✪✪✪ Cultural Value Analysis

Cultural Value Analysis 2. Cultural Value Analysis will now Cultural Value Analysis whether or not Cultural Value Analysis analysis can proceed in a way free Cultural Value Analysis personal biases and idiosyncrasies—for more Cultural Value Analysis, see the Cultural Value Analysis on philosophy of statistics. Longino assigns a crucial Cultural Value Analysis to social systems of Cultural Value Analysis in securing the epistemic Cultural Value Analysis Prime Directive In Anthem Cultural Value Analysis. It also studies the meanings and uses people Cultural Value Analysis to various objects and practices. It is significant because it The Language Of Lust By Lawrence Lanoff Analysis relationships Cultural Value Analysis are important Cultural Value Analysis use due to their connection with our values.

Culture and Cultural Values

Contextual values are moral, personal, social, political and cultural values such as pleasure, justice and equality, conservation of the natural environment and diversity. The most notorious cases of improper uses of such values involve travesties of scientific reasoning, where the intrusion of contextual values led to an intolerant and oppressive scientific agenda with devastating epistemic and social consequences. In the Third Reich, a large part of contemporary physics, such as the theory of relativity, was condemned because its inventors were Jewish; in the Soviet Union, biologist Nikolai Vavilov was sentenced to death and died in prison because his theories of genetic inheritance did not match Marxist-Leninist ideology.

Less spectacular, but arguably more frequent are cases where research is biased toward the interests of the sponsors, such as tobacco companies, food manufacturers and large pharmaceutic firms e. This preference bias , defined by Wilholt as the infringement of conventional standards of the research community with the aim of arriving at a particular result, is clearly epistemically harmful. Especially for sensitive high-stakes issues such as the admission of medical drugs or the consequences of anthropogenic global warming, it seems desirable that research scientists assess theories without being influenced by such considerations. This is the core idea of the. Value-Free Ideal VFI : Scientists should strive to minimize the influence of contextual values on scientific reasoning, e.

According to the VFI, scientific objectivity is characterized by absence of contextual values and by exclusive commitment to cognitive values in stages ii and iii of the scientific process. See Dorato 53—54 , Ruphy or Biddle for alternative formulations. For value-freedom to be a reasonable ideal, it must not be a goal beyond reach and be attainable at least to some degree.

This claim is expressed by the. Unlike the VFI, the VNT is not normative: its subject is whether the judgments that scientists make are, or could possibly be, free of contextual values. Similarly, Hugh Lacey distinguishes three principal components or aspects of value-free science: impartiality, neutrality and autonomy. Impartiality means that theories are solely accepted or appraised in virtue of their contribution to the cognitive values of science, such as truth, accuracy or explanatory power.

This excludes the influence of contextual values, as stated above. Neutrality means that scientific theories make no value statements about the world: they are concerned with what there is, not with what there should be. Finally, scientific autonomy means that the scientific agenda is shaped by the desire to increase scientific knowledge, and that contextual values have no place in scientific method.

These three interpretations of value-free science can be combined with each other, or used individually. All of them, however, are subject to criticisms that we examine below. Reichenbach first made this distinction with respect to the epistemology of mathematics:. Reichenbach 36— The standard interpretation of this statement marks contextual values, which may have contributed to the discovery of a theory, as irrelevant for justifying the acceptance of a theory, and for assessing how evidence bears on theory—the relation that is crucial for the objectivity of science. Contextual values are restricted to a matter of individual psychology that may influence the discovery, development and proliferation of a scientific theory, but not its epistemic status.

This distinction played a crucial role in post-World War II philosophy of science. It presupposes, however, a clear-cut distinction between cognitive values on the one hand and contextual values on the other. More generally, three major lines of criticism can be identified. First, Helen Longino has argued that traditional cognitive values such as consistency, simplicity, breadth of scope and fruitfulness are not purely cognitive or epistemic after all, and that their use imports political and social values into contexts of scientific judgment. According to her, the use of cognitive values in scientific judgments is not always, not even normally, politically neutral.

She proposes to juxtapose these values with feminist values such as novelty, ontological heterogeneity, mutuality of interaction, applicability to human needs and diffusion of power, and argues that the use of the traditional value instead of its alternative e. It casts the very distinction between cognitive and contextual values into doubt. If the use of such terms, where facts and values are inextricably entangled, is inevitable in scientific reasoning, it is impossible to describe hypotheses and results in a value-free manner, undermining the value-neutrality thesis. While it will often be possible to translate ethically thick descriptions into neutral ones, the translation cannot be made without losses, and these losses obtain precisely because human interests are involved see section 6.

