Who Gets to Decide What Science Is For

The answer is yes, and hormone replacement therapy is the case. Here it is in order.

And the sentence that makes it a philosophy case. Some argued the result should have surprised nobody, because there had been warnings for decades that the evidence for the benefits was thin and that evidence of risk existed.

So where exactly did the value judgments get in? Intemann names three, and they are three different kinds.

• What counts as a benefit. Treating skin that ages or droops as a health benefit is a value judgment, and one shaped by a norm about what a woman is for.
• What counts as an acceptable risk. Saying the benefits outweigh the risks is not arithmetic. It depends on how good you think the benefits are and how bad the outcomes would be, and both are judgments.
• How much evidence is enough, and of what kind. Whether observational studies suffice, or whether you require a randomised trial, is a decision somebody made long before the 2002 trial existed.

The answer is five places, and this is the list to be able to produce. Each comes with a case, and the case is where the argument is.

The answer is four conditions: a replacement has to do the three political jobs the VFI was doing, and protect the science as well. A replacement has to answer:

1. Does it matter who participates in science, and if so why? An epistemic reason, on top of a fair one.
2. How can feminist values play a positive role, having only ever been the thing to be scrubbed out?
3. How do we make sure the products of science benefit marginalised groups, given how reliably they have reinforced the arrangement?
4. And how is the epistemic integrity of science protected once values are admitted?

The answer is yes, if the community is built right, and the building instructions are Longino's four norms. Rolin's name for the arrangement is the value-management model.

1. There must be recognised avenues for criticism of evidence, methods, assumptions and reasoning.
2. There must be shared standards that critics can appeal to.
3. The community as a whole must respond to criticism.
4. Intellectual authority must be shared equally among qualified practitioners.

The mechanism, in one line: you cannot see your own assumptions, and you can see somebody else's easily. So a community holding different values will catch what each member cannot.

It passes all four tests, which is why it is the mainstream answer. Diversity gets an epistemic job, so question one is answered. Feminist values can be the better-grounded ones in a given case, so question two is answered: if interventions ought to work as well for women as men, that is a reason against male-only animal models; if gathering is work, baskets are tools. Including people whose interests were absent changes what gets studied, so question three is answered. And shared standards plus live criticism protect integrity, so question four is answered.

Then the objection Intemann raises against her own preferred field. The model assumes a level field, and treats science as a place where any value may enter and be judged on equal terms. She lists what is wrong with that picture:

• Research is increasingly privately funded, and funders decide what gets pursued, which methods regulators require, and what gets published. Pharmaceutical trials often retain the right to withhold negative results.
• Manufactured dissent, which is week 5's Merchants of Doubt arriving from the other direction: privately funded scientists raise objections in order to stall policy, confuse the public and divert other scientists' time.
• Who gets to participate at all is unequal before anybody reaches a laboratory. A third of United States schools are rural and a fifth of students attend one, and rural schools get less funding, less fast internet, and have more trouble keeping qualified science teachers.
• And the culture inside the field excludes without any explicit discrimination: work demands incompatible with parenting, harassment, and a climate that makes staying undesirable even where nobody discounts your work.

So the objection is not that the four norms are wrong. It is that a model which depends on equal intellectual authority cannot deliver it in a world arranged like this one.

The answer is an aim. The social justice model starts from a commitment: a central purpose of publicly funded science is to achieve social justice, meaning science should benefit everyone and particularly those who are worst off. Intemann presents it as an addition built on top of the first model.

What makes it different in one line: the management model is pluralist, letting all values compete. The social justice model prioritises some values over others before the competition starts.

The method attached to it has a name you should keep: studying up, or studying from the margins out. Five things it asks of a researcher:

1. Work with members of the affected group to frame the problem.
2. Identify everyone the problem affects.
3. Ask whether the field's usual concepts serve all of them.
4. Investigate how the problem shows up differently for different groups.
5. Ask how systems of power contribute to it.

Why it answers question one better. People in marginalised positions are likelier to have evidence about how arrangements disadvantage them, and the line Intemann uses is the memorable one: privilege is easier to identify by those who do not have it.

