Values are important and lasting ideals or beliefs that a person shares with the rest of the community on what is bad or good, or what is right or wrong. These attitudes usually have strong influences on a person’s behaviors and attitudes, as they will serve as his or her guidelines in all situations. Debates on whether science has been value-free and therefore subjective, or objective have been around for a while. Feminist philosophers such as Longino have argued that social or human values are usually part of human science contexts. They are these social or human values that are used to justify a scientific knowledge as objective (unbiased). Derivation of hypothesis and determination of relevant data to explain or proof it is usually dependent on human beliefs and assumptions (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2014). This view is also shared by Kathleen Okruhlik who notes that in a predominantly male chauvinistic academic community, some of the findings will tend to be sexist. Some scientific accounts that require rationality would tend to lean on the prevailing gender ideologies (Okruhlik, 1994).
Longino indicates that for an epistemic community to have objective scientific accounts, it has to have avenues for criticism, shared standards, uptake of criticism and equality of intellectual authority (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2014). Some philosophers have posited that true, or natural science does not deal with values, but facts only. However, this can only be true if the science is a truly empirical, that is, it has no rationality. These philosophers, as well as Longino and Okruhlik, have to acknowledge that there are both epistemic values and social values in scientific enquiries. Epistemic values regulate how a scientific research problem is chosen, evidences are gathered according to the problem, the hypothesis is accepted or rejected and scientific evidences are extrapolated. Contextual or social values have to be incorporated for the research to be ethical. However, there are cases where cultural value-free scenarios can be achieved. In this regard, the researcher would have minimized all aspects of cultural values that can interfere with true science epistemic principles, as noted above. For instance, in a laboratory experiment that does not involve humans, one can produce physics results that are reliable, accurate, testable, precise, simple and guaranteeing generality of concept and heuristic power. Since values usually ensure status-quos, value-less science also has to result in value novelty or new discoveries that can enable one to win Nobel Prizes and so forth (Allchin, 2016).
References
Allchin, D. (2016). Values in science: an introduction. Retrieved on 24 March 2016 from
https://www1.umn.edu/ships/ethics/values.htm
Okruhlik, K. (1994).Gender and the Biological Sciences. Canadian Journal of Philosophy,
24(sup1):21-42.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2014). Scientific objectivity. Retrieved on 24 March
2016 from http://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=scientific-objectivity