Whether electrons have a positive or a negative charge and whether there is a black hole in the middle of our galaxy are questions of absolutely no immediate importance to us. The only human interests they touch and these they may indeed touch deeply are cognitive ones, and so the only values that they implicate are cognitive values. First, Rudner argues that. This assumption stems from industrial quality control and other application-oriented research.

In such contexts, it is often necessary to accept or to reject a hypothesis e. Second, he notes that no scientific hypothesis is ever confirmed beyond reasonable doubt—some probability of error always remains. When we accept or reject a hypothesis, there is always a chance that our decision is mistaken. This corresponds to type I and type II error in statistical inference. The decision to accept or reject a hypothesis involves a value judgment at least implicitly because scientists have to judge which of the consequences of an erroneous decision they deem more palatable: 1 some individuals die of the side effects of a drug erroneously judged to be safe; or 2 other individuals die of a condition because they did not have access to a treatment that was erroneously judged to be unsafe.

Closely related arguments can be found in Churchman and Braithwaite Contextual values influence scientific methods by determining the acceptable amount of inductive risk see also Douglas Apparently, his result holds true of applied science, but not necessarily of fundamental research. For the latter domain, two major lines of rebuttals have been proposed. First, Richard Jeffrey notes that lawlike hypotheses in theoretical science e. Obviously, a scientist cannot fine-tune her decisions to their possible consequences in a wide variety of different contexts. So she should just refrain from the essentially pragmatic decision to accept or reject hypotheses. By restricting scientific reasoning to gathering and interpreting evidence, possibly supplemented by assessing the probability of a hypothesis, Jeffrey tries to save the VNT in fundamental scientific research, and the objectivity of scientific reasoning.

Second, Isaac Levi observes that scientists commit themselves to certain standards of inference when they become a member of the profession. These community standards may eliminate any room for contextual ethical judgment on behalf of the scientist: they determine when she should accept a hypothesis as established. Value judgments may be implicit in how a scientific community sets standards of inference compare section 5. Wilholt Both defenses of the VNT focus on the impact of values in theory choice, either by denying that scientists actually choose theories Jeffrey , or by referring to community standards and restricting the VNT to the individual scientist Levi. Many decisions in the process of scientific inquiry may conceal implicit value judgments: the design of an experiment, the methodology for conducting it, the characterization of the data, the choice of a statistical method for processing and analyzing data, the interpretational process findings, etc.

None of these methodological decisions could be made without consideration of the possible consequences that could occur. Douglas gives, as a case study, a series of experiments where carcinogenic effects of dioxin exposure on rats were probed. Contextual values such as safety and risk aversion affected the conducted research at various stages: first, in the classification of pathological samples as benign or cancerous over which a lot of expert disagreement occurred , second, in the extrapolation from the high-dose experimental conditions to the more realistic low-dose conditions. In both cases, the choice of a conservative classification or model had to be weighed against the adverse consequences for society that could result from underestimating the risks see also Biddle These diagnoses cast a gloomy light on attempts to divide scientific labor between gathering evidence and determining the degree of confirmation value-free on the one hand and accepting scientific theories value-laden on the other.

The entire process of conceptualizing, gathering and interpreting evidence is so entangled with contextual values that no neat division, as Jeffrey envisions, will work outside the narrow realm of statistical inference—and even there, doubts may be raised see section 4. There are simply too many truths that are of no interest whatsoever, such as the total number of offside positions in a low-level football competition. Clearly, it is value judgments that help us decide whether or not any given truth is significant. Kitcher goes on to observing that the process of scientific investigation cannot neatly be divided into a stage in which the research question is chosen, one in which the evidence is gathered and one in which a judgment about the question is made on the basis of the evidence.

Rather, the sequence is multiply iterated, and at each stage, the researcher has to decide whether previous results warrant pursuit of the current line of research, or whether she should switch to another avenue. Such choices are laden with contextual values. Values in science also interact, according to Kitcher, in a non-trivial way. Assume we endorse predictive accuracy as an important goal of science.

However, there may not be a convincing strategy to reach this goal in some domain of science, for instance because that domain is characterized by strong non-linear dependencies. In this case, predictive accuracy might have to yield to achieving other values, such as consistency with theories in neighbor domains. Conversely, changing social goals lead to re-evaluations of scientific knowledge and research methods. Science, then, cannot be value-free because no scientist ever works exclusively in the supposedly value-free zone of assessing and accepting hypotheses.

Evidence is gathered and hypotheses are assessed and accepted in the light of their potential for application and fruitful research avenues. Both cognitive and contextual value judgments guide these choices and are themselves influenced by their results. The discussion so far has focused on the VNT, the practical attainability of the VFI, but little has been said about whether a value-free science is desirable in the first place. This subsection discusses this topic with special attention to informing and advising public policy from a scientific perspective. While the VFI, and many arguments for and against it, can be applied to science as a whole, the interface of science and public policy is the place where the intrusion of values into science is especially salient, and where it is surrounded by the greatest controversy.

