Project Summary |
Note |
Scientific knowledge is shared mostly through what epistemologists call testimony: telling others what you know or believe. Books, journals, conferences, and the like all serve to facilitate the efficient and effective flow of knowledge by enabling scientists to easily obtain reliable information from competent sources on relevant issues.
The current trend towards pervasive commercialization of scientific research changes how these testimonial mechanisms work, both for the good and for the bad. For the good when private money makes it possible to share research results more widely and efficiently, as in the later stages of the Human Genome Project. For the bad when pressure is put on scientists not to publish commercially undesirable results or when conflicts of interest arise. These latter effects are detrimental to science internally and they also jeopardize public trust in science. In this project, I will systematically investigate the impact of commercialization on the sharing of scientific knowledge by taking into account both philosophical-theoretical work on the nature of science and testimony, and the results of empirical studies of the effects of commercialization. I will first provide a systematic account of the role and importance of testimony in science. Then, I will identify how commercialization affects this role positively and negatively. Finally, I will explore new opportunities and solutions to potential problems. Existing work on the commercialization of science tends to be exclusively empirical. Analyzing this empirical work with the help of theoretically more sophisticated philosophical accounts of science and testimony will further clarify the exact nature and extent of the effects that commercialization has on the flow of scientific knowledge. The results of such an analysis should be of relevance to science policy. Furthermore, an account of scientific testimony and an analysis of commercialization are novel and timely contributions to epistemology and philosophy of science. |
This NWO Veni project ran from 2010 to 2014 and is now completed. Hence, I’m no longer updating this page. To see where the current action is, check out my Vidi project and the University project.
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