Seeking hermeneutical justice in social values -

Abstract

After feminist scientists and philosophers of science heralded the death of value-free science as a received notion, numerous normative models were developed in order to regulate the influence social values can have on scientific inquiries. As yet, none has proved successful in settling which social values have acceptable influence on science, nor the acceptable manners in which science can be influenced. The aim of this paper is twofold: first I seek to expose limitations faced by normative accounts of values in science. I identify four independent yet interrelated issues that pose a challenge for normative accounts: (1) the ill-defined dichotomy between the so called “epistemic” and “non-epistemic” (or social) values; (2) the unclear nature of the boundaries between the different phases of scientific inquiry; (3) the failure to account for the relation of systematicity between dominant social values and dominant power structures; and (4) the failure to account for the persistence of influence of certain values in the face of changing scientific paradigms. Second, I draw upon Miranda Fricker’s (2006) notion of epistemic injustice to present a superior conceptual framework upon which to build an effective normative account of values in science. Although Fricker discusses epistemic injustice with respect to social experiences, I expand her project by applying it to epistemological issues in the nature of science. I argue that social values are intricately embedded within our collective hermeneutical resources or collective pool of meaning generating practices, they are pre-conditional to our (and the scientist’s) understanding of and engagement with the world. Inasmuch as social values are components of worldviews, they are constituted by hermeneutical resources, but they also constitute the scientific production of knowledge. The scientific products in turn feed back into those hermeneutical resources such that they sustain and reinforce the same social values which gav