Suchergebnisse

First published in 1896. ; Editor's preface signed: H. Sidgwick. ; Mode of access: Internet.

Citizens today are increasingly expected to be knowledgeable about and prepared to engage with biomedical knowledge. In this article, I wish to reframe this 'public understanding of science' project, and place fresh emphasis on public understandings of research: an engagement with the everyday laboratory practices of biomedicine and its associated ethics, rather than of specific scientific facts. This is not based on an assumption that non-scientists are 'ignorant' and are thus unable to 'appropriately' use or debate science; rather, it is underpinned by an empirically-grounded observation that some individuals may be unfamiliar with certain specificities of particular modes of research and ethical frameworks, and, as a consequence, have their autonomy compromised when invited to participate in biomedical investigations. Drawing on the perspectives of participants in my own sociological research on the social and ethical dimensions of neuroscience, I argue that public understandings of biomedical research and its ethics should be developed both at the community level and within the research moment itself, in order to enhance autonomy and promote more socially robust science. Public bioethics will have play a key role in such an endeavour, and indeed will contribute in important ways to the opening up of new spaces of symmetrical engagement between bioethicists, scientists, and wider publics – and hence to the democratisation of the bioethical enterprise.

Sociologists of science who portray their work as a challenge to the epistemology of science, including H. M. Collins (Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice, London: Sage Publications, 1985), are criticized. One reason is that they target hackneyed, positivist defenses of the unique position of scientific knowledge of the physical world, rather than tackling the more sophisticated formulations. The dispute cannot be resolved by empirical evidence drawn from studies of science or history. The aim of science is the acquisition of knowledge of the physical world, with experiment rather than mere observation as the source of significant scientific data. Sociologists' assertion that scientific debates are settled by social & political pressures rather than by experimental means is seen as an extreme position unsupported by case examples. Experimental outcomes are determined by the physical world itself. One branch of the sociology of science, constructivism, takes antirealism to the point that the physical world itself seems to be a social construction, & fails to distinguish between knowledge & the object of knowledge. The use of relativistic sociology of science to justify serious treatment of "creation science," for example, is raised as a possibility. A. Waters