Rowan Hildebrand-Chupp, The Empirical Role of Values in Science

[@samuelmaia9138]

First of all, thanks for the great talk. It really helped me to see things in my own research more clearly now - especially in seeing more clearly what the limits are in my efforts to identify values ​​as causes or as effects in poverty measures. Now, I would like to give a kind of defense of the contingency model against your critique. It seems to me that many folks who adopt this model accept this premise: it is easier to influence the valuations of experts than what causes them. (A confession: at least this is what brought me to this literature.) That is: it is “easier” to identify fulcrum evaluative points in scientific research, and then influence the choices taken at these points, and with it making scientific products take the form that we consider more appropriate - it is easier to do so than to struggle with the social evaluational background ​​that causes experts evaluations. Of course, as you yourself point out, this premise can be misleading, as it could make us ignore the pressures that practitioners suffer and that lead them not to take the valuations that we (or even themselves) consider appropriate. In addition, another premise that motivates the model is: that making explicit “where” or “what” are the evaluative questions of scientific practices contributes to interventions in an important way, and a way that is different from training a researcher's evaluative sensitivity. In the work of making these explicit, the responsibility moves from the researcher to the design of the scientific practice. The evaluative decision points are defined ex-ante, and incorporated by the research community. Again, in the end, it is assumed that it is easier to do this than to intervene in what causes the researchers' valuations. (Or are these two premises examples of applications of the valuographic approach?) However, even taking these two premises into account, from an eminently descriptive point of view, what you suggest as a research program still seems quite attractive. Thanks and congrats for your talk!

[@three-cats-photography]

This is more of a question than a comment. One problem with value judgments made by individuals is that they're hard to observe, and often we won't have good evidence that value judgment X as opposed to Y or Z had a particular effect on the research outcome or behavior or whatever. But if individual value judgments are hard to observe as causes, they'll also be hard to observe as effects. So we can say that this individual was working in this particular institutional, social, political context, and maybe even that individuals in that kind of context tend to make value judgment X. But is this enough to claim that this individual made value judgment X in this particular case?