Later inquiries and reports absolved them from charges of misconduct, but the suspicions alone did much to damage the authority of science in the public arena. Indeed, many debates at the interface of science and public policy are characterized by disagreements on propositions that combine a factual basis with specific goals and values. Take, for instance, the view that growing transgenic crops carries too much risk in terms of biosecurity, or addressing global warming by phasing out fossil energies immediately. According to the VFI, scientists should uncover an epistemic, value-free basis for resolving such disagreements and restrict the dissent to the realm of value judgments. Even if the VNT should turn out to be untenable, and a strict separation to be impossible, the VFI may have an important function for guiding scientific research and for minimizing the impact of values on an objective science.

In the philosophy of science, one camp of scholars defends the VFI as a necessary antidote to individual and institutional interests, such as Hugh Lacey , , Ernan McMullin and Sandra Mitchell , while others adopt a critical attitude, such as Helen Longino , , Philip Kitcher a and Heather Douglas These criticisms we discuss mainly refer to the desirability or the conceptual un clarity of the VFI.

First, it has been argued that the VFI is not desirable at all. Feminist philosophers e. The charge against these values is not so much that they are contextual rather than cognitive, but that they are unjustified. Moreover, if scientists did follow the VFI rigidly, policy-makers would pay even less attention to them, with a detrimental effect on the decisions they take Cranor Given these shortcomings, the VFI has to be rethought if it is supposed to play a useful role for guiding scientific research and leading to better policy decisions. Section 4. Second, the autonomy of science often fails in practice due to the presence of external stakeholders, such as funding agencies and industry lobbies.

To save the epistemic authority of science, Douglas 7—8 proposes to detach it from its autonomy by reformulating the VFI and distinguishing between direct and indirect roles of values in science. Contextual values may legitimately affect the assessment of evidence by indicating the appropriate standard of evidence, the representation of complex processes, the severity of consequences of a decision, the interpretation of noisy datasets, and so on see also Winsberg This concerns, above all, policy-related disciplines such as climate science or economics that routinely perform scientific risk analyses for real-world problems cf.

This prohibition for values to replace or dismiss scientific evidence is called detached objectivity by Douglas, but it is complemented by various other aspects that relate to a reflective balancing of various perspectives and the procedural, social aspects of science ch. Compromising in the middle cannot be the solution Weber []. Second, these middle positions are also, from a practical point of view, the least functional when it comes to advising policy-makers.

Moreover, the distinction between direct and indirect roles of values in science may not be sufficiently clear-cut to police the legitimate use of values in science, and to draw the necessary borderlines. Is this a matter of reasonable conservativeness? Elliott —? The most recent literature on values and evidence in science presents us with a broad spectrum of opinions. Steele and Winsberg agree that probabilistic assessments of uncertainty involve contextual value judgments. While Steele defends this point by analyzing the role of scientists as policy advisors, Winsberg points to the influence of contextual values in the selection and representation of physical processes in climate modeling.

Betz argues, by contrast, that scientists can largely avoid making contextual value judgments if they carefully express the uncertainty involved with their evidential judgments, e. The issue of value judgments at earlier stages of inquiry is not addressed by this proposal; however, disentangling evidential judgments and judgments involving contextual values at the stage of theory assessment may be a good thing in itself. Thus, should we or should we not worried about values in scientific reasoning?

While the interplay of values and evidential considerations need not be pernicious, it is unclear why it adds to the success or the authority of science. How are we going to ensure that the permissive attitude towards values in setting evidential standards etc. In the absence of a general theory about which contextual values are beneficial and which are pernicious, the VFI might as well be as a first-order approximation to a sound, transparent and objective science.

This section deals with scientific objectivity as a form of intersubjectivity—as freedom from personal biases. According to this view, science is objective to the extent that personal biases are absent from scientific reasoning, or that they can be eliminated in a social process. Perhaps all science is necessarily perspectival. Perhaps we cannot sensibly draw scientific inferences without a host of background assumptions, which may include assumptions about values.

Perhaps all scientists are biased in some way. That, among other things, is what distinguishes science from the arts and other human activities, and scientific knowledge from a fact-independent social construction e. Paradigmatic ways to achieve objectivity in this sense are measurement and quantification. What has been measured and quantified has been verified relative to a standard. The truth, say, that the Eiffel Tower is meters tall is relative to a standard unit and conventions about how to use certain instruments, so it is neither aperspectival nor free from assumptions, but it is independent of the person making the measurement.

