Ahmad Elabbar, a PhD scholar at Cambridge College, is the winner of the 2023 Historical past and Philosophy of Science Essay Prize from the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IUHPST).
The biennial prize “seeks to encourage recent methodological pondering on the historical past and philosophy of science and associated areas.”
Mr. Elabbar gained the prize for his essay “The curatorial view of assessment and the ethics of scientific advice: Beyond decisional autonomy towards distributive epistemic justice“.
The judges write,
Elabbar’s considerate, well-argued, and evocative essay tackles the query of how values do and will inform the presentation of policy-relevant scientific information and judgments, utilizing the manufacturing of IPCC reviews as a case examine. It introduces an insightful analogy between museum curation and the form of data curation practices that happen within the manufacturing of those reviews. Elabbar describes how the choice, ordering, emphasis, and contextualisation of scientific information focused at coverage audiences is inherently value-laden, with the epistemic dangers related to every stage of the method illustrated by way of a comparability with the selections that information the show of museum objects.
Elabbar argues that methods for negotiating values in policy-relevant science explored within the literature all share a dedication to preserving the ‘decisional autonomy’ of policymakers—their potential to use their very own values to coverage selections knowledgeable by science—but they fail to protect such autonomy. He proposes that we as an alternative perceive scientific assessments of insurance policies and their ethics from the attitude of distributive epistemic justice. Scientists curating massive portions of policy-relevant information ought to intention to mitigate in opposition to asymmetries amongst stakeholders in entry and skill to control professional data.
Elabbar’s essay gives an attention-grabbing and novel method to the problem of values in science by extensively analyzing scientific literature along with work in sociology and museum research. We commend him for the depth of analysis and rigorous argumentative method that this essay achieves.
The prize consists of $1,000 and the invitation to current the paper on the upcoming assembly of the International Congress on Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology, happening this July in Buenos Aires.
The runner-up for the prize is Karoliina Pulkkinen, a postdoctoral researcher on the College of Helsinki for her essay “Beyond democratic legitimacy of value-judgments in science: a closer look at science in the early Soviet Union“. The judges write,
Pulkkinen’s formidable and novel essay asks how HPS students and scientists ought to search to professional the position of values in science, given the impossibility (and maybe undesirability) of eliminating them. Pulkkinen factors to a household of responses to this query that grounds legitimating mechanisms in democratic values and processes and asks what assets we’d develop for asking comparable questions in regards to the professional affect of values in non-democratic contexts. The paper attracts upon a historic case examine that tracks the shift from a cultural emphasis on pure science in Tsarist Russia to a state-cultivated emphasis on utilized science within the early Soviet Union. Pulkkinen notes a historiographical tendency to conceive of this shift as a top-down, and subsequently seemingly illegitimate, imposition of ideological values on science by the Soviet state. This essay goals to complicate that story, displaying how the evolving place of utilized science within the early Soviet Union owed not less than as a lot to the company and values of particular person scientists because it did to the heavy hand of Bolshevism. Pulkkinen proposes that historic strategies supply essential assets for understanding nondemocratic contexts, particularly when their modern analogues are comparatively opaque.
The judges for the competitors have been: Agnes Bolinska of the College of South Carolina (chair); Marlis Hinckley of Johns Hopkins College, Helen Longino of Stanford College, and Joseph Martin of Durham College.
You’ll be able to study extra in regards to the prize and the IUHPST here.
