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Researchers and research institutions have a variety of financial, personal, and political interests that sometimes conflict with their professional, ethical, or legal obligations. These situations can create conflicts of interest or the appearance of conflicts of interest. This chapter discusses how conflicts of interest affect research, how they are defined, and how they should be managed. It also describes how government agencies and research institutions have responded to conflicts of interest in research and describes some cases from science.

Public resources are managed to satisfy societal values, and policies are set to prescribe management programs that satisfy those values. Science does not set policies but provides a factual environment in which policies can be set. The natural-regulation policy was set internally within NPS, a procedure that tends to promote ownership of the policy and resistance to critical scientific evidence. Scientific objectivity is more likely to be promoted with policies set externally by representatives of all interest groups as in the U.S.D.A. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Effective administration of national parks requires explicit goals for the purposes of the areas, and freedom to employ whatever management is needed to achieve the goals.

The next step is to explore the possibility of scientific objectivity. It is argued that the supposed underdetermination of theory by evidence is not as intractable a problem as it has sometimes appeared, and that it does not prevent scientists from aspiring to objectivity.

Research by Yellowstone biologists was administered by the park until 1993, when they were transferred out of the National Park Service (NPS). Park northern-range research since 1971 has largely supported the natural-regulation hypothesis, which has provided a scientific rationale for the politically coerced natural-regulation policy. Park research since 1971 has produced inferences on the northern range that are contrary to pre-1971 research and post-1971 research not supported by the park, because contrary evidence has been ignored; evidence has been used selectively, hypotheses have been proposed for which there was no supporting evidence, and subsequently treated as confirmed, careless scholarship; and administrative actions coercing compliance with the natural-regulation hypothesis. Scientific objectivity in park research could be fostered by placing it in an independent NPS division that reports to the NPS director. But such a move is administratively unlikely because former park biologists are now in the Biological Resources Division of the US Geological Survey, and the park has moved to ‘backfill’ its vacated research program.

Centered on the unfolding and eventual closure of a recent, highly contentious operational transition at the NWS, this chapter introduces readers to the institutionalized environment in which NWS forecasters operate today, and to the operational philosophy, technologies, and identity politics through which its logic becomes articulated on the ground. The aim is to provide a balanced perspective on how institutional forces can, and cannot, structure decision-making in action. Attention is drawn to the typically invisible but profound role of technical standards and knowledge infrastructures for forging a community of practice. The argument is richly fleshed out through the experiences, practices, and points of view of meteorologists working at one forecasting office of the NWS.

This chapter argues for the political, post-modern dimensions in philosophy (among them feminist philosophy) which has been dismissed by practitioners of the more traditional and apolitical approach as lacking in scientific objectivity. Returning to the arguments of the first chapter of this book (“Non-Negotiable Demands”), this chapter redefines objectivity as trustworthiness. Trustworthiness is the complex relationship between agents, communities, researchers, and what have you—an “epistemic dependency” in which knowledge gathering is dependent upon interacting with others. Disregarding the political and social justice implications, in the end, will sacrifice true scientific objectivity in favor of outdated and isolated notions of philosophy.

Subjective Bayesianism is often criticized for a lack of objectivity: (i) it opens the door to the influence of values and biases, (ii) evidence judgments can vary substantially between scientists, (iii) it is not suited for informing policy decisions. We rebut these concerns by bridging the debates on scientific objectivity and Bayesian inference in statistics. First, we show that the above concerns arise equally for frequentist statistical inference. Second, we argue that the involved senses of objectivity are epistemically inert. Third, we show that Subjective Bayesianism promotes other, epistemically relevant senses of scientific objectivity—most notably by increasing the transparency of scientific reasoning.

