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Scientific Research–Who Should Govern?

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Abstract

I argue that the title question needs to be taken seriously because there are important questions about how the scientific agenda should be set. Natural answers to the question – declarations of the proper autonomy of science or expressions of faith in market forces – are found inadequate. Instead, I propose a form of democracy with respect to scientific research that will avoid the obvious dangers of a tyranny of ignorance. I conclude with some modest proposals about how the ideal of a democratic science might be implemented and with a response to common objections.

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Notes

  1. There are numerous informative histories of the early Royal Society that describe the ways in which contemporaries reacted. See, for example, Purver M (1967) The royal society: concept and creation. Routledge, London.

  2. Bush V (1995) Science: the endless frontier, reprinted edition. National Science Foundation, Washington DC.

  3. I heard this story from Gordon Conway, in a symposium at Columbia University, in 2002.

  4. This is my own impression of what occurs at multi-disciplinary conferences, where the future of scientific research is discussed.

  5. Flory JH, Kitcher P (2004) Global health and the scientific research agenda. Philos Public Aff 32:36–65.

  6. Ibid.

  7. See Allen G (1978) Thomas Hunt Morgan: the man and his science. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

  8. I present this ideal in Chapter 10 of my book Science, Truth, and Democracy (2001, Oxford University Press, New York).

Acknowledgement

Thanks to John Weckert for the invitation to write a paper on this topic, and for his helpful comments on an earlier version.

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Correspondence to Philip Kitcher.

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Kitcher, P. Scientific Research–Who Should Govern?. Nanoethics 1, 177–184 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-007-0019-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-007-0019-2

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