Scientific American: Awareness of our biases
UC faculty member Angela Potochnik says values have always influenced research
“Ideological awareness is thus essential to our understanding of science,” writes University of Cincinnati faculty member Angela Potochnik, PhD, in an opinion article published in the editorial section of the Scientific American.
Her impetus to write the article, she says, came as a rebuttal to an opinion piece by Lawrence Krauss claiming that science has been corrupted by current concern for racism and sexism and that the humanities are complicit in the corruption.
“We need philosophers to help lay bare and analyze how values shape science; we need historians to reveal science’s broader societal context, says Potochnik, professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Public Engagement with Science at UC. The Center for Public Engagement with Science illustrates the value of the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration Potochnik describes, as it strives to innovate forms of science engagement by drawing on philosophy and other humanities, natural and social sciences, and science education to the benefit of all stakeholders.
Potochnik’s research addresses the nature of science and its successes, the relationships between science and the public, and methods in population biology. She is the author of Idealization and the Aims of Science (2017) and coauthor of Recipes for Science (2018), an introduction to scientific methods and reasoning. She earned her PhD from Stanford University in 2007.
Featured image at top: Getty Images/Japardize
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