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The social epistemology of scientific dissent : responding to William Lynch’s Minority Report
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Fuller, Steve (2022) The social epistemology of scientific dissent : responding to William Lynch’s Minority Report. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 52 (5). pp. 279-289. doi:10.1177/00483931221081018 ISSN 1552-7441.
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/00483931221081018
Abstract
William Lynch’s Minority Report is the most comprehensive and fair-minded attempt to give epistemic dissent its due in science that has appeared in recent times. Nevertheless, it remains too beholden to the scientific establishment as its epistemic benchmark. The sophistication of Lynch’s argument lies in the trading of counterfactual intuitions about whether suppressed dissenters would scientifically flourish even given an appropriate level of exposure. Here, he attempts to strike a balance between Lakatos’ instinctive conservatism and Feyerabend’s instinctive radicalism. I argue that Lynch needs to turn the dial more toward Feyerabend, in that science is more authoritarian than he thinks and restricts more than it should. However, the value of Lynch’s book lies in demonstrating that calls for increased openness now (i.e., allowing more dissent) are related to its closure to alternatives in the past. In short, if science is authoritarian now, then it has been so before – and the question is for a how long and to what extent.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Philosophy | ||||||
| SWORD Depositor: | Library Publications Router | ||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Philosophy of the Social Sciences | ||||||
| Publisher: | SAGE Publications | ||||||
| ISSN: | 1552-7441 | ||||||
| Official Date: | September 2022 | ||||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 52 | ||||||
| Number: | 5 | ||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 279-289 | ||||||
| DOI: | 10.1177/00483931221081018 | ||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access |
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