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How to Assess the Epistemic Wrongness of Sponsorship Bias? The Case of Manufactured Certainty

Although the impact of so-called “sponsorship bias” has been the subject of increased attention in the philosophy of science, what exactly constitutes its epistemic wrongness is still debated. In this paper, I will argue that neither evidential accounts nor social–epistemological accounts can fully...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Leefmann, Jon
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8131867/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34027299
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frma.2021.599909
Descripción
Sumario:Although the impact of so-called “sponsorship bias” has been the subject of increased attention in the philosophy of science, what exactly constitutes its epistemic wrongness is still debated. In this paper, I will argue that neither evidential accounts nor social–epistemological accounts can fully account for the epistemic wrongness of sponsorship bias, but there are good reasons to prefer social–epistemological to evidential accounts. I will defend this claim by examining how both accounts deal with a paradigm case from medical epistemology, recently discussed in a paper by Bennett Holman. I will argue that evidential accounts cannot adequately capture cases of sponsorship bias that involve the manufacturing of certainty because of their neutrality with respect to the role of non-epistemic values in scientific practice. If my argument holds, it further highlights the importance of integrating social and ethical concerns into epistemological analysis, especially in applied contexts. One can only properly grasp sponsorship bias as an epistemological problem if one resists the methodological tendency to analyze social, ethical, and epistemological issues in isolation from each other.