And she does not pretend it is finished. Three questions she poses and leaves open:

1. Are there competing conceptions of justice, and what happens when they conflict?
2. Should all research aim at it, or can research be worth doing without advancing it?
3. How is any of it applied to a concrete decision?

The answer, and it is the chapter's opening move: what is wanted is appreciation. Giordano's claim is that the literature itself says so, and she goes to the first issue of the journal to show it.

Where the demand came from historically, and this is the part worth holding on to. It takes root after the Second World War, and it is tangled with nationalism. An assumption that science is good in itself did not survive the war. Who controlled it mattered.

So the push for a scientifically literate public was about national pride and national security, and the worry about science in the wrong hands runs from Cold War politics into the war on terror and into bioethics today.

Then the close reading she builds the section on. The first article in the first issue of Public Understanding of Science, 1992, by two policy advocates at a cancer research fund, argues scientists should get involved so the public will see them as normal people and trust them. It identifies two threats.

• Unskilled working women, named as the hardest group to reach, who the authors assume get their information from television game shows and tabloids. The suggested remedy is putting a scientist into a soap opera.
• Animal rights activists, and the way this is done is the thing to notice. The authors cite polls showing public distrust about animal research, and then set them beside a fear that people think scientific curiosity could produce a child with yellow eyes and three noses. Giordano's objection is that the connection is spurious, and that lumping a reasoned objection together with a fantasy discredits the objection by association.

And why she picks that article, when worse ones exist. It is the first article in the first journal of the field, so it set the terms. It also appeared alongside critical pieces in the same issue, which tells you the field was entangled with scientists and policy makers from the start.

The answer: because the movements of the 1960s and 1970s were not asking to be let into the existing arrangement, and the version that survived was the one that asked for exactly that.

The reasoning in order. Those movements held that categories of race, gender, sexuality and ability were not inevitable but were doing work for the economic and political system. So the goal was to change the system, and not to admit a few people to it. What happened instead was that admitting some people from excluded groups let the system carry on and redrew the lines somewhere else.

Her two cases, and they share a pattern.

1. Respectability. Conformity to white, heterosexual, middle-class norms about how a woman behaves and what family she lives in. It was used to justify withholding state support from poor Black women, by blaming individuals or culture.
2. Same-sex marriage. The campaign won healthcare benefits for couples with jobs that provide healthcare, while leaving marriage itself unquestioned, so people without jobs or insurance stayed outside.

In both, the boundary moved, and the people on the far side of the new one became harder to see.

What that means for science. Calls to open science to everyone, made without correcting the inequality first, end up meaning everyone who is already economically successful. She calls this a colourblind and genderblind politics, and the objection is that we do not live in a raceless or genderless world, so a rule that ignores race and gender preserves whatever the existing distribution happens to be.

The answer the chapter defends: sometimes they know it and are refusing it, and that is a different thing.

The evidence she cites. Barr and Birke interviewed women about adult science education and found that some knew the scientific answers and chose other explanations. Emily Martin found that what looked like scientific illiteracy among working-class women was resistance to medical authority on menstruation. So the category ignorant was being applied to people making a choice.

Then the stronger version, which is where most readers get off. Lucía Egaña Rojas writes that a transfeminist technology will value illiteracy, for being unproductive for industry, as a way of finding paths that speed and productivity never imagine. The underlying observation: tying epistemic authority to literacy devalues the knowledge of most of the world's poorest people.

And the sentence that makes the argument serious. The people making the decisions that reproduce an unequal society every day are the best educated people in it. So more education cannot be the whole answer. She gathers five alternatives, each a way of working the deficit model has no room for.

1. Unlearning
2. Rewriting
3. Unschooling
4. Failure
5. Illiteracy

What to do with this if you think it is wrong. Her own footnote concedes the obvious objection: this is no purist stance, and nobody is giving up medicine or phones. The narrow claim is that in specific cases refusing the scientific framing is a legitimate move. That narrow claim is the one to argue against if you want to, and the broad version is one she does not make.

The answer: producing knowledge, in four movements she names, none of which was invited.

