinguishes between “academic” and “post-academic” science (the latter organized on market principles), detailing the (idealized) norms intrinsic to both (with some overlap of course, hence the ‘post-’), as well as the power of governments and industrial corporations in the initiation of research projects and their sometime pernicious influence on the publication of results.
Of course there’s so much more covered in this book: the nature of scientific reasoning (a species of practical reasoning); the question of scientism, including the implausibility of a “theory of everything” (TOE); theories of science as “maps” idea/analogy/metaphor (cf. Kitcher’s discussion of same); the role of heuristics, regulative principles, maxims, epistemic norms, principles of rationality and so forth; the dialectic between the need for “transdisciplinarity” with regard to “contexts of application,” and the specialization and fragmentation of scientific fields; the vulnerability of scientists to the “demands of their paymasters”….
Perhaps we could focus the discussion by finding a book or two by way of common background knowledge and then address some or all of the questions you raise here.