Science for sale
Symposium, March 6th 2008, Vooruit, 13.00hrs - 18.00hrs, an initiative of CLEA (VUB), the department of theatre sciences (UGent) and Interface, free entrance
Philosophers of Science claim that a value-free science is a fiction. Scientific research includes values and norms as well, and aims for applicable knowledge that brings about a good or better life. But how can we monitor the border between a humanized science and political or economical manipulation or abuse? For this reason, this symposium focuses, outdoors the university, on contemporary smoke screens of what is called 'science'.
For instance, when does the interplay between natural sciences and industry turns over in a sell out of patented knowledge in sake of the market and the banking business? Do hidden political agenda's intervene in the anonymous community that produces the apparently innocent and generous Wikipedia? To what extend is the academic enterprise liable to a deceptive, promising rhetoric in favour of an influx of funding? Finally, what ideological worldviews does the popularization of bioscience try to sell?
Schedule:
(In order to avoid streaming problems, play the videos in a Firefox browser using Apple quicktime or VLC media player.)
13.00 - 13.15: Robrecht Vanderbeeken / KASK, UGent - Welcome (video)
Tom Bonte / Vooruit - Welcome (video)
13.15- 14.00: Sigrid Sterckx / UGent, Philosophy and Moral Sciences (video)
The commodification of academic research: fostering innovation or undermining academic values?
14.00 - 14.45: Rik Pinxten / UGent, Cici, cultural studies (video)
Humanities in danger?
14.45 - 15.00: Break (Jeroen Van Bouwel / UGent, chair session 2)
15.00 - 15.45: Dany Nobus / Brunel University, London, Psychology (video)
(E)valuating Words: Money and Gain in the Therapeutic Economy
15.45 - 16.30: John Dupré / University of Exeter, UK, Biology (video)
Scientific Tales about Human Nature
16.30 - 17.00: Break (Maarten Van Dyck / UGent, chair session 3)
17.00 - 18.00: Esther-Mirjam Sent / Nijmegen University, Economics (video)
The Economic Value(s) in and of Science
Abstracts:
Sigrid Sterckx - The commodification of academic research: fostering innovation or undermining academic values?
Academic research is increasingly being commercialised. This commercialisation trend has different dimensions, among which the massive increase of patenting and licensing activities by universities, the significant growth of industry funding of academic research via so-called contract research, and the creation of ever more 'spin-out' companies. All this is strongly encouraged by governments throughout the Western world. The commercialisation trend has far-reaching consequences for access to the fruits of academic research and so the question arises whether the current policies are indeed promoting innovation or whether they are instead a symptom of a pro-commercialisation culture which is blind to adverse effects.
I will discuss the justifications that are given for the current policies and raise the question to what extent they threaten important academic values. Next, the question will be addressed as to why policymakers seem to ignore the adverse effects of the commercialisation of academic research. Finally, a number of proposals for improving university policies will be made.
Bio: Sigrid Sterckx is professor of medical ethics, bioethics and applied ethics at the Free University Brussels, and ethics and environmental ethics at Ghent University. She made her Ph-D on the ethical justification of current patent-systems in industrialized and developing countries. She published intensively on this and other ethical inquiries.
Rik Pinxten - Humanities in danger?
The corporate model (or the market model) has been introduced in the organisation and development of scientific research. The Thomson ICI-system is part of that trend, as is the growing influence of military funding. In this contribution I investigate what the consequences are for the Humanities, and (in the knowledge society of the future) for the future of research.
Bio: Rik Pinxten is professor of anthropology and religious studies at Ghent University since 1980. He was visiting professor at Northwestern University, Ill. and Syracuse university, NY. He also is the president of the Flemish Humanist Federation (HVV). Field of research: epistemology of anthropology, intercultural negotiation, interreligious entente.
Dany Nobus - (E)valuating Words: Money and Gain in the Therapeutic Economy
One does not need to be a cynic to acknowledge that the psychiatric profession and the pharmaceutical industry form a marriage made in heaven. Psychiatrists benefit from the marketing of the latest drugs; pharmaceutical companies capitalise on the psychiatric diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. Mental health care professionals who rely on the ‘talking cure' seem to circumvent this insidious corporatisation of their clinical practice, but it does not stop them from placing a monetary value on the dispensation of ‘care', and quite often in the absence of scientific, ‘evidence-based' principles of treatment. Should we really believe that there is no such thing as a psychotherapeutic industry in which patients are cash-cows and practitioners are enriching themselves on the back of other people's misery? How does one place a value on words anyway?
Bio: Dany Nobus is Professor of Psychology and Psychoanalysis at Brunel University, London, where he is also Head of the School of Social Sciences. He is Visiting Professor of Psychiatry at Creighton University Medical School in Omaha NE and Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. He is the author, most recently, of Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid: Elements for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology (Routledge, 2005).
John Dupré - Scientific Tales about Human Nature
In this talk I shall consider critically the role of genetic determinism in the currently popular discipline of Evolutionary Psychology. I shall then discuss the inevitable role of value-laden assumptions in this science and the ways these are concealed or denied by its practitioners. Finally I shall consider the social consequences of the widespread acceptance of the kinds of simplistic deterministic stories that Evolutionary Psychologists disseminate.
Bio: John Dupré is a philosopher of science whose work has focused especially on issues in many areas of biology. He is currently Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Exeter and since 2002 he has been Director of the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (Egenis). He has formerly held posts at Oxford, Stanford, and Birkbeck College, London. In 2006 he held the Spinoza Visiting Professorship of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. His publications include The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Harvard, 1993); Human Nature and the Limits of Science (Oxford, 2001); Humans and Other Animals (Oxford, 2002): and Darwin's Legacy: What Evolution Means Today (Oxford, 2003).
Esther-Mirjam Sent - The Economic Value(s) in and of Science
Much has been made of the value(s) in science. But what about the value(s) of science? The paper addresses this question by focusing on efforts within economics of science to eliminate (economic) value(s). Specifically, it considers contributions by economists and philosophers of science aimed at responding to the widespread view in social studies of science that the presence of non-epistemic goals of individual scientists such as professional success undermine epistemic aims of science such as the acquisition of truth. One response to efforts within economics of science to eliminate values is to question their descriptive accuracy. However, the contributors themselves often acknowledge that their economic models of scientific activity are oversimplified as well as schematic. Another reaction is to criticize their appeals to economics from a historical and philosophical perspective for being conflicting, incoherent, and mistaken. Indeed, many economists have used this strategy. A third response to the contributions, one that has not yet been employed and is used in this paper, is to show that values reappear in various guises once a variety of economic settings is considered. Indeed, as this paper shows, game theory can be twisted and turned in all kinds of manners to establish all kinds of results and to show that a credit-maximizing motivation may seriously hinder truth promotion. In the process, the paper develops game-theoretic examples not as being more realistic, but as illustrating the arbitrariness of game theory.
Bio: Esther-Mirjam Sent is Professor of Economic Theory and Policy at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Her book The Evolving Rationality of Rational Expectations: An Assessment of Thomas Sargent's Achievements (Cambridge University Press, 1998) was awarded the 1999 Gunnar Myrdal Prize of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy. She is the editor, with her former colleague from the University of Notre Dame Philip Mirowski, of Science Bought and Sold: Essays in the Economics of Science (University of Chicago Press, 2002). She is also the co-editor of the Journal of Institutional Economics. Her research interests include the history and philosophy of economics as well as the economics of science.