Science and Democracy

In the dispute between presentism and eternalism, the affective dimensions of the debate have been somewhat neglected. Contemporary philosophers of time have not tried to relate these ontological positions with two of the most discussed maxims in the history of ethics – “live in the present” vs. “look at your life under the aspect of the eternity” (sub specie aeternitatis)”– that since the Hellenistic times have been regarded as strictly connected with them. Consequently, I raise the question whether the endorsement of one of these two ontological views can make a practical difference in the way we should live.

Epistemic division of labor pervades modern democracies, and we both do and should rely upon expertise in making decisions.  But how can reliance on expertise be squared with the need for democratic representation and accountability?  Building on the account of values in science from the first talk, this talk will articulate how we can in practice hold experts accountable in democratic contexts while protecting the integrity of science.  How to assess expertise is central to this challenge, as are institutional forms for structuring expert advice in governance.

Recent statements of the responsibilities of scientists have strengthened the responsibilities of scientists towards the societies in which they pursue their research. Scientists are now expected to do more than treat their experimental subjects ethically and communicate their results. They are also expected to benefit humanity. In a shift from the predominant views of the second half of the 20th century, social responsibility is now yoked to the freedom to pursue scientific research, rather than opposed to such freedom. First I will describe this change and some of its causes. Then I will address the fact that much of our institutional research oversight infrastructure was put in place with a now-outdated understanding of the societal responsibilities and freedoms of scientists. Finally, I will make some recommendations on how to shift the structures we have to be more in tune with the current conceptualization of scientific freedom and social responsibility.

In today’s world, open science and open government matter. When combined, many agree, they strengthen science and democracy. Yet opening up – whether in the name of open science, open data, open source or open government – is rarely straightforward. This essay explores the curious alliances, novel tensions and surprising paradoxes that contemporary practices of openness entail. It dwells on two controversies in particular: Climategate and The Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment Act of 2017. These examples show that the grounds on which expertise and science for government work are shifting; and how difficult it can be to defend established scientific practices, which are increasingly cast as secretive, suspect and morally untenable. While pundits routinely take both examples as evidence of a populist, right-wing assault on science, the essay suggests that the recent push for openness and transparency itself contributes substantially to the challenges science for government faces. Familiar stories about a post-truth, anti-science Right that operates in the shadows, and a truthful, pro-science Left that does not, have limited explanatory value. Ultimately the essay aims to expand our thinking on the knotty entanglements of science and liberal democratic governance in the twenty-first century.

Values and Objectivity: A Discussion Following Longino Question of the role played by values in science and their effects on objectivity of scientific knowledge has been at the focus of heated and unresolved debates for decades. While these debates were not wholly unfruitful, accounts purported to be answers to this puzzling problem were inadequate. Following Longino's conception of science as social practice, I will argue their inadequacy is the result of their misconceptions of values and of objectivity in sciences. Although Longino herself argues against these views convincingly, my point of introducing them is to start the discussion from the very beginning, from the start of the modern science and Newton's four rule of reasoning in natural sciences. Although values can come into play in various stages of scientific reasoning, in this paper I will only focus on the evidential relation between data and the hypotheses and analyze how values enter into scientific reasoning. 1 On the basis of that analyses, I will suggest an alternative view regarding objectivity and justification. In that analyses it will be clear that neither self-evident nor logically true assumptions about the structure of the domain under investigation must be made in order to inquire a phenomenon. These non-self-evident assumptions are ineliminable, for they are what structure the states of affairs and relevance of them to hypotheses purported to be explanations of that states of affairs. But before that discussion I will briefly discuss the positivist and the historicist approaches to evidential relations, and in comparing those account to Newton's rules for natural philosophy and to neuroscientific studies on female intelligence, I will try to show their inadequacy and the role of background assumptions. In the light of these discussion, I will support Longino's view of science as a social practice governed by objectively agreed upon assumptions and 1 Nagel distinguishes 4 ways of values having effect on production of scientific knowledge; "(1) the selection of problems, (2) the determination of the contents of conclusions, (3) the identification of fact, and (4) the assessment of evidence" (Douglas 57). We are here only dealing with the second one.

