 Hi. Welcome back to History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine. I'm Matt Brown. Let's talk about values and science again. Previously, we've discussed the ways in which values can influence science through the fact that science has uncertainty and choice in it. What we have called inductive risk, right? What we might also call epistemic risk. The basic, basically the idea is that if you are, if you have a certain amount of evidence, certain body of evidence, that doesn't compel you to make certain inferences, right? Inference comes with a certain amount of risk, a certain amount of uncertainty, a certain amount of indeterminacy with it. And values are one of the things that help us figure out what kind of inferences we ought to be making. Not by just telling us to sort of infer whatever we want to be the case, right? But instead by telling us, for example, the trade-off between false negative and false positive errors that we should accept, right? And which kind of error is more significant, more important, more important to avoid? Today, I want to talk about a different kind of influence of values on science. And that has to do with the types of concepts and claims that we make in science that sometimes have overt value-laden content. So let me start by thinking about an example that's not particularly scientific, right? We might say of someone that they're courageous. We might say, Sandy is courageous. That's a kind of claim. The term courageous is evaluative, right? It has a sense of being good, right? It's a good thing to be courageous, right? It's praise to call someone courageous. But courageous is not like a term like good or right, right? The term good doesn't describe any particular thing. What it is is it says that something has a positive value. To say that something's right is to say something good about that action or state of affairs. It's right that it's this way means that we approve of it and that it's the thing that should be done, right? To say someone's courageous brings along a whole host of descriptive features, right? There are certain things that are good but not courageous and certain things that involve danger that aren't good, right? So what's interesting about the term or the concept of courage is that it has both specific content that is descriptive, taking certain kinds of actions in the face of danger, being willing to put oneself at risk for the benefit of something important, as well as a pro attitude, as well as a valuation of that person and the actions that they take as being a good thing, right? So courageous or courage, courageousness is a kind of mixed concept. It has an evaluative and a descriptive component but not ones that we can just sort of pull apart, right? Ones that kind of go hand in hand with one another. Now, we can refer to this sort of thing in different ways. It's been called a thick ethical concept which distinguishes it from thin ethical concepts like good or right, permissible, impermissible, right? Obligatory, those are all kinds of ethical concepts that don't have any particular thick content. We could just call them value laden concepts or we could focus not on the concepts but on the claims that embed the concept like sandy is courageous, right? And that's a what we might call a mixed claim, right? It's value laden in a very particular way. Now, courage is not a particularly scientific concept. We don't see courage or courageousness appearing in a lot of scientific literature but they're, you know, it's more like an ethical concept perhaps but there's lots of other concepts not that different from it which we do see appearing in science. Things like conscientiousness, intelligence, violent, right? We might call someone violent in a psychological context, right? We might sociologically say something like the United States is a violent country. That's an example from one of the readings. So we also talk about states of affairs that are mixed or value laden in this sense, health, well-being, again from one of the readings, poverty, wealth, these are concepts that again are mixed in this way, okay? Now, you might think that these are awkward concepts to have in science because of their evaluative content and the goal for scientists ought to be to refine our language, to refine our terms so that they don't embed so much of this value laden content, right? So we should go through a process of what you might call operationalization or you might call regimentation of language that's going to sort of strip away the evaluative stuff, right? So we want to understand, we want to understand a certain phenomenon, we might not talk about violence, we might talk about aggressiveness, although again, aggressiveness is another value laden concept, so that doesn't really help. But we might try to say, acts of a certain kind at a certain frequency, we might replace various concepts with definitions that have no evaluative features, right? The problem with that move, one of the problems that's going to be pointed out with that move is that we're interested in these concepts for a reason. We do sociology, psychology, biology to get at concepts like health, well-being, welfare, happiness, to address problems like violence and rape and poverty, because we care about those things, right? And if you have, if you redefine your terms in such a way that it's disconnected from those things that we care about, you're no longer really doing the work that you set out to do. You're going to get further and further away into a technical universe that has nothing to do with the motivations with which the research began. And in that sense, you render the science effectively useless, right? And that actually happens, you know, the more that happens in science, right? When you're not dealing with an area like physics or chemistry where the tech technical language allows you to build sort of technologies that become useful and to investigate phenomena that are otherwise hidden from our examination, right? But, you know, rather you're still talking about social phenomena, psychological phenomena that is the kind of stuff we should care about, but you're using this alien language that doesn't connect with our interests, that's not good. It's not going to get us what we want. In fact, we need, in order to clarify, in order to capture and measure these things that we are interested in, we need those evaluative concepts and we need to make those evaluations so we know, is this a good way to operationalize violence? Or is it problematic in various ways? So that's really the kind of big issues that our readings are getting into. You might think of, for example, the concept of intelligence, which we've talked about. This is a concept that plays an important role in psychology. Being intelligent is a good thing, right? And we break it down into a number of skills that we can test with various tests, IQ tests, and things like that. But if we do not sort of keep that concept in check by applying value judgments, that might be one reason that we get into these kinds of culturally specific behaviors that we're measuring that make some some groups look more intelligent than others by virtue of the interests of those cultures. Right? So we may not, we may, we may start to universalize peculiar values of our own and actually kind of hide that information because we begin to pretend as if there's a there's a value free concept of intelligence. Now, one of the things that comes up in the readings is the question of objectivity. Well, if we're going to be including these mixed claims or thick concepts, value laden concepts in our science, how are we going to do science subjectively? And I think there's two ways we can think about that. I mean, on the one hand, we can ask how important is the concept of objectivity, right? You know, do we worry, you know, about, should we worry, should we worry about objectivity in the social, psychological, biological realm of human interests in the same way that we might worry about it in a courthouse or in a, in a physics lab, right? So there's, you know, one, one way, one thing we might ask is, should we care about objectivity? If we say, yes, we still want to insist on objectivity. And that's something we might want to insist on. Does objectivity really require this kind of distance from our values? Does it really require value freedom? That's something we've discussed a bit before. But you might think, look, objectivity might have to have to do more with, you know, social processes of examining ideas might have to do more with sort of uncovering hidden presuppositions and consulting various people with different opinions on the matter, rather than sort of being able to cleanse our thinking of all traces of values, right? So maybe there's concepts of objectivity. And that's, that's what a lot of our readings would argue is, is there's concepts of objectivity that are quite independent of this notion of being sort of impartial or value free. So that's just a quick setup on our, on our concepts for today. We'll have a lot more specific stuff to discuss in class. So I look forward to hearing what you think on discord or in class in our meeting, or feel free to leave a comment on this video. Otherwise, I look forward to talking to you next time about race and medicine.