What counts as objectively good evidence for a scientific claim or a policy prediction? Or rather, since ‘evidence’ is often seen to include only empirical findings, what counts as objectively good reasons? This has been one of the central research questions throughout CHESS history, one which we continue to address today. Descriptions of a lot of our past work can be found in the CHESS Working Paper (CWP) series.
Much of this research has focussed on better evidence for evidence-informed social policy, where we have addressed practical issues in a number of different policy domains, including
Given the current emphasis on RCTs (randomised controlled trials) in evidence-based policy, it should be no surprise that we have worked specifically on their uses and abuses in warranting policies (see Objectivity in Science and Law: A Shared Rescue Strategy).
There has also been a good deal of attention lately to how to ensure that the introduction of values into scientific endeavours – which many argue is unavoidable – can be done without undermining objectivity, to which we have contributed (see Modelling Objectively).
In addition we have worked on what more generally constitutes objectivity in scientific and science influenced endeavours, including issues of objectivity for social activist research (see Objectivity – What it is for, when we can have it and when we can’t) and on general questions surrounding what counts as good evidence in these areas (see Theory and Evidence in Economics).
Currently funded projects. Getting policy right involves being able to make sound predictions about what will happen if you act as planned in the specific setting and at the specific time you do act. These are predictions about what philosophers call ‘singular causation’. We have had a lot to say about this (see e.g., Causal processes – a social policy example). Currently the AHRC is funding further work on this topic by Nancy Cartwright, Eileen Munro and Brendan Kelters, using the successes and failures in properly implementing the widely mandated child protection programme Signs of Safety.
It barely needs stating that science has been a remarkably successful enterprise. Equally uncontroversial, however, is that science has also failed on numerous occasions. There are many different senses in which science may be said to have succeeded or failed, and many possible reasons for its successes and failures. Our aim in this project has been to examine the role of intellectual humility, and its corresponding vices of intellectual arrogance or hubris on the one hand and excessive doubt or diffidence on the other, in some of the successes and failures of science from the early modern period to the present.
The project has had two main focusses. One of these was on “big” metaphysical questions and the ability of science to answer them. Two metaphysical theses we have explored in depth are determinism and reductionism, respectively the claims that that all states of the universe are fully determined by its past states and that all phenomena are reducible to and derivable from the laws of physics. Both theses are widely assumed to be supported by science. Yet a closer look at science and its history reveals that neither thesis has ever been supported empirically. The claim, then, that science has answered these big questions is hubristic; it takes science to have established more than it in fact has. This, however, is not to say that science can never answer such questions, as we show in our research on chemistry’s success in answering questions about matter previously thought to be beyond the scope of empirical investigation.
The other focus of the project was on the application of science to practical matters such as industry, law, and public policy. In this part of the project, we looked at several case studies from the history of chemistry and chemical industry including potable water analysis and the development of nutritionally engineered foodstuffs and various synthetic products. We also conducted an in-depth analysis of the scientific advisory teams SAGE and Independent SAGE and their advice to the UK government and public during the COVID-19 pandemic. In several of these cases we found that a lack of intellectual humility on the part of scientists, both individually and collectively, has led to significant harms to humans, eco-systems, and the environment.
The project constitutes an important step towards filling two significant gaps in the literature on intellectual humility. Firstly, previous research has been conducted mainly by epistemologists and psychologists, the former focussing primarily on conceptual analysis and the latter on empirical investigation in controlled experiments. As a result, there has been little research on intellectual humility in real-world situations. By providing perspectives from history and philosophy of science and science and technology studies, disciplines that look essentially at intellectual activity in different social and cultural settings, the project has added some much-needed contextualisation, and this has augmented existing work on situational influences both on intellectual humility in particular and on intellectual virtues and vices more generally.
Secondly, existing work has conceptualised intellectual humility almost exclusively as a character trait or state embodied by individuals. Almost no attention has been given to intellectual humility as a collective virtue, and this is something we have provide by looking at intellectual humility at the level of scientific institutions and disciplines. An especially interesting finding here is that collective intellectual humility is fundamentally different from, and cannot be reduced to, the intellectual humility exhibited by individual members of a collective.