• The feminist women's health movement, which made its own medical knowledge and distributed it, Our Bodies, Ourselves being the best-known product.
• The Black Panther Party, which made health justice part of its platform: criticising racist scientific data, providing health information and medical services against a history of medical neglect, and running public education and testing for sickle cell anaemia.
• The environmental justice movement, which from the 1980s collected its own data on environmental racism and built a movement that still works against corporate interests.
• HIV and AIDS activists, who changed the way clinical trials are run and took a direct part in revising the definitions and the scientific facts of the disease.

And the question she asks of the field. Why were the people writing about public understanding of science not learning from any of these? Her answer: those initiatives never wanted a participatory relationship. They wanted attachment, appreciation and trust, and feminist disloyalty to science was one of the things they were worried about.

The answer from her own fieldwork: no, and what surprised her is that the participants were untroubled by it.

What she found. The rhetoric of open science for all is used to build support for these spaces. The people actually in them are overwhelmingly already scientifically trained, many holding academic posts or having worked in large biotechnology companies. Most are there to become biological entrepreneurs. The aim is freedom from the constraints of traditional research, and not a wider membership.

The detail that bothered her. The successes they highlighted were the ones that made a profit, and she had expected collective spaces that shared results and profits. Her word for her own reaction is puzzlement, and she traces it to a difference in what people mean by democratic.

What follows from that. Democratising science means counting the people whose bodies have been most subjected to the medical gaze, where counting women in general would leave the arrangement exactly as it is.

Her three worked models, briefly, since she gives them a paragraph each.

• The science shop, from the Netherlands in the 1970s: a desk where community members bring research questions for graduate students to answer. It has drifted into a service for businesses, and feminists argue it could be run from a feminist studies department with an explicit commitment to justice.
• Community-based participatory research. At its worst, the language is used to get free labour and community buy-in for research whose goals are still set by funders. Kim TallBear's objection is that it keeps the boundary between inside and outside the academy; her alternative phrase is standing with communities.
• Public engagement, as in the Write2Know campaign in Canada, which argues for access to evidence about environmental toxins, political power for the people most affected, and the ability to produce new data in those communities.

Detlefsen's answer: it made the difference, and the path from one to the other is traceable in three steps.

1. She noticed that beliefs about women were held without ever being examined, and that she had suffered from it.
2. She generalised that into a position about belief itself, which modern philosophy calls the ethics of belief: you have a duty to examine what you believe before believing it.
3. She applied that rule to the biggest scientific quarrel of her day, saw that both sides were holding positions out of national loyalty, and so was free to take the correct middle position that neither side could reach.

And the correct position she reached is the one you were taught in school. Hypotheses are central to science. In 1740 that was close to heresy.

And her answer is that the question is the wrong way round. She asks why, in so many centuries, no good tragedy, poem, history, painting or book of physics came from a woman, and says that these creatures, whose understanding appears in all things equal to that of men, seem to be stopped by an invincible force on this side of a barrier. She invites anybody to explain it.

Then she explains it. If she were king, she says, she would let women share in all the rights of humanity and most of all those of the mind. Women seem born to deceive, and their souls are scarcely allowed any other exercise. Many are either ignorant of their own talents, through flaws in their education, or bury them out of prejudice and for lack of a bold spirit. And she says that what she has experienced herself confirms it.

What makes this more than a complaint: she identifies a loop, and it closes.

1. The belief that women are naturally frivolous
2. produces institutions that give women nothing to do with their minds,
3. which produces women who have done nothing,
4. which confirms the belief.

And she names the part done from inside, where women take the prejudice on themselves and bury what they have.

Then the generalisation, from her Discourse on Happiness. A source of happiness is to be free of prejudice, and the decision rests with us to be rid of it. We all have enough intelligence to examine what others want us to believe.

The answer: that believing is something you do, so it can be done responsibly or not, and doing it badly is a fault, and never bad luck. The name arrived in 1877 with W. K. Clifford, whose version is absolute: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence.

Du Châtelet is a century and a half earlier and in good company. Detlefsen sets three thinkers beside each other, and the useful observation is that each has a different authority in view.

