The Politics of Pure Science

The Politics of Pure Science

Author: Daniel S. Greenberg

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1999-08

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 9780226306322

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Dispelling the myth of scientific purity and detachment, Daniel S. Greenberg documents in revealing detail the political processes that underpinned government funding of science from the 1940s to the 1970s.


The Politics and Science of Prevision

The Politics and Science of Prevision

Author: Andreas Wenger

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-28

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 1000088367

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This book inquires into the use of prediction at the intersection of politics and academia, and reflects upon the implications of future-oriented policy-making across different fields. The volume focuses on the key intricacies and fallacies of prevision in a time of complexity, uncertainty, and unpredictability. The first part of the book discusses different academic perspectives and contributions to future-oriented policy-making. The second part discusses the role of future knowledge in decision-making across different empirical issues such as climate, health, finance, bio- and nuclear weapons, civil war, and crime. It analyses how prediction is integrated into public policy and governance, and how in return governance structures influence the making of knowledge about the future. Contributors integrate two analytical dimensions in their chapters: the epistemology of prevision and the political and ethical implications of prevision. In this way, the volume contributes to a better understanding of the complex interaction and feedback loops between the processes of creating knowledge about the future and the application of this future knowledge in public policy and governance. This book will be of much interest to students of security studies, political science, sociology, technology studies, and International Relations. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.routledge.com/The-Politics-and-Science-of-Prevision-Governing-and-Probing/Wenger-Jasper-Cavelty/p/book/9780367900748, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.


The Art and Politics of Science

The Art and Politics of Science

Author: Harold Varmus

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 9780393061284

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The nobel prize winning scientist and former director of the National Institue of Health recalls the events of his life and career in science, in an autobiography that also incorporates scientific information about cancer biology and issues in public health.


Between Politics and Science

Between Politics and Science

Author: David H. Guston

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2000-01-13

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9780521653183

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Combining political-economic, sociological, and historical approaches, Professor Guston provides a coherent new framework for analyzing the changing relationship between politics and science in the United States. After World War II, the "social contract for science" assumed that the integrity and productivity of research were automatic; a belief that endured for four decades. But in the 1980s, cases of misconduct in science and flagging economic performance broke the trust between politics and science. New "boundary organizations" were created to mend the relationship between scientists and politicians.


Politics of Nature

Politics of Nature

Author: Bruno Latour

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0674039963

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A major work by one of the more innovative thinkers of our time, Politics of Nature does nothing less than establish the conceptual context for political ecology—transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: “Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks.” Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of reality, is a way of assembling political order without due process. Thus, his book proposes an end to the old dichotomy between nature and society—and the constitution, in its place, of a collective, a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually practiced. In a critique of the distinction between fact and value, Latour suggests a redescription of the type of political philosophy implicated in such a “commonsense” division—which here reveals itself as distinctly uncommonsensical and in fact fatal to democracy and to a healthy development of the sciences. Moving beyond the modernist institutions of “mononaturalism” and “multiculturalism,” Latour develops the idea of “multinaturalism,” a complex collectivity determined not by outside experts claiming absolute reason but by “diplomats” who are flexible and open to experimentation.


The Politics of Scientific Advice

The Politics of Scientific Advice

Author: Justus Lentsch

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-06-02

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 1139502840

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Controversies over issues such as genetically engineered food, foot-and-mouth disease and the failure of risk models in the global financial crisis have raised concerns about the quality of expert scientific advice. The legitimacy of experts, and of the political decision-makers and policy-makers whom they advise, essentially depends on the quality of the advice. But what does quality mean in this context, and how can it be achieved? This volume argues that the quality of scientific advice can be ensured by an appropriate institutional design of advisory organisations. Using examples from a wide range of international case studies, including think tanks, governmental research institutes, agencies and academies, the authors provide a systematic guide to the major problems and pitfalls encountered in scientific advice and the means by which organisations around the world have solved these problems.


Who Speaks for Nature?

Who Speaks for Nature?

Author: Laura Ephraim

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 081224981X

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Introduction. The Science Question in Political Theory -- Earth to Arendt -- Vico's World of Nature -- Descartes and Democracy -- Hobbes's Worldly Geometry of Politics -- Epilogue. Science and Politics at the End of the World


Politics and Expertise

Politics and Expertise

Author: Zeynep Pamuk

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2024-11-26

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0691219265

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A new model for the relationship between science and democracy that spans policymaking, the funding and conduct of research, and our approach to new technologies Our ability to act on some of the most pressing issues of our time, from pandemics and climate change to artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons, depends on knowledge provided by scientists and other experts. Meanwhile, contemporary political life is increasingly characterized by problematic responses to expertise, with denials of science on the one hand and complaints about the ignorance of the citizenry on the other. Politics and Expertise offers a new model for the relationship between science and democracy, rooted in the ways in which scientific knowledge and the political context of its use are imperfect. Zeynep Pamuk starts from the fact that science is uncertain, incomplete, and contested, and shows how scientists’ judgments about what is significant and useful shape the agenda and framing of political decisions. The challenge, Pamuk argues, is to ensure that democracies can expose and contest the assumptions and omissions of scientists, instead of choosing between wholesale acceptance or rejection of expertise. To this end, she argues for institutions that support scientific dissent, proposes an adversarial “science court” to facilitate the public scrutiny of science, reimagines structures for funding scientific research, and provocatively suggests restricting research into dangerous new technologies. Through rigorous philosophical analysis and fascinating examples, Politics and Expertise moves the conversation beyond the dichotomy between technocracy and populism and develops a better answer for how to govern and use science democratically.


Leo Strauss, Max Weber, and the Scientific Study of Politics

Leo Strauss, Max Weber, and the Scientific Study of Politics

Author: Nasser Behnegar

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2005-07

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0226041433

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Can politics be studied scientifically, and if so, how? Assuming it is impossible to justify values by human reason alone, social science has come to consider an unreflective relativism the only viable basis, not only for its own operations, but for liberal societies more generally. Although the experience of the sixties has made social scientists more sensitive to the importance of values, it has not led to a fundamental reexamination of value relativism, which remains the basis of contemporary social science. Almost three decades after Leo Strauss's death, Nasser Behnegar offers the first sustained exposition of what Strauss was best known for: his radical critique of contemporary social science, and particularly of political science. Behnegar's impressive book argues that Strauss was not against the scientific study of politics, but he did reject the idea that it could be built upon political science's unexamined assumption of the distinction between facts and values. Max Weber was, for Strauss, the most profound exponent of values relativism in social science, and Behnegar's explication artfully illuminates Strauss's critique of Weber's belief in the ultimate insolubility of all value conflicts. Strauss's polemic against contemporary political science was meant to make clear the contradiction between its claim of value-free premises and its commitment to democratic principles. As Behnegar ultimately shows, values—the ethical component lacking in a contemporary social science—are essential to Strauss's project of constructing a genuinely scientific study of politics.