Socializing Science: On the Epistemic Significance of the Institutional Context of Science

Science is a social activity. About this much, everyone agrees. Disagreement arises, however, with the attempt to explicate the precise manner in which science is social and the precise ways in which scientific communities should be organized. This dissertation addresses these two issues.

In the first part of this dissertation, I argue that scientific knowledge is intrinsically social; that is, the development of scientific knowledge requires communities, and the decisions that communities make--regarding both the choices of problems and the epistemic evaluation of research--are inevitably influenced by their broader social contexts. In some areas of science, furthermore, moral and political values inevitably influence the epistemic evaluation of research. I defend this claim against the objection that only the practical--and not the epistemic--evaluation of research is legitimately influenced by such values.

Given that scientific knowledge is intrinsically social, the question of how research should be organized takes on added epistemic significance. If the development of scientific knowledge requires communities, one must begin to spell out which communities are knowledge-productive and which are not. The second part of the dissertation is an attempt to do this, particularly in the area of pharmaceutical research. Due to the increasing involvement of for-profit companies in biomedical research, the organization of this research is changing dramatically, in ways that are presenting serious ethical and epistemic costs. The question of how these organizational arrangements should be improved is not only an important public policy issue, but also an important epistemological one. To begin to address this issue, I discuss a recent episode of pharmaceutical research, involving Vioxx, and I highlight some of the organizational inadequacies that led to this debacle.

A crucial lesson of the Vioxx case is the need for enforcing organized skepticism. I discuss one potential way of doing this--through an adversarial system of research--according to which competing sets of scientific advocacy groups argue for opposing positions before a panel of scientist-judges. While this proposal is not completely developed, it is a pursuit-worthy one that merits further discussion.