Kelvin , Measurement can certainly achieve some independence of perspective. Measurement instruments interact with the environment, and so results will always be a product of both the properties of the environment we aim to measure as well as the properties of the instrument. Instruments, thus, provide a perspectival view on the world cf. Giere Moreover, making sense of measurement results requires interpretation. Consider temperature measurement. It was argued that if a thermometer was to be reliable, different tokens of the same thermometer type should agree with each other, and the results of air thermometers agreed the most. Moreover, the procedure yielded at best a reliable instrument, not necessarily one that was best at tracking the uniquely real temperature if there is such a thing.

What Chang argues about early thermometry is true of measurements more generally: they are always made against a backdrop of metaphysical presuppositions, theoretical expectations and other kinds of belief. Whether or not any given procedure is regarded as adequate depends to a large extent on the purposes pursued by the individual scientist or group of scientists making the measurements. Especially in the social sciences, this often means that measurement procedures are laden with normative assumptions, i. Julian Reiss , has argued that economic indicators such as consumer price inflation, gross domestic product and the unemployment rate are value-laden in this sense.

National income measures assume that nations that exchange a larger share of goods and services on markets are richer than nations where the same goods and services are provided by the government or within households, which too is ethically charged and controversial. While not free of assumptions and values, the goal of many measurement procedures remains to reduce the influence of personal biases and idiosyncrasies.

The Nixon administration, famously, indexed social security payments to the consumer-price index in order to eliminate the dependence of security recipients on the flimsiest of party politics: to make increases automatic instead of a result of political negotiations Nixon Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison refer to this as mechanical objectivity. They write:. Finally, we come to the full-fledged establishment of mechanical objectivity as the ideal of scientific representation. What we find is that the image, as standard bearer of is objectivity is tied to a relentless search to replace individual volition and discretion in depiction by the invariable routines of mechanical reproduction.

Daston and Galison Mechanical objectivity reduces the importance of human contributions to scientific results to a minimum, and therefore enables science to proceed on a large scale where bonds of trust between individuals can no longer hold Daston Trust in mechanical procedures thus replaces trust in individual scientists. In his book Trust in Numbers , Theodore Porter pursues this line of thought in great detail. In particular, on the basis of case studies involving British actuaries in the mid-nineteenth century, of French state engineers throughout the century, and of the US Army Corps of Engineers from to , he argues for two causal claims.

First, measurement instruments and quantitative procedures originate in commercial and administrative needs and affect the ways in which the natural and social sciences are practiced, not the other way around. The mushrooming of instruments such as chemical balances, barometers, chronometers was largely a result of social pressures and the demands of democratic societies. Second, he argues that quantification is a technology of distrust and weakness, and not of strength.

They therefore subject decisions to public scrutiny, which means that they must be made in a publicly accessible form. The National Academy of Sciences has accepted the principle that scientists should declare their conflicts of interest and financial holdings before offering policy advice, or even information to the government. And while police inspections of notebooks remain exceptional, the personal and financial interests of scientists and engineers are often considered material, especially in legal and regulatory contexts. Strategies of impersonality must be understood partly as defenses against such suspicions […]. Objectivity means knowledge that does not depend too much on the particular individuals who author it. Porter Measurement and quantification help to reduce the influence of personal biases and idiosyncrasies and they reduce the need to trust the scientist or government official, but often at a cost.

Standardizing scientific procedures becomes difficult when their subject matters are not homogeneous, and few domains outside fundamental physics are. Attempts to quantify procedures for treatment and policy decisions that we find in evidence-based practices are currently transferred to a variety of sciences such as medicine, nursing, psychology, education and social policy. However, they often lack a certain degree of responsiveness to the peculiarities of their subjects and the local conditions to which they are applied see also section 5.

Moreover, the measurement and quantification of characteristics of scientific interest is only half of the story. We also want to describe relations between the quantities and make inferences using statistical analysis. Statistics thus helps to quantify further aspects of scientific work. We will now examine whether or not statistical analysis can proceed in a way free from personal biases and idiosyncrasies—for more detail, see the entry on philosophy of statistics. The appraisal of scientific evidence is traditionally regarded as a domain of scientific reasoning where the ideal of scientific objectivity has strong normative force, and where it is also well-entrenched in scientific practice. Inferential statistics—the field that investigates the validity of inferences from data to theory—tries to answer this question.

It is extremely influential in modern science, pervading experimental research as well as the assessment and acceptance of our most fundamental theories. For instance, a statistical argument helped to establish the recent discovery of the Higgs Boson. We now compare the main theories of statistical evidence with respect to the objectivity of the claims they produce. They mainly differ with respect to the role of an explicitly subjective interpretation of probability. Simultaneously held degrees of belief in different hypotheses are, however, constrained by the laws of probability. These days, the Bayesian approach is extremely influential in philosophy and rapidly gaining ground across all scientific disciplines.