Ruth First was a leading light in the campaign against the South African apartheid regime. In 1963 she was imprisoned without charge and fled to London the following year, where she continued her anti-apartheid work. She took up a lecturer post in the Department of Sociology and Social Administration at Durham in 1973, teaching a new course on development studies and raising feminist issues. She was on leave from Durham working in Mozambique when she was assassinated by a letter bomb from Pretoria.
We are engaged in both a celebratory project and in two academic research projects.
Celebrating Ruth First: 2022 – 40 years on
Our activities to celebrate the 40th anniversary of First’s assassination were carried out jointly with the Ruth First Educational Trust and St Mary's and St Chad's colleges. These began with the unveiling of a restored mural commissioned by Durham City Parish Council and dedicated to Ruth First located on the outside of the Ruth First House on Providence Row in the City. This was followed by a memorial concert by the Soweto Gospel Choir in Durham Cathedral and the setup of a small exhibition intended to reach a wide audience at different locations around Durham. It is currently located at St Mary’s College.
First in the North
This project aims to discover more about First’s work in the north of England and her relationship with the City of Durham, the University and its history of activism against oppressive regimes, and to learn more about how her research and teaching affected – and was affected by – her political activities. The work has been sponsored by the European Research Council and Liverpool University under the direction of Philosophy, Politics and Economics lecturer Katherine Furman
Objectivity and Social activism: A Ruth First case study
Being committed to a cause that you are doing research for or about clearly raises many threats of bias. What are these threats and how can they be ameliorated? This project has been looking at Ruth First’s research as an exemplar. It is carried out with the CHESS project on Objectivity and Evidence and has been sponsored by the British Academy and the University of California at San Diego.
EURiCA is a 3yr Leverhulme-Trust-funded research project running 2021-24, where ‘EURiCA’ stands for ‘Exploring Uncertainty and Risk in Contemporary Astrobiology’. The teams consists of a balance of philosophers of science and scientists: Peter Vickers (PI, Durham), Sean McMahon (Co-I, Edinburgh), Martin Ward (Co-I, Durham), Chris Greenwell (Co-I, Durham), Ufuk Tasdan (Postdoc 2023-24), Cat Gillen (PhD student), Emma Gardiner (Project Administrator/Research Assistant), Chris Cowie (Collaborator, Durham), Cyrille Jeancolas (Postdoc 2021-23), and Nicola Craigs (Administrator 2021-23). Several publications (see here) on the theme of uncertainty and risk in astrobiology have now been published, in journals such as Philosophical Quarterly, Astrobiology, and Nature Astronomy. For example, in a team-authored paper entitled ‘Confidence of Life Detection: The Problem of Unconceived Alternatives’ we put forward a proposal for how space agencies such as NASA should express degree of confidence when a possible detection of extraterrestrial life is announced. In another paper, ‘Breakthrough Results in Astrobiology: Is High-Risk Research Needed?’ we analyse significant results in the field of astrobiology, and show that a large number of these results were born of so-called ‘high risk’ research projects, thus providing support for increased funding for such projects. We have also put forward a novel definition of the key term ‘biosignature’. The EURiCA project, together with CHESS, supports a seminar series entitled PIASS: Philosophical Issues in Astrobiology and Space Science, which has run for four years from 2021-24. Past and forthcoming talks are listed here, and many of our past talks can be viewed on our YouTube channel.
This pilot project (running 2022-23) sets out to determine the viability of an ‘Institute for Ascertaining Scientific Consensus’ (IASC)’. The concept scientific fact is linked to a solid, international scientific consensus, with the 2022 monograph Identifying Future-Proof Science serving as a major piece of underpinning research. So understood, ‘future-proof’ scientific facts (such as ‘We live in a spiral galaxy’) are to be identified primarily by measuring the strength of the scientific consensus, but also by investigating epistemic virtues and vices of the relevant community of experts. In a pre-pilot-study at Durham University (UK) during June 2022, a new method was tested out on 361 scientists, whereby one could, in principle, access the opinions of many tens of thousands of scientists, on any scientific question of interest, within a few days. Such a thing has never before been possible, and it could have major ramifications for anyone who might benefit from better understanding what is, and isn’t, an established ‘scientific fact’, including scientists themselves, policy makers, and the general public.