Historians of pragmatism have long overlooked Kenneth Burke and Richard McKeon.This has not been without good reason. At first glance, the two read more like critics than adherents of the tradition. Yet placing Burke and McKeon’s writings from the 1920s to the late 1950s in the context of their development reveals a shared project aimed at reforming pragmatism. While pragmatists such as John Dewey and Sidney Hook alleged a conceptual fidelity between the scientific method and democratic processes such as public debate, Burke and McKeon questioned this link. Metaphors drawn from science, they believed, blinded pragmatists to the nature of communication.Due to this oversight, pragmatists ignored the ideological ambiguity that surrounded terms like “science” and “democracy” during the mid-twentieth century. Burke and McKeon sought to fix this omission. Pragmatists, they argued, needed to trade the language of science for a terminology drawn from a source more attuned to the power of communication: the arts. By advancing this case, Burke and McKeon crafted an aesthetic form of pragmatism—a variant of the philosophy that, ultimately, contemporaries would barely recognize as such.

The goal of this paper is to provide an interpretation of Feyerabend’s metaphysics of science as found in late works like Conquest of Abundance and Tyranny of Science. Feyerabend’s late metaphysics consists of an attempt to criticize and provide a systematic alternative to traditional scientific realism, a package of views he sometimes referred to as “scientific materialism.” Scientific materialism is objectionable not only on metaphysical grounds, nor because it provides a poor ground for understanding science, but because it implies problematic claims about the epistemic and cultural authority of science, claims incompatible with situating science properly in democratic societies. I show how Feyerabend’s metaphysical view, which I call “the abundant world” or “abundant realism,” constitute a sophisticated and challenging form of ontological pluralism that makes interesting connections with contemporary philosophy of science and issues of the political and policy role of science in a democratic society.

Call for Papers
In the midst of chaotic uncertainty, alarms, skepticism and mistrust, we are observing the assertion of the ethical superiority of public health, common good and the collective interest.  In some way, we are witnessing the essential role of science, technology, rational management policies and effects control which are all accompanied by a new governance that alternates or reinforces lockdowns, mask mandates, movement limitations, real-time location tracking, and vaccine mandates.
In contrast, others see unprecedented restrictions on freedom – enabled by new technological tools. Rejection of such limitations and biopower-control lies in a more or less supported criticism against institutional policies, scientific practices (including data collection) and their practical applications, and media risk production. These critics have no specific geography but are certainly arising in opulent Western countries and cannot always be dismissed as merely populist.
The Pandemic has revealed the limits of self centered disciplines, in both natural and social sciences. Current global challenges now, more than ever, require a cross-disciplinary joint effort to measure, interpret, explain, and address planetary crisis – i.e. climate change, pandemic, global inequalities. This conference aims to bridge over incomplete analysis and misunderstandings about the pandemic and its causes, governance, and effects. By positing a new inclusive argumentative dimension that we shall rename “Sociology of Pandemic”, we are willing to incorporate different scientific analysis and approaches – quantitative as well as qualitative, technical as well as humanitarian. By using own appropriate methods and concepts, we look for contributions that source their data on diverse disciplines, from biology to political science, from environmental studies to philosophy, from statistics to media studies, from medical studies to sociology etc. 
Cross-disciplinarity being one of the scopes of this conference, priority will be given to contributions that will bring original, specialized, and accurate analysis in an accessible way for a larger public of academics and students of different disciplines.
The conference will be organized in 4 sections. Each Panel will include a chair and four speakers selected through the call.
For consideration, we invite you to send a long abstract (between 500 and 800 words) to smaddanu@usf.edu or e.toscano@unimarconi.it by May 31st 2022. The email must contain a statement of interest in participating in, at least, one specific panel. Best papers might be considered for a collective publication.

Panel I: Measuring the Pandemic in a Globalized World
Chair: Elizabeth Dobbins (Samford University)

Panel II: Pandemic and Inequalities
Chair: Simone Maddanu (University of South Florida)

Panel III: Pandemic, Science, Populism and Democracy
Chair: Emanuele Toscano (Telematica Marconi, Rome)

Panel IV: Social Movements in the Shadow of Pandemic
Chair: Breno Bringel (State University of Rio de Janeiro)

We focus this paper on the conditions to build reliable science, technology and higher education systems in Latin America, based on international comparative studies, fieldwork and interviews conducted over the last three years. The analysis shows that science can have a major role in furthering the democratization of society through public policies that foster opportunities to access knowledge and the advanced training of human resources. Broadening the social basis for higher education promotes the qualification of the labour force and contributes decisively to social and economic development.
The need to guarantee higher education diversity, strengthening scientific institutions and investing in a strong science base, is deemed as critical, but goes far beyond policies centred on innovation and industry-science relationships. It requires adequate training and attraction of skilled people, as well as promoting scientific and technological culture among society.

