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LTT: Arnon Levy
March 3 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm EST
Title: Inductive Risk and Value Freedom, Revisited
Abstract:
Work on the role of values in science has grown and diversified dramatically in the 21st century. But there is a near-consensus on one basic point, namely the value-ladeness – that is, ladeness with social, moral and political values – of all aspects of the scientific process, including “core” aspects like the bearing of evidence on hypotheses. My goal in this talk is to buck this trend and argue for a somewhat old-fashioned view about the relation between science and values: science-based decision making is best carried out by separating factual assessments from value judgments, and a healthy division of labor assigns the former task primarily to scientists. I argue for this view by taking a new look at the debate over inductive risk, both in its original form (Rudner, 1953; Jeffrey, 1956) and in more recent incarnations (Douglas 2000, 2009; Elliott 2011; Steele 2012; Parker and Winsberg, 2017).
This talk will also be available live streamed on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg.