Interests and Epistemic Integrity in Science
eBook - PDF

Interests and Epistemic Integrity in Science

A New Framework to Assess Interest Influences in Scientific Research Processes

  1. 197 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Interests and Epistemic Integrity in Science

A New Framework to Assess Interest Influences in Scientific Research Processes

About this book

Scientific research is often influenced by financial interests, political interests, or personal career interests of the scientists involved. For instance, the pharmaceutical giant Merck manipulated clinical trial data in order to make sure that data confirmed the safety of one of its products, Vioxx, in order to serve the company's short-term commercial interests. This case is obviously unacceptable. But why exactly is it unacceptable? One way to account for this judgment is on the basis of the ideal of purity. According to this ideal, scientific decision-making should be pure— that is, unaffected by financial interests, political interests, career interests, and so on. Although this ideal is questionable, many people (including philosophers of science) still hold on to it.

In Interests and Epistemic Integrity in Science: A New Framework to Assess Interest Influences in Scientific Research Processes, Jan De Winter first argues that it is better to fully abandon the ideal of purity, then proposes an alternative ideal to assess interest influences in science: the ideal of epistemic integrity. He spells out and systematically defends a new concept of epistemic integrity, using it not only to analyze the Vioxx debacle, but also to identify unacceptable interest influences in aerospace science, climate science, and biology, and to explain exactly why these interest influences are unacceptable. These analyses make a compelling case for the new concept of epistemic integrity which will be interesting and useful for philosophers of science, scientists, engineers, science policymakers, and anyone else concerned about the integrity of science.

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Yes, you can access Interests and Epistemic Integrity in Science by Jan De Winter in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Philosophy & Ethics & Moral Philosophy. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Table of Contents
  2. Preface
  3. Introduction
  4. I: The Roles of Interests within Scientific Research
  5. Chapter One: The Ideal of Purity
  6. Chapter Two: Mechanistic Artifact Explanation
  7. Chapter Three: Explanations in Software Engineering
  8. Chapter Four: Interests and Explanation in the Sciences
  9. II: Epistemic Integrity
  10. Chapter Five: Developing a Concept of Epistemic Integrity
  11. Chapter Six: The Four Requirements of Explication
  12. Chapter Seven: The Space Shuttle Program
  13. Chapter Eight: Controversies Concerning the IPCC
  14. Chapter Nine: Frans de Waal’s Work on Animal Morality
  15. Conclusion
  16. References
  17. Index
  18. About the Author