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Published on: September 28, 2018
Science, truth and dictatorship: Wishful thinking or wishful speaking?
1Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge, CB2 3RH, UK.
Abstract:
This paper argues for a novel way of addressing questions about the relationship between politics and science: in terms of norms of communication, rather than norms of cognition. The first half of the paper motivates this general shift through close study of the concept of "wishful speaking"; arguing that this vice - rather than the more familiar "wishful thinking" - better captures real-life cases, such as the Lysenko affair. The second half builds on the ethics of communication to develop an account of the proper role of non-epistemic values in justification in terms of "value-aptness".
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