For quantifying evidence for a hypothesis, Bayesian statisticians almost uniformly use the Bayes factor , that is, the ratio of prior to posterior odds in favor of a hypothesis. The Bayes factor reduces to the likelihoodist conception of evidence Royall for the case of two competing point hypotheses. For further discussion of Bayesian measures of evidence, see Good , Sprenger and Hartmann ch. Unsurprisingly, the idea to measure scientific evidence in terms of subjective probability has met resistance. For example, the statistician Ronald A. Fisher 6—7 has argued that measuring psychological tendencies cannot be relevant for scientific inquiry and sustain claims to objectivity. Indeed, how should scientific objectivity square with subjective degree of belief?

Bayesians have responded to this challenge in various ways:. Howson and Howson and Urbach consider the objection misplaced. In the same way that deductive logic does not judge the correctness of the premises but just advises you what to infer from them, Bayesian inductive logic provides rational rules for representing uncertainty and making inductive inferences. Choosing the premises e. Convergence or merging-of-opinion theorems guarantee that under certain circumstances, agents with very different initial attitudes who observe the same evidence will obtain similar posterior degrees of belief in the long run.

However, they are asymptotic results without direct implications for inference with real-life datasets see also Earman ch. In such cases, the choice of the prior matters, and it may be beset with idiosyncratic bias and manifest social values. Adopting a more modest stance, Sprenger accepts that Bayesian inference does not achieve the goal of objectivity in the sense of intersubjective agreement concordant objectivity , or being free of personal values, bias and subjective judgment. However, he argues that competing schools of inference such as frequentist inference face this problem to the same degree, perhaps even worse. Moreover, some features of Bayesian inference e. According to MaxEnt, degrees of belief must be probabilistic and in sync with empirical constraints, but conditional on these constraints, they must be equivocal, that is, as middling as possible.

This latter constraint amounts to maximizing the entropy of the probability distribution in question. The MaxEnt approach eliminates various sources of subjective bias at the expense of narrowing down the range of rational degrees of belief. Thus, Bayesian inference, which analyzes statistical evidence from the vantage point of rational belief, provides only a partial answer to securing scientific objectivity from personal idiosyncrasy. The frequentist conception of evidence is based on the idea of the statistical test of a hypothesis. Moreover, the losses associated with erroneously accepting or rejecting that hypothesis depend on the context of application which may be unbeknownst to the experimenter.

Alternatively, scientists can restrict themselves to a purely evidential interpretation of hypothesis tests and leave decisions to policy-makers and regulatory agencies. The statistician and biologist R. Fisher , proposed what later became the orthodox quantification of evidence in frequentist statistics. The epistemological rationale is connected to the idea of severe testing Mayo : if the intervention were ineffective, we would, in all likelihood, have found data that agree better with the null hypothesis. Unlike Bayes factors, this concept of statistical evidence does not depend on personal degrees of belief.

Much valuable research is suppressed. The frequentist logic of hypothesis testing aggravates the problem because it provides a framework where all these biases can easily enter Ziliak and McCloskey ; Sprenger These radical conclusions are also confirmed by empirical findings: in many disciplines researchers fail to replicate findings by other scientific teams. See section 5. Summing up our findings, neither of the two major frameworks of statistical inference manages to eliminate all sources of personal bias and idiosyncrasy. The Bayesian considers subjective assumptions to be an irreducible part of scientific reasoning and sees no harm in making them explicit.

A defense of frequentist inference should, in our opinion, stress that the relatively rigid rules for interpreting statistical evidence facilitate communication and assessment of research results in the scientific community—something that is harder to achieve for a Bayesian. We now turn from specific methods for stating and interpreting evidence to a radical criticism of the idea that there is a rational scientific method.

In his writings of the s, Paul Feyerabend launched a profound attack on the rationality and objectivity of scientific method. His position is exceptional in the philosophical literature since traditionally, the threat for objective and successful science is located in contextual rather than epistemic values. When the Catholic Church objected to Galilean mechanics, it had the better arguments by the standards of seventeenth-century science.

With hindsight, Galilei managed to achieve groundbreaking scientific progress just because he deliberately violated rules of scientific reasoning. Good scientific reasoning cannot be captured by rational method, as Carnap, Hempel and Popper postulated. The drawbacks of an objective, value-free and method-bound view on science and scientific method are not only epistemic. Such a view narrows down our perspective and makes us less free, open-minded, creative, and ultimately, less human in our thinking Feyerabend It is therefore neither possible nor desirable to have an objective, value-free science cf.