• Descartes aims at the Scholastics, arguing that human error is our own fault for assenting to what we have not examined clearly, which rots the foundations of the sciences.
• Hume aims at religious authority, arguing in On Miracles that people set aside countless regularities of nature on the strength of one reported exception. A marble statue said to bleed outweighs every piece of marble that has never bled.
• Du Châtelet aims at prejudice about women, and at national partisanship in science.

And what all three share, which is the sentence to take. A commitment to education for everyone, as the source both of evidence and of self-ownership of the mind, which is the best guard against authorities who use the gullible to spread untruths, whether about the natural world or about the social one.

How she passes it on. Her masterwork opens as a letter to her son. She tells him to accustom his mind early to think and to be self-sufficient, and then: whatever side you take in this dispute among philosophers, guard yourself against the obstinacy that the spirit of national partisanship produces, which is dangerous everywhere in life and ridiculous in physics.

The answer, in the framework Detlefsen uses: two camps, and the fight was about whether hypotheses are allowed at all.

What they meant by the charge. Newton: experimental philosophy reduces phenomena to general rules, while hypothetical philosophy consists in imaginary explications of things and imaginary arguments for or against them, and he follows the first while Descartes and Leibniz follow the second too much. A contemporary dismisses the systems of Descartes, Gassendi and Hobbes as possibly chimeras and amusing notions, fit to entertain working heads.

And the nationalism riding on top of it, which is why her rule is relevant. Voltaire's Elements of Newton's Philosophy draws a bright line between the old French way of hypotheses and the new British hard-headed experimentalism, and tells the French to catch up. So the scientific question had an English answer and a French answer, which is exactly the situation her letter to her son is about.

One piece of context worth having, because it changes who she is. For decades her thought was treated as derivative of Voltaire's, with whom she lived and worked. Detlefsen calls that claim evidence-free, and says close examination of her work has debunked it. Her treatment of hypotheses is the example: she does not agree with him.

Her answer: because there is no other way to reach a cause you cannot observe and cannot derive, and the fix is to constrain them, where everybody around her wanted them banned. This is chapter 4 of the Foundations, and the four constraints she sets are, in substance, the modern ones.

First, why they are necessary. Hypotheses are needed in all cases where the true reason for a phenomenon cannot be discovered either in advance, from truths already known, or afterwards, from experiment. That gap is permanent, so the tool is permanent.

And the argument from who used them. Copernicus, Kepler, Huygens, Descartes, Leibniz and Newton himself all devised useful hypotheses to explain difficult phenomena.

So, she says, those who want to ban them from philosophy intend harm to the interests of science. Her target is anybody leaning too hard on Newton's famous line that he feigns no hypotheses.

Then the constraints, which are what make the account modern.

1. Test them. Once a hypothesis is posed, experiments get done to find out whether it is a good one, experiments which would never have been thought of without it. That is the hypothesis earning its place by generating work.
2. One falsifying observation kills it. A hypothesis becomes false when it is found to contradict a well-established observation. That is falsification, stated plainly, two centuries before Popper gave it a name.
3. Fruitfulness counts. A good hypothesis explains the phenomenon it was built for and its further consequences agree with observation.
4. Be modest, and take it apart before throwing it out. A hypothesis can be true in one of its parts and false in another.

Her fourth constraint has teeth, because she uses it against the winning side. Descartes explained gravity with vortices, and by her time the idea was held in contempt because Newton's account had won. She will not have the wholesale rejection: it cannot legitimately be concluded that a vortex, or several vortices conceived differently, cannot be the cause of these movements. That is the ethics of belief applied to an opinion everybody around her held.

And her conclusion, which is the passage to know. Hypotheses are only probable propositions, more or less probable according to how many of the attendant circumstances they account for. A very high degree of probability has nearly the effect on us of certainty, so hypotheses eventually become truths for us when the probability rises far enough. A hypothesis becomes improbable in proportion to the circumstances it fails to explain, and false when it contradicts a well-established observation.

What is remarkable about that is not the content but the date. Degrees of probability, falsification by a single result, and theories that are accepted without being proved. That is roughly the twentieth-century account, written in 1740 by somebody the Académie would not admit.