Kant’s original philosophical project took Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics as synthetic a priori sciences fixed for all time. Developments in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century science made this view untenable, but a number of neo-Kantian philosophers responded by relativizing the conception of a priori principles to the historical development of mathematics and physics after Kant. Friedman’s conception of a dynamics of reason follows this tradition. Mark Wilson has addressed many of these same post-Kantian developments on behalf of a sophisticated version of scientific realism inspired by the earlier work of Hilary Putnam, and Wilson has expressed dissatisfaction with the ‘ersatz’ conceptions of scientific objectivity characteristic of neo-Kantianism. This chapter argues that Wilson’s and Friedman’s approaches can be seen as complementary rather than incompatible, responding to different but equally important aspects of the historical development of modern physics from Newton to the early twentieth century.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the growing scholarly/policy gap, which is the result of the professionalization of the discipline of political science. While the professionalization of a discipline and its increasing irrelevance to concrete policy issues is not inevitable, there nonetheless seems to be an elective affinity between these two trends. Rigor and relevance are not necessarily incompatible, but they are often in tension, which is why social science's relevance question endures. As the number of scholarly articles using sophisticated quantitative or formal methods increased since 1980, the percentage of them offering concrete policy recommendations—the core of policy relevance—has declined. Many proponents of the scientific study of politics now eschew advocacy of particular policies on the grounds that doing so is incompatible with scientific objectivity. Moreover, many pressing policy questions are not readily amenable to the preferred methodological tools of social scientists.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of objectivity, the presence of which is evidently required for basic justice, honest government, and true knowledge. It differentiates disciplinary objectivity from mechanical objectivity. Mechanical objectivity has been a favorite of positivist philosophers, and it has a powerful appeal to the wider public. A faith in objectivity tends to be associated with political democracy, or at least with systems in which bureaucratic actors are highly vulnerable to outsiders. The appeal of numbers is especially compelling to bureaucratic officials who lack the mandate of a popular election, or divine right. Arbitrariness and bias are the most usual grounds upon which such officials are criticized. A decision made by the numbers (or by explicit rules of some other sort) has at least the appearance of being fair and impersonal. Scientific objectivity thus provides an answer to a moral demand for impartiality and fairness. Quantification is a way of making decisions without seeming to decide. Objectivity lends authority to officials who have very little of their own.

The fields of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary social psychology were spawned by the intellectual ferment created by the principles of inclusive fitness and reproductive success. Based on these ideas, a number of bold implications deriving from the concepts of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology have been drawn in the scholarly domain — implications that were very rapidly echoed in the popular press and other media, most often in a simplified and vulgarized form. Even genocide has become subject to sociobiological explanation. This chapter questions the widespread and often uncritical applications of sociobiological principles to the explanation of collective violence, which in the twentieth century alone produced by some estimates, over 100 million civilian deaths. Not only is the zoomorphic generalization a wild exaggeration, but the sociobiological theory of aggression is unsupported by empirical data, and in many instances it is contradicted by them. This chapter also discusses scientific objectivity and the study of massacres.

This chapter examines how undercover investigation fared amid celebrations of postwar affluence. The return of peace and rising postwar prosperity in the later 1940s and 1950s was accompanied by a decline in the number of classic undercover investigations. The worlds of skid row, hobohemia, and itinerant labor that had nourished them were shrinking. Some anthropologists and sociologists continued to argue in favor of the undercover technique, but scientific objectivity was evidently pushing subjectivist approaches out to the disciplines' margins, where they were viewed with growing skepticism. In addition, from the 1950s through the century's end, periodic crises over professional ethics would increasingly delegitimize deceptive research practices. This chapter considers how the central concerns of social science shifted away from a Depression-era emphasis on class and toward race and culture.

Composite outcomes are becoming widespread in clinical trials. By combining individual outcome measures (e.g., death, non-fatal heart attack, non-fatal stroke, re-hospitalization) as a single composite measure, composites can increase statistical precision and trial efficiency, consequently enabling researchers to answer questions that could not otherwise be answered and providing more patient-relevant information. Critics, however, argue that a composite threatens the scientific objectivity of the trial by introducing new risks. This chapter examines common use of composites in cardiovascular trials and highlights the inductive risks involved in employing them. It shows that the inductive risk associated with a particular methodology (such as the use of a composite outcome) is not always clear in advance, so non-epistemic values are relevant to deciding whether or not it is worth using them. It also illustrates the importance of being explicit about which methodological choices were made and why.

Suffering is the unique distress of persons whose intactness or integrity is disrupted or destroyed. The first lesson of suffering is that bodies do not suffer, persons suffer. It follows that a loss of dignity may incite suffering, as do other injuries to the person. Three cases are cited in this chapter of persons who suffer at least in part because of disruption of their dignity. These cases allow us to go further into the nature of persons, human dignity, and the relation of suffering to dignity. Since the mid-twentieth century, the ideas and ideals of science became universal in medicine and then spread out to the entire culture, where they are present in great strength and wider influence. These ideas include the belief that only objective data have validity. But objectivity in the absence of subjectivity renders persons as one-dimensional and robs medicine of the compassion and human relationships that have defined it in history and in the care of an individual sick person.

This chapter looks at Carl Sagan's famous dictum: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The gist seems to be that one does not have sufficient reason to credit an extraordinary claim unless one also has commensurately extraordinary evidence to support it. This looks reasonable enough at first glance but its vagueness leaves it open to several interpretations, some of which are incompatible with the norms of rational inquiry. In particular, while Sagan's dictum is a justified skeptical response to claims that are known to be highly improbable or contrary to well-substantiated science, it is irrational and contrary to scientific objectivity to demand extraordinary evidence for those that are merely amazing or bizarre, and thus Sagan's dictum must be handled with caution in astrobiology. The chapter then sets out the conditions under which an appeal to Sagan's dictum is justified and those under which it is not, with special reference to existing and anticipated astrobiological debates.