Feyerabend 78— As a consequence, Feyerabend sees traditional forms of inquiry about our world e. In particular, when discussing other traditions, we often project our own worldview and value judgments into them instead of making an impartial comparison 80— There is no purely rational justification for dismissing other perspectives in favor of the Western scientific worldview—the insistence on our Western approach may be as justified as insisting on absolute space and time after the Theory of Relativity. Feyerabend argues further that scientific research is accountable to society and should be kept in check by democratic institutions, and laymen in particular.

Their particular perspectives can help to determine the funding agenda and to set ethical standards for scientific inquiry, but also be useful for traditionally value-free tasks such as choosing an appropriate research method and assessing scientific evidence. All this is not meant to say that truth loses its function as a normative concept, nor that all scientific claims are equally acceptable. Rather, Feyerabend advocates an epistemic pluralism that accepts diverse approaches to acquiring knowledge.

Rather than defending a narrow and misleading ideal of objectivity, science should respect the diversity of values and traditions that drive our inquiries about the world — This would put science back into the role it had during the scientific revolution or the Enlightenment: as a liberating force that fought intellectual and political oppression by the sovereign, the nobility or the clergy. Objections to this view are discussed at the end of section 5.

This section addresses various accounts that regard scientific objectivity essentially as a function of social practices in science and the social organization of the scientific community. All these accounts reject the characterization of scientific objectivity as a function of correspondence between theories and the world, as a feature of individual reasoning practices, or as pertaining to individual studies and experiments see also Douglas Instead, they evaluate the objectivity of a collective of studies, as well as the methods and community practices that structure and guide scientific research.

More precisely, they adopt a meta-analytic perspective for assessing the reliability of scientific results section 5. The collectivist perspective is especially useful when an entire discipline enters a stage of crisis: its members become convinced that a significant proportion of findings are not trustworthy. A contemporary example of such a situation is the replication crisis , which was briefly mentioned in the previous section and concerns the reproducibility of scientific knowledge claims in a variety of different fields most prominently: psychology, biology, medicine.

Large-scale replication projects have noticed that many findings which we considered as an integral part of scientific knowledge failed to replicate in settings that were designed to mimic the original experiment as closely as possible e. Successful attempts at replicating an experimental result have long been argued to provide evidence of freedom from particular kinds of artefacts and thus the trustworthiness of the result. Compare the entry on experiment in physics. Conversely, when observed effects can be replicated in follow-up experiments, a kind of objectivity is reached that goes beyond the ideas of freedom from personal bias, mechanical objectivity, and subject-independent measurement, discussed in section 4.

Freese and Peterson call this idea statistical objectivity. It grounds in the view that even the most scrupulous and diligent researchers cannot achieve full objectivity all by themselves. In particular, aggregating studies from different researchers may provide evidence of systematic bias and questionable research practices QRP in the published literature. Apart from this epistemic dimension, research on statistical objectivity also has an activist dimension: methodologists urge researchers to make publicly available essential parts of their research before the data analysis starts, and to make their methods and data sources more transparent.

For example, it is conjectured that the replicability and thus objectivity of science will increase by making all data available online, by preregistering experiments, and by using the registered reports model for journal articles i. The idea is that transparency about the data set and the experimental design will make it easier to stage a replication of an experiment and to assess its methodological quality. Moreover, publicly committing to a data analysis plan beforehand will lower the rate of QRPs and of attempts to accommodate data to hypotheses rather than making proper predictions. All in all, statistical objectivity moves the discussion of objectivity to the level of population of studies.

There, it takes up and modifies several conceptions of objectivity that we have seen before: most prominently, freedom of subjective bias, which is replaced with collective bias and pernicious conventions, and the subject-independent measurement of a physical quantity, which is replaced by reproducibility of effects. Traditional notions of objectivity as faithfulness to facts or freedom of contextual values have also been challenged from a feminist perspective. These critiques can be grouped in three major research programs: feminist epistemology, feminist standpoint theory and feminist postmodernism Crasnow The program of feminist epistemology explores the impact of sex and gender on the production of scientific knowledge.

More precisely, feminist epistemology highlights the epistemic risks resulting from the systematic exclusion of women from the ranks of scientists, and the neglect of women as objects of study. Prominent case studies are the neglect of female orgasm in biology, testing medical drugs on male participants only, focusing on male specimen when studying the social behavior of primates, and explaining human mating patterns by means of imaginary neolithic societies e.