The physical sciences have traditionally been central objects of study for the history and philosophy of science, which has seen them as a source of paradigm cases of how empirical knowledge and understanding grow and change. CHESS is the centre of an interdisciplinary group of philosophers, historians and scientists who seek to continue that work, but with a different focus. Philosophers have tended to limit their attention to the most fundamental parts of physics such as relativity and quantum mechanics. We focus instead on non-fundamental physical sciences, and especially chemistry and condensed matter physics.
CHESS has a robust research community in the History and Philosophy of Medicine, including specialists in histories of psychiatry, medical ethics, histories of epidemic disease, postcolonial histories of medicine, global health, and history and philosophy of epidemiology. Professor Maehle's work on medical psychology and psychoanalysis in the 19th and early 20th centuries for a new book 'Freud's Berlin Rival: Albert Moll and his Psychology' examines the development of a key psychiatric practice and its contested scope and ethics; recent work by Professor Eddy and Dr Webster in the history of medicine in the British Empire has led to publications in the areas of medical technologies and information organization among black medical professionals (Eddy) and studies in the socio-ecology and epidemiology of infectious disease in port cities of the British Empire, spanning India, Australia, and Ireland (Webster). Dr Coreen McGuire specializes in disability history and histories of measurement in Medicine, and runs (alongside Professor Alex Broadbent) the Measurement Lab through the Institute for Medical Humanities.
The group also contains significant strengths in the philosophy of medicine and epidemiology, especially related to epidemic response and the practices of science-in-action. Dr Wieten specialises in epistemology and clinical ethics, alongside work in methods of epidemiology and economics, and has recently published on the causal assumptions of DAGs and evidence assessment in COVID-19 health policy impact evaluation. Dr Katherine Furman is a philosopher of health policy, and examines knowledge-creation and epistemologies of epidemic response, drawing on both historical and contemporary case studies; meanwhile Sam Colclough and Dr Deb Marber examine the scientific response to COVID-19 in the UK as a site for understanding how the production of scientific knowledge is politically mediated, with a particular focus on the ways and extent to which politics became embedded in the knowledge claims made by the UK scientific advisory community during the pandemic. Despite these wide-ranging interests, members of this research cluster share strong common interests in questions of methodology and epistemology, knowledge formation in medicine, and the translation of medical evidence to health policy and practice.
CHESS’s mission is to integrate work from the humanities and the social and natural sciences to understand better how to improve societies. In particular, to investigate what kinds of academic knowledge — 'science' in the German sense — can best inform policy and practice, what methods will produce this knowledge and how this knowledge should be put to use. Causal knowledge is clearly vital here. Past work at CHESS in this area has focussed on causal modelling and causal inference. Our current concern is with the use of knowledge to make better assessments of causal effects, especially the effects of social policies. How can you predict if a policy intervention will have its targeted effect in a particular case, or determine afterwards whether it has done so?
Our focus is on warrant for singular causal claims: claims that one thing was/will be the cause of another. Our project begins from the assumption that to provide evidence for something, you need a solid understanding of what that something is like. But, surprisingly, there is no well-developed account of singular causation available. So we are working to develop a rich well-grounded account of singular causation, identifying features useful for evidencing singular claims.
The current work is sponsored by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, with a grant to philosopher Nancy Cartwright (CHESS co-director, Durham) and child protection expert Eileen Munro (emeritus professor, LSE), with Dr Brendan Kelters working as postdoctoral research associate.
To aid in the collection and processing of evidence, we aim to provide user-friendly templates for what we call ‘evidence-role maps’: maps charting what role each piece of evidence plays in supporting an overall judgment. To assure that our account is sufficiently rich and detailed to constrain how to apply it practically we are developing our theoretical analysis with application to a case study, a child protection programme, Signs of Safety, with which Professor Munro has been involved as a researcher. We aim to construct evidence-role maps for the implementation of Signs of Safety that are of practical use to those designing implementation strategies in identifying and assessing evidence about whether or how it can be implemented successfully in a targeted context and what changes might be needed to increase the likelihood of success. This will serve as a test of our general template and an exemplar for other domains.
We are always keen to attract new PhD students. If you are interested in undertaking a PhD in any of our research areas, please contact the Centre Administrator at admin.chess@durham.ac.uk
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