Hugh Lacey: Is Science Value Free?
Abstract
During a lecture on philosophy
of science, the lecturer was asked whether, in his opinion, science is value free. He simply answered: “I suppose you have never heard of craniometry?” The discipline of craniometry, or skull measuring, was widely practiced in nineteenth century anthropology. It sought to justify scientifically the segregation of races. In particular, it was argued that the dimensions of one’s skull could in principle count as evidence for claims about one’s character, for example the existence of latent criminal tendencies. The present scientific community has dismissed the ‘evidence’ from craniometry, but in its time, the art of skull measuring served as a fundamental building block to some of the world’s more sinister ideologies.
The reply given by the lecturer signifies one way of answering the question of what roles values play (or do not play) in science. One simply looks for an example of a value-laden theory or discipline within science, and then infers that science is in not completely value free. Conversely, one could try and find a counterexample to the opposite claim.
The strategy just stated is intended to answer questions about the actual state of scientific practice: in actual fact, theory such and such manifests value, while discipline so and so does not. An alternative approach to the matter however, is to establish, on theoretical grounds, whether science is or is not value free in principle. This represents a shift toward a more philosophically engaged perspective. Perhaps one could prove that science is, of its very nature, free of values, or that the opposite must be the case, that science can never be completely value free. This alternative approach is adopted by Hugh Lacey in his Is Science Value Free? Moreover, Lacey is concerned not only with the factual state of science in a descriptive way, his approach is also normative: he asks not only if science is value free, but also if science should be value free.
The book has a rather complicated structure. It centers on three components of the view that science is value free: impartiality, neutrality and autonomy. Impartiality is the idea that there are no non-cognitive (cognitive construed here as epistemic) values at play in the ‘soundly accepting’ (as opposed to provisionally accepting) of a theory. Neutrality concerns the consequences of accepting and applying a theory: the consequences should not favor a particular value or value complex. Lastly, autonomy is a thesis about scientific endeavors as such. These endeavors are driven by ‘purely cognitive considerations’ (p. 82). The scientific community works without outside interference, is master of its own agenda and free from influence by political, economical etc. influences. In the fourth chapter of the book, Lacey formulates provisional theses to encompass these three key ideas.
Is Science Value Free aims to investigate whether or not science, considered on its own as well as in its historical and social context, exhibits the three theses, and to what extent. In the course of the book, Lacey leads us across a dazzling landscape of scientific and philosophic ideas, as well as some key theories from the history of science. Claiming that the monopolistic adherence to ‘materialist strategies’ prevents us from seeing any other possible strategies, Lacey dedicates a good deal of his book (the lengthy chapters 5, 6 and 7) on explaining how and why it came to pass that these materialist strategies took their exulted places in the scientific community, before considering some alternative strategies (chapters 8 and 9).
All these issues considered, in the final analysis, the three theses in their provisional form, do not apply rigidly to science. A more definite reshaping of the theses then follows in chapter 10. Ultimately, only the first, impartiality, seems to stand up to scrutiny. The claim of neutrality is maintainable but only in a seriously weakened form, whereas autonomy is best to be wholly abandoned (as a description of science, that is, not as an ideal of how science should be). As the author believes that the claim that science is value free hinges on all three of these theses being defendable, the conclusion follows that science is not value free (p. 259).