Welcome to CPS Lunch Forum. It will be a hybrid meeting taking place at Blindern, and it will also be possible to follow the lecture through Zoom. To receive the zoom-link, send an e-mail to ingvihar@uio.no. The meeting is open for everyone!
Jack Wright is a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the ERC-funded QUALITY project, at the University of Cambridge. He is also a guest researcher at CPS, UiO. Jack's research focuses on the epistemic and political effects of the social organization of science and on the relationship between scientific knowledge and politics. As part of QUALITY he will explore the differential role different quantitative causal inference techniques play in politics.
"The new demarcation problem"
What is special about science? The demarcation of science from non-science was once central to the philosophy of science. That is no longer the case. Philosophers now typically eschew demarcation in favour of local questions about the justification or ontology of particular aspects of science – the epistemic virtue of minimal models, for example. This has lead to a flourishing of interactions between philosophers and scientists, and many productive developments. I will argue, however, that now is a good time to re-examine the demarcation problem, albeit in a new form. Given increasing questions about the role of scientific knowledge in politics and public life, I will argue that it is worth asking: what general features of science give us good reason to rely on its products? I will also sketch a preliminary answer to this problem, one with the sociology of science, rather than a specific scientific method, at the centre.