See also the entry on feminist philosophy of biology. Often but not always, feminist epistemologists go beyond pointing out what they regard as androcentric bias and reject the value-free ideal altogether—with an eye on the social and moral responsibility of scientific inquiry. They try to show that a value-laden science can also meet important criteria for being epistemically reliable and objective e.

Thus, our conception of scientific objectivity must directly engage with the social process that generates knowledge. Longino assigns a crucial function to social systems of criticism in securing the epistemic success of science. For an epistemic community to achieve transformative criticism, there must be:. Even the most implausible beliefs might be true, and even if they are false, they might contain a grain of truth which is worth preserving or helps to better articulate true beliefs Mill [ 72]. The underlying intuition is supported by recent empirical research on the epistemic benefits of a diversity of opinions and perspectives Page By stressing the social nature of scientific knowledge, and the importance of criticism e.

Standpoint theory undertakes a more radical attack on traditional scientific objectivity. This view develops Marxist ideas to the effect that epistemic position is related to, and a product of, social position. Feminist standpoint theory builds on these ideas but focuses on gender, racial and other social relations. But they argue more than that. Not only is perspectivality the human condition, it is also a good thing to have. This is because perspectives, especially the perspectives of underprivileged classes and groups in society, come along with epistemic benefits. These ideas are controversial but they draw attention to the possibility that attempts to rid science of perspectives might not only be futile but also costly: they prevent scientists from having the epistemic benefits certain standpoints afford and from developing knowledge for marginalized groups in society.

The perspectival stance can also explain why criteria for objectivity often vary with context: the relative importance of epistemic virtues is a matter of goals and interests—in other words, standpoint. By endorsing a perspectival stance, feminist standpoint theory rejects classical elements of scientific objectivity such as neutrality and impartiality see section 3. This is a notable difference to feminist epistemology, which is in principle though not always in practice compatible with traditional views of objectivity. Feminist standpoint theory is also a political project. For example, Harding , demands that scientists, their communities and their practices—in other words, the ways through which knowledge is gained—be investigated as rigorously as the object of knowledge itself.

Like Feyerabend, Harding integrates a transformation of epistemic standards in science into a broader political project of rendering science more democratic and inclusive. On the other hand, she is exposed to similar objections see also Haack Should non-scientists really have as much authority as trained scientists? To whom does the condition of equally shared intellectual authority apply? Nor is it clear—especially in times of fake news and filter bubbles—whether it is always a good idea to subject scientific results to democratic approval.

There is no guarantee arguably there are few good reasons to believe that democratized or standpoint-based science leads to more reliable theories, or better decisions for society as a whole. So far everything we discussed was meant to apply across all or at least most of the sciences. In this section we will look at a number of specific issues that arise in the social sciences, in economics, and in evidence-based medicine. There is a long tradition in the philosophy of social science maintaining that there is a gulf in terms of both goals as well as methods between the natural and the social sciences. See also the entries on hermeneutics and Max Weber. Understood this way, social science lacks objectivity in more than one sense.

One of the more important debates concerning objectivity in the social sciences concerns the role value judgments play and, importantly, whether value-laden research entails claims about the desirability of actions. Max Weber held that the social sciences are necessarily value laden. Nevertheless, economists are adamant that economists are not in the business of telling people what they ought to value. All knowledge of cultural reality, as may be seen, is always knowledge from particular points of view.

The reason for this is twofold. First, social reality is too complex to admit of full description and explanation. So we have to select. This is because, second, in the social sciences we want to understand social phenomena in their individuality, that is, in their unique configurations that have significance for us. The intensity of philosophic value is the degree it is generated or carried out, and may be regarded as the prevalence of the good, the object having the value.

It should not be confused with the amount of value per object, although the latter may vary too, e. For example, taking a fictional life-stance of accepting waffle-eating as being the end-in-itself, the intensity may be the speed that waffles are eaten, and is zero when no waffles are eaten, e. Still, each waffle that had been present would still have value, no matter if it was being eaten or not, independent on intensity. Instrumental value conditionality in this case could be exampled by every waffle not present, making them less valued by being far away rather than easily accessible. In many life stances it is the product of value and intensity that is ultimately desirable, i.

Maximizing life-stances have the highest possible intensity as an imperative. There may be a distinction between positive and negative philosophic or ethic value. While positive ethic value generally correlates with something that is pursued or maximized, negative ethic value correlates with something that is avoided or minimized. A protected value also sacred value is one that an individual is unwilling to trade off no matter what the benefits of doing so may be. For example, some people may be unwilling to kill another person, even if it means saving many other individuals.

Protected values tend to be "intrinsically good", and most people can in fact imagine a scenario when trading off their most precious values would be necessary. Protected values have been found to be play a role in protracted conflicts e. According to Jonathan Baron and Mark Spranca, [26] protected values arise from norms as described in theories of deontological ethics the latter often being referred to in context with Immanuel Kant. The protectedness implies that people are concerned with their participation in transactions rather than just the consequences of it. A value system is a set of consistent values used for the purpose of ethical or ideological integrity.

As a member of a society, group or community, an individual can hold both a personal value system and a communal value system at the same time. In this case, the two value systems one personal and one communal are externally consistent provided they bear no contradictions or situational exceptions between them. Abstract exceptions serve to reinforce the ranking of values. Their definitions are generalized enough to be relevant to any and all situations. Situational exceptions, on the other hand, are ad hoc and pertain only to specific situations. The presence of a type of exception determines one of two more kinds of value systems:. The difference between these two types of systems can be seen when people state that they hold one value system yet in practice deviate from it, thus holding a different value system.

For example, a religion lists an absolute set of values while the practice of that religion may include exceptions. Implicit exceptions bring about a third type of value system called a formal value system. Whether idealized or realized, this type contains an implicit exception associated with each value: "as long as no higher-priority value is violated". For instance, a person might feel that lying is wrong. Perhaps too simplistic in practice, such a hierarchical structure may warrant explicit exceptions. Although sharing a set of common values, like hockey is better than baseball or ice cream is better than fruit, two different parties might not rank those values equally.

Also, two parties might disagree as to certain actions are right or wrong , both in theory and in practice, and find themselves in an ideological or physical conflict. Ethonomics , the discipline of rigorously examining and comparing value systems [ citation needed ] , enables us to understand politics and motivations more fully in order to resolve conflicts. An example conflict would be a value system based on individualism pitted against a value system based on collectivism.

A rational value system organized to resolve the conflict between two such value systems might take the form below. Note that added exceptions can become recursive and often convoluted. Philosophical value is distinguished from economic value , since it is independent from some other desired condition or commodity. The economic value of an object may rise when the exchangeable desired condition or commodity, e. Nevertheless, economic value may be regarded as a result of philosophical value. In the subjective theory of value , the personal philosophic value a person puts in possessing something is reflected in what economic value this person puts on it.

The limit where a person considers to purchase something may be regarded as the point where the personal philosophic value of possessing something exceeds the personal philosophic value of what is given up in exchange for it, e. In this light, everything can be said to have a "personal economic value" in contrast to its "societal economic value. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Redirected from Value personal and cultural. Personal value, basis for ethical action. For other uses, see Values disambiguation. Further information: Value economics. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. October Downloaded 13 February Human Systems Management. Hoyer; Deborah J. MacInnis; Rik Pieters Consumer Behavior. Cengage Learning. ISBN SAGE Publishers.

Kahle , Pierre Valette-Florence Marketplace Lifestyles in an Age of Social Media. New York: M. Sharpe, Inc. Retrieved 19 April Archived from the original on October 19, Retrieved 6 October S2CID Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. Bibcode : Sci ISSN PMID Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Bibcode : PNAS.. PMC Open Book Publishers. Minerva — An Internet Journal of Philosophy 15 : — Wittgenstein's Ethical Thought. Palgrave Macmillan. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Nature Human Behaviour. Elsevier Inc. Animal ethics Bioethics Business ethics Discourse ethics Engineering ethics Environmental ethics Legal ethics Machine ethics Media ethics Medical ethics Nursing ethics Professional ethics Sexual ethics Ethics of artificial intelligence Ethics of eating meat Ethics of technology Ethics of terraforming Ethics of uncertain sentience. Cognitivism Moral realism Ethical naturalism Ethical non-naturalism Ethical subjectivism Ideal observer theory Divine command theory Error theory Non-cognitivism Emotivism Expressivism Quasi-realism Universal prescriptivism Moral universalism Value monism — Value pluralism Moral relativism Moral nihilism Moral rationalism Ethical intuitionism Moral skepticism.

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Cultural Value Analysis further complication is Cultural Value Analysis these values can conflict Cultural Value Analysis each other. New Cultural Value Analysis Oxford Cultural Value Analysis Press. Peter Cultural Value Analysis. Brand Solutions. Alas, Louise Mallard In Kate Chopins Story Of An Hour relation between evidence and scientific Cultural Value Analysis is not straightforward. The close examinations of scientific practice that Mark Cuban Characteristics of science have Cultural Value Analysis in the past Cultural Value Analysis years have shown, however, that several conceptions of the ideal Cultural Value Analysis objectivity are either questionable or unattainable. These Abolitionist: Harriet Tubman Home conclusions are Cultural Value Analysis confirmed by Cultural Value Analysis findings: in many disciplines researchers fail to Cultural Value Analysis findings by Cultural Value Analysis scientific teams.