Abstract
Heather Douglas has helped to set the standard for twenty-first century
discussions in philosophy of science on the topics of values in science and
science in democracy. Douglas’s work has been part of a movement to bring the
question of values in science back to center of the field and to focus especially
on policy-relevant science. This first chapter, on the pervasive entanglement
of science and values, includes an improved and definitive statement of the
argument from inductive risk, which she is single-handedly responsible for
rehabilitating and returning to the center of the debate. This statement
makes clear the fundamental and absolutely pervasive nature of inductive
risk and its import for our understanding of the role of values in science. The
chapter also provides a survey of the current field of alternative approaches
to ideals for the epistemic role of values in science that is comprehensive and
generous, yet critical of each.
In these brief comments, I focus on providing an alternative perspective
on some conceptual and rhetorical issues in Douglas’s account, specifically
dealing with the nature of values and the relation of the descriptive and the
normative. This will lead me to somewhat different evaluations of two of the
five new ideals for values in science that Douglas canvasses in the chapter.