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The phenomenon of interactive human kinds, namely kinds of people that undergo change in reaction to being studied or theorised about, matters not only for the reliability of scientific claims, but also for its wider, sometimes harmful effects at the group or societal level, such as contributing to negative stigmas or reinforcing existing inequalities. This paper focuses on the latter aspect of interactivity and argues that scientists studying interactive human kinds are responsible for foreseeing harmful effects of their research and (...) for devising ways of mitigating them. (shrink) | |
Performativity refers to the phenomenon that scientific conceptualisations can sometimes change their target systems or referents. A widely held view in the literature is that scientists ought not to deliberately deploy performative models or theories with the aim of eliciting desirable changes in their target systems. This paper has three aims. First, I cast and defend this received view as a worry about autonomy-infringing paternalism and, to that end, develop a taxonomy of the harms it can impose. Second, I consider (...) various approaches to this worry within the extant literature and argue that these offer only unsatisfactory responses. Third, I propose two positive claims. Manipulation of target systems is (a) not inherently paternalist and can be unproblematic, and is (b) sometimes paternalist, but whenever such paternalism is inescapable, it has got to be justifiable. I generalise an example of modelling international climate change coordination to develop this point. (shrink) | |
Most social policies cannot be defended without making inductive inferences. For example, consider certain arguments for racial profiling and affirmative action, respectively. They begin with statistics about crime or socioeconomic indicators. Next, there is an inductive step in which the statistic is projected from the past to the future. Finally, there is a normative step in which a policy is proposed as a response in the service of some goal—for example, to reduce crime or to correct socioeconomic imbalances. In comparison (...) to the normative step, the inductive step of a policy defense may seem trivial. We argue that this is not so. Satisfying the demands of the inductive step is difficult, and doing so has important but underappreciated implications for the normative step. In this paper, we provide an account of induction in social contexts and explore its implications for policy. Our account helps to explain which normative principles we ought to accept, and as a result it can explain why it is acceptable to make inferences involving race in some contexts (e.g., in defense of affirmative action) but not in others (e.g., in defense of racial profiling). (shrink) | |
Performativity of science refers to the phenomenon that the dissemination of scientific conceptualisations can sometimes affect their target systems or referents. A widely held view in the literature is that scientists ought not to deliberately deploy performative models or theories with the aim of eliciting desirable changes in their target systems. This paper has three aims. First, I cast and defend this received view as a worry about autonomy-infringing paternalism and, to that end, develop a taxonomy of the harms it (...) can impose. Second, I consider various approaches to this worry within the extant literature and argue that these offer only unsatisfactory responses. Third, I propose two positive claims. Manipulation of target systems is (a) not inherently paternalist and can be unproblematic, and is (b) sometimes paternalist, but whenever such paternalism is inescapable, it has got to be justifiable. I generalise an example of modelling international climate change coordination to develop this point. (shrink) |
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