Bias as an epistemic notion

Inconvenient Truth and Inductive Risk in Covid-19 Science

“…3 In view of these insights into the positive role of values in science and worries about bias, it is crucial to clarify where and how, exactly, to divide legitimate and illegitimate uses of non-epistemic values in science. Despite recent progress on this front (see, for example, Wilholt 2013;Intemann 2015;Winsberg, Oreskes, and Lloyd 2020;John 2021;Boulicault and Schroeder 2021;Koskinen and Rolin 2022;Holman and Wilholt 2022;ChoGlueck 2022;Bueter 2022), 4 Covid-19 offers new perspective.…”

How Social Science Got Better: Overcoming Bias with More Evidence, Diversity, and Self‐Reflection By MattGrossmann. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 316 pp.

“…Curiously, the “holdouts” (p. 71) he mentions working in this tradition do not include any anthropologists, although his sense of pique in the face of reflexivity gone wild recalls the old Writing Culture debates. Rather than singling out interpretivism as bad bias, it might be more productive for Grossmann to look—as he does elsewhere in the book—to the philosophy of science, where scholars (e.g., Bueter, 2022) are teasing apart different notions of bias and proposing to give research the benefit of the doubt in the absence of good reasons to expect it to have been done better.…”

Agent‐based models of scientific interaction

“…Since every theory in the model is conflict-free, for each theory T there is a unique maximally admissible subset of T (with respect to set inclusion). An argument a in T is considered defended in T iff it is a member of this maximally admissible subset of T(Borg et al, 2019, p. 26).14 How to draw the line between a legitimate role of (non-epistemic) value judgments and epistemically pernicious scientific inquiries has recently been discussed as the 'New Demarcation Problem' byHolman & Wilholt, 2022, Bueter, 2021. See alsoHolman & Elliott, 2018 for an overview of issues surrounding industry-funded science, and Politi, 2021 for a discussion on the literature on ABMs of the social organization of science and the importance of including non-epistemic values in models.15 For a similar model showing that industry can bias a scientific community without corrupting any of the individual scientists that compose it (by helping industry-friendly scientists have successful careers), seeHolman & Bruner, 2017. 16 Another way to understand such a process is as a kind of 'epistemic iteration' based on multiple models and their subsequent refinements and variants(Chang, 2004;Elliott, 2012;Šešelja et al, 2020).17 I am grateful to Paul Hoyningen-Huene for suggesting the notion of potential explanation in this context.…”

“…14 14 How to draw the line between a legitimate role of (non‐epistemic) value judgments and epistemically pernicious scientific inquiries has recently been discussed as the ‘New Demarcation Problem’ by Holman & Wilholt, 2022, Bueter, 2021. See also Holman & Elliott, 2018 for an overview of issues surrounding industry‐funded science, and Politi, 2021 for a discussion on the literature on ABMs of the social organization of science and the importance of including non‐epistemic values in models. …”