The Covid-19 outbreak in late fall of 2019 ruthlessly exposed quite a few key fractures in many societies around the globe. In Germany, too, the numerous government measures and their critical reception in society can be interpreted as a time of crisis in which a fault line solidified between a supposedly rational majority and a supposedly irrational minority. As with other issues before (such as the ongoing controversies over bias in the ‘mainstream’ media, populism, migration), German society appears deeply divided into two opposing factions. The respective mutual accusations are: uncritical state-believing adoption of the mainstream-diffused elite-narratives, by means of which the ‘gullible population’ can be controlled, versus deludedly falling for demagogues while being blinded by conspiracy theories. Both sides claim to be the real pillars of true democracy, whereby the other would betray democratic principles and, above all, fundamental rights. Even if such a confrontation may be simplified, it can be observed that in the major newspapers and on public broadcasting, opponents of political measures like the so-called lockdown and alternative media are un-differentially placed into a corner as “contrarians”, “covidiots” or “conspiracy mystics”, without seriously addressing their arguments; and that, conversely, in alternative formats, all reporting by the supposed mainstream media is declared to be inauthentic and interest-driven control strategy. It became obvious that the fundamental foundations of democracy and of basic civil rights in Germany are now disputed terrain over which the factions are hardly able to agree. This text shows to what extent the discussions concerning the Covid-19 pandemic and the measures to contain it joined already existing lines of conflict within German society and in what way these divisions hardened during a time of crisis, so that a common and communal basic understanding concerning the foundations of democracy and the legitimate claim to basic rights seems impossible to realise. The focus in this text is on evaluating the various understandings of reason, freedom, and science in selected ‘mainstream’ media outlets in respect to the government measures designed to contain the pandemic.

The 'Science Wars' of the 1990s, whose central moment was the Sokal hoax, was understood to be 'political', but it was never quite clear what the political issue was. Two recent books, James Robert Brown's Who Rules in Science? (2001) and Phillip Kitcher's Science, Truth, and Democracy (2001), attempt in different ways to reflect on and extend the discussion from a 'Left' perspective. Brown argues Sokal's case from a perspective of philosophical rationalism and anti-naturalism. Kitcher's argument is that the aim of science is significant truth, and significance is a valuative notion. Explanation is relative to interests or values. But this does not mean that truth does not matter, or that the world has no influence on what we believe – the two considerations, significance and truth, interact and co-evolve. If this is true, how science is governed, and particularly what is studied, make a difference. A well-ordered science would be one in which decisions about what is studied would be both wise and democratic. Pure democracy would undermine wisdom, so a novel relation is needed, in which the preferences of voters would be tutored and a family-like dialogue would allow optimal choices to be made. Both discussions point to a genuine political dilemma over science and democracy, related to the dilemma faced by the Old Left, which hoped that science, through 'Planning', would seamlessly integrate itself into the social good in solidarity with the proletariat. Kitcher grasps that the forms of Liberal Democracy are not up to the task of dealing with science – and thus places himself at the opposite pole from thinkers like Habermas, who think that the Left must expand Public Reason. So the issue is 'Who rules?' and whether the proper role of science in society is one that effectively precludes 'democratic control.'

abstract: The connection between science and democracy can be read along two different lines. The first claims that they share some basic assumptions about rationality. The second rejects the neutrality of science and claims that democratic deliberations aims at establishing moral truths. I argue that, while the first line of thought is sound, the second is problematic.

Kitcher has proposed an ideal-theory account-well-ordered science (WOS)-of the collective good that science's research agenda should promote. Against criticism regarding WOS's action-guidance, Kitcher has advised critics not to confuse substantive ideals and the ways to arrive at them, and he has defended WOS as a necessary and useful ideal for science policy. I provide a distinction between two types of ideal-theories that helps clarifying WOS's elusive nature. I use this distinction to argue that the action-guidance problem that WOS faces remains even under the aims/means distinction, because the WOS's failure is more basic than critics have suggested.

Traduction de textes classiques et contemporains du pragmatisme, introduits par Roberto Frega : John Dewey, Janes Addams, George H. Mead, Sidney Hook, Richard J. Bernstein, John Ryder, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Paul C. Taylor, Patricial Hill Collins, Elizabeth Anderson, Charles Sabel.

Cette sélection permet d'apprécier les contributions du pragmatisme aux problématiques sociales et politiques du vingtième siècle et sa relation au marxisme, au libéralisme, au naturalisme, à l'expérimentalisme, aux race studies, aux cultural studies, aux gender studies, et aux questions d'intersectionnalité.

My introduction to this volume of essays on Cold War science (in the journal Social Studies of Science) outlines key interpretive issues that arise from the contested interactions between scientists and the nation state during that time period. I emphasize that growing controversy over science-state relations during the 1960s and in later years helped call into question foundational assumptions from an earlier era about the nature of science, specifically, the alleged apolitical, anti-ideological, and objective character of scientific inquiry.

Historians of pragmatism have long overlooked Kenneth Burke and Richard McKeon. This has not been without good reason. At first glance, the two read more like critics than adherents of the tradition. Yet placing Burke and McKeon's writings from the 1920s to the late 1950s in the context of their development reveals a shared project aimed at reforming pragmatism. While pragmatists such as John Dewey and Sidney Hook alleged a conceptual fidelity between the scientific method and democratic processes such as public debate, Burke and McKeon questioned this link. Metaphors drawn from science, they believed, blinded pragmatists to the nature of communication. Due to this oversight, pragmatists ignored the ideological ambiguity that surrounded terms like “science” and “democracy” during the mid-twentieth century. Burke and McKeon sought to fix this omission. Pragmatists, they argued, needed to trade the language of science for a terminology drawn from a source more attuned to the power...

What must laypersons understand about science to allow them to make sound decisions on science-related issues? Relying on recent developments in social epistemology, this paper argues that scientific education should have the goal not of bringing laypersons' understanding of science closer to that of expert insiders, but rather of cultivating the kind of competence characteristic of “competent outsiders” (Feinstein 2011). Moreover, it argues that philosophers of science have an important role to play in attempts to promote this kind of understanding, but that to successfully fulfill this role, they will have to approach central questions in the field differently.

In 1990, Chile transitioned to democracy after 17 years of military rule. The new democracy built the country’s first environmental institutions and began efforts to revitalize science, among them attempts to connect scientific expertise to public decision-making. Just over a decade into these efforts, conflicts over the environmental impacts of large industrial projects began to multiply. These environmental conflicts were often also credibility contests, where the authority of science to speak to public issues was contested. Two such conflicts, a gold mine called Pascua Lama and a hydroelectric project called HidroAyse ́n, enrolled several scientific teams, yet in each case the state made its final decision on each project autonomously from science. Though some scientists became central participants in each conflict, carving out for themselves access to needed resources that they used to practice ever-narrower forms of science, their credibility was called into question by many of their scientific colleagues. Chile’s scientific community fractured over how to define credible science. Divisive and decisive issues included the source of funding, ethics, access to resources, and being local. Although some scientists and non-scientists used boundary work to try to affirm the authority of science, no stable map of scientific credibility resulted from these efforts. Chile’s new democracy is more plural than its recent military dictatorship but still lacks adequate spaces in which to negotiate what counts as credible science. These experiences highlight the need to better understand how science fares through regime transitions and what it contributes to emerging democracies.

W.V.Quine and Philip Kitcher have both developed naturalistic approaches to the philosophy of science which are partially based on a skeptical view about the possibility of rational inquiry into certain questions of value. Nonetheless, both Quine and Kitcher do not wish to give up on the normative dimension of the philosophy of science. I argue that Kitcher's recent argument against the specification of the goal of science in terms of truth raises a problem for Quine's account of the normative dimensions of the discipline. However Kitcher's alternative suggestion, that the goal of science is to be specified in terms of an ideal democratic procedure, does not escape this problem, given Kitcher's own limited skepticism about rational inquiry into certain questions of value.

What should the goals of scientific inquiry be? What questions should scientists investigate, and how should our resources be distributed between different lines of investigation? Philip Kitcher has suggested that we should answer these questions by appealing to an ideal based on the consideration of hypothetical democratic deliberations under ideal circumstances. The paper argues that we have no reason to adopt this ideal. The paper examines both traditional arguments for democracy and Kitcher's own reasons for adopting this ideal, as presented in Kitcher (2001) and in Kitcher (2011b), and argues that none of these supports adoption of Kitcher's proposed ideal.

Die kritisch gemeinte Diagnose eines »postfaktischen Zeitalters« erinnert mit großem Pathos an »die« Wahrheit als notwendige Grundlage von Demokratie, ja von Politik überhaupt. Angesichts eines republikanischen US-Präsidenten, der strategisch »alternative Fakten« produziert, seine eigenen Widersprüchlichkeiten ignoriert und andere Meinungen als »fake news« denunziert, erklärt sich leicht, warum der Widerstand dagegen im Namen der Wahrheit erfolgt. Doch vergisst diese Kritik, wie problematisch die Berufung auf die eine Wahrheit von jeher war und noch immer ist.
In diesem Artikel begründe ich daher die Notwendigkeit von Vernunftkritik aus den Funktionen, die die Diagnose eines »postfaktischen Zeitalters« in den politischen, wissenschaftlichen und medialen Kämpfen der Gegenwart spielt. Vernunftkritik darf jedoch nicht den Ungeheuerlichkeiten das Wort zur reden, die den berechtigten Anlass zu dieser Diagnose bilden. Daher argumentier ich nicht nur für die Notwendigkeit der Vernunftkritik, sondern zeige auch, wie sie in den genannten Kämpfen emanzipatorisch wirken kann.

Vogelmann, Frieder (2019): Mit Unwahrheit kämpfen. Zur Aktualität von Vernunftkritik. In: WestEnd. Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 16 (2), 25–46.

STS studies in India have found their impetus and site in social movements rather than in the academe and science policy centres. Our official scientists were eloquent about our nuclear power and our need for greater investment in science. But it is the movements that have provided the great critiques of science. STS in an academic sense has been the case of a missing discipline that democracy in India urgently needs but cannot access.

¿Es posible ser ciudadanos en el sistema capitalista, donde no se conside-ran ciudades los suburbios y los espacios rurales? Aun siendo indulgentes con el término ciudadano y asumiendo que la ciudadanía no fuese exclu-yente, parece entonces que la intención de la pregunta es saber si los ciudadanos son capaces de apropiarse de la cultura (" espíritu " o " ideolo-gía ") de los científicos. Siguiendo la lógica racionalista deberíamos contes-tar que sí, y la prueba es que los científicos son ciudadanos y lo han hecho, es decir, se han apoderado del espíritu científico en sus deliberaciones públicas. Lo humano no puede ser excluyente en esto de las ideologías, pues se puede representar más de un rol que se complemente; hay científicos que, sin dejar de ser ciudadanos, también son creyentes de otras formas de conocimiento. Por ejemplo, Darwin era anglicano y Einstein creía en " un dios que se revela en la armonía de todo lo que existe ". Y bien sabemos que la ciencia no reconoce estas formas de conocimiento. Quedan otros términos de la pregunta con los cuales nos vemos obliga-dos a ser aún más considerados. Pareciera que el " compromiso con el conocimiento " , es de hecho, con el conocimiento científico, y el régimen de objetividad y atención a lo obvio indicarían que la subjetividad y lo no obvio son excluidos de la ecología de conocimientos. Otro término que levanta polémica es el de democracia, cuyo origen griego facilita que prevalezca la visión eurocentrista en sus apellidos. Así tenemos un espectro que va desde la democracia representativa y liberal (burguesa) hasta la democracia protagonista (popular). La democracia es un término ambiguo, utilizado muchas veces para señalar como antide-mocrático al enemigo. Cabe entonces preguntarse: ¿es la ciencia antide

We focus this paper on the conditions to build reliable science, technology and higher education systems in Latin America, based on international comparative studies, fieldwork and interviews conducted over the last three years. The analysis shows that science can have a major role in furthering the democratization of society through public policies that foster opportunities to access knowledge and the advanced training of human resources. Broadening the social basis for higher education promotes the qualification of the labour force and contributes decisively to social and economic development. The need to guarantee higher education diversity, strengthening scientific institutions and investing in a strong science base, is deemed as critical, but goes far beyond policies centred on innovation and industry-science relationships. It requires

The question of the democratisation of the scientific space is a complex topic which goes beyond instrumental, normative and substantive arguments justifying civic participation, to include feminist, epistemological and sociological critical theory on the construction of knowledge, ignorance and agency. An exploration across different disciplines and contexts suggests that these different fields share a culture which increasingly employs the metaphor of socially embedded autonomy. Democratisation emerges as multi-directional and multi-functional, whether in the reflection by the scientific community on the social conventions of the scientific space to strengthen their objective autonomy and withstand the manufacture of ignorance around invested interests; or in research design where interdisciplinary approaches around transdisciplinary themes such as gender and climate change in corporate citizen participation in the research process, benefitting from local knowledge about particular contexts.

On many science-related policy questions, the public is unable to make informed decisions, because of its inability to make use of knowledge and information obtained by scientists. Philip Kitcher and James Fishkin have both suggested therefore that on certain science-related issues, public policy should not be decided upon by actual democratic vote, but should instead conform to the public's Counterfactual Informed Democratic Decision (CIDD). Indeed, this suggestion underlies Kitcher's specification of an ideal of a well-ordered science. The paper argues that this suggestion misconstrues the normative significance of CIDDs. At most, CIDDs might have epistemic significance, but no authority or legitimizing force.

Contents:

Where the Epistemic and the Political Meet: An Introduction to the Social Sciences and Democracy; J.Van Bouwel

PART I: DEMOCRATIZING THE SOCIAL SCIENCES: BALANCING EXPERTISE AND DIALOGUE
Social Sciences and the Democratic Ideal: From Technocracy to Dialogue; P.Baert, H.Mateus Jerónimo& A.Shipman
Stakeholders or Experts? On the Ambiguous Implications of Public Participation in Science; S.Solomon
Scientific Knowledge: A Stakeholder Theory; K.Rolin

PART II: THE SOCIAL SCIENCES IMPROVING DEMOCRATIC THEORY AND PRACTICE
Improving Democratic Practice: Practical Social Science and Normative Ideals; J.Bohman
Fact and Value in Democratic Theory; H.Kincaid

PART III: DEMOCRATIC THEORY ELUCIDATING SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC THEORY AND PRACTICE
The Problem With(Out) Consensus: The Scientific Consensus, Deliberative Democracy and Agonistic Pluralism; J.Van Bouwel
Joint Commitment, Coercion and Freedom in Science - Conceptual Analysis and Case Studies; A.Bouvier

PART IV: THE DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
Public Sociology and Democratic Theory; S.P.Turner
Varieties of Democracy in Science Policy; E.Weber
Some Economists Rush to Rescue Science From Politics, Only to Discover in Their Haste, They Went to the Wrong Address; P.Mirowski

PART V: (FUTURE) OBSTACLES TO THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND DEMOCRACY
Fuller and Mirowski on the Commercialization of Scientific Knowledge; F.Remedios
Humanity: The Always Already – or Never to be – Object of the Social Sciences?; S.Fuller

Index

Making public policy choices (especially on health issues) based on available scientific evidence is an ideal condition for any policy making. However, the mechanisms governing these scenarios are complex, non-linear, and, alongside the medical-health and epidemiological issues, involve socio-economic, political, communicative, informational, ethical and epistemological aspects. In this article we analyze the role of scientific evidence when implementing political decisions that strictly depend on it, as in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic. In carrying out this analysis, we will focus above all on the Italian case. This, on the one hand, precisely because Italy led the way (among European countries) regarding the containment policies of the pandemic. Secondly, the government's action was immediately criticized in various respects (specifically, by a publication on the Harvard Business Review, but later on also by various political figures and experts of various research fields). Some were calling into question not only the cumbersome political mechanisms, but also suggesting a scarce ability to take scientific evidence into account. On other fronts, there are those who have criticized Italy for its blind and uncritical faith in science and for the paternalism of its decisions. This debate therefore offers the possibility of dealing with some aspects concerning scientific results and their implementation at the political level from the point of view of a political philosophy of science, roughly in the spirit suggested by John Dupré (2016).

We are grateful to Alan Irwin for his constructive response Agreeing to Differ? to our paper and, notwithstanding differences between his view and ours, we agree with many of his comments. In this short rejoinder, we zoom in on the three main issues Irwin raises. We also use this opportunity to highlight and further develop some of our ideas.