The Instrumental Value of Scientific Knowledge and Understanding and the Rationale for Space Science

Author(s):  
James S.J. Schwartz

This chapter provides a defense of the instrumental value of scientific knowledge and understanding as well as a defense of the use of public funds in support of scientific research, including space science. It motivates a more sophisticated understanding of the “spinoff” justification for space exploration by drawing on research in philosophy of science which connects social progress to scientific progress, and scientific progress to scientific exploration. This establishes the instrumental value of scientific (including space) exploration. It then uses a framework derived from Mark Brown and David Guston to argue that democratic states have obligations to provide wide-ranging and substantial support for scientific research, including space research. Finally, it provides an overview of various space research projects, identifying the ways they contribute to democratic governance. It also contains a discussion of the crewed vs. robotic exploration debate.

Author(s):  
Ilkka Niiniluoto

Science is the systematic pursuit of new knowledge by using critical methods of inquiry. Scientists constitute a community of investigators jointly engaged in research to produce knowledge about nature, humanity, culture, and society. The notion of science may thus refer to a social institution, the researchers, the research process, the methods of inquiry, and scientific knowledge. Developments and changes in all of these aspects of science are studied by the history of science. Sociologists of science are especially interested in the professional status of the scientists and their academic institutions, the internal norms of the scientific community, forms of scientific communication, and the economics and funding systems of scientific research. Multidisciplinary science studies illuminate the interaction between science and society, especially the ways scientific advances have brought about social progress by improved technologies, economic prosperity, quality of life, and justice in society. Science education is concerned with the increased skill and expertise of the scientists. Methodology looks at the development of new methods and tools of research, such as the refinement of scientific instruments, techniques of experimentation, and statistical and computational methods. Philosophy of science analyzes science from a cognitive perspective as an attempt to improve and increase scientific knowledge. In particular, axiological studies discuss the aims of scientific inquiry. Logic and epistemology study the proper ways of scientific thinking, argumentation, and inference. The language of science and its relations to reality, observation, and theory; explanation and prediction; and patterns of scientific change belong to the main themes of general philosophy of science. Philosophical studies may also focus on key issues about special scientific disciplines, such as physics, biology, psychology, and economics. While the notion of scientific progress in the broad sense could cover improvements in all of these aspects of science, it is customary to restrict this title to advances of science in terms of its success in knowledge seeking. In this sense, scientific progress is a fundamental issue that has been actively debated within the philosophy of science since the 1960s. The task of philosophical analysis is to consider alternative answers to the conceptual or normative question: What is meant by improvement or progress in science? The definition of progress leads to the methodological question about indicators of progress: How can we recognize progressive developments in science? With these tools one can then study the factual question: To what extent and in which respects has science been progressive?


2021 ◽  
pp. 026377582110423
Author(s):  
Katherine G Sammler ◽  
Casey R Lynch

This paper examines two space science infrastructures in Hawai'i, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and the Hawai'i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS). It considers how scientific observation and colonial occupation are co-constituted through the production of apparatuses – extensive material practices and arrangements that iteratively produce subject–object relations. By analyzing TMT and HI-SEAS as apparatuses, we show how both involve the active ordering of space, time, and matter in ways that are dependent upon existing settler colonial relations while enacting specific subject positions key to the projection of settler colonialism across space and time. TMT materializes the Archimedean point, or view-from-nowhere, on which Western scientific “objectivity” depends, while HI-SEAS works to produce ideal colonizer-subjectivities and orient their bodies to the spatialities of the colony. Engaging Native Hawai’ian, Indigenous, and allied anti-colonial critiques, we argue that social science of outer space research must critically address the colony, as its basic logics are foundational to the practices of contemporary space science and imaginaries of space exploration.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-144
Author(s):  
Colin Milburn ◽  
Melissa Wills

Over the last decade, a variety of ‘citizen science’ projects have turned to video games and other tools of gamification to enrol participants and to encourage public engagement with scientific research questions. This article examines the significance of sf in the field of citizen science, focusing on projects such as Eyewire, Be a Martian!, Sea Hero Quest, Play to Cure: Genes in Space, Forgotten Island and the ‘Project Discovery’ experiments in EVE Online. The sf stories that frame these projects often allegorise the neoliberal assumptions and immaterial labour practices of citizen science, even while seeming to hide or disguise them. At the same time, the fictional frames enable players to imagine social and technical innovations that, while not necessarily achievable in the present, nevertheless point to a future of democratic science, social progress and responsible innovation - blips of utopian thought from the zones of crowdsourced labour.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-54
Author(s):  
Zoha Adel Mahmoud

institution is one of the highest institutions that have the task of providing the development needs of the community of specialists in various fields, in addition to being the centers of scientific research and applied to ensure economic and social progress It enriches decision makers with expertise and skills and thus controls political performance. In any society, the university can not play its full role in social change without interaction between the individual on the one hand and the social environment on the other, Social and interdependent Ah syndrome change, they strengthen the skills, and enrich the spirit of innovation of the individual, and raise the level of social progress. It helps to improve the conditions of the poor segments of the population and facilitates the employment opportunities of the individuals imposed by the society as they meet the needs of the individual and society of different professions, thus providing an opportunity for production and thus have a positive impact on the standard of living to achieve the well-being of the individual and the citizen. The interest reflected on the progress, such as Germany, which was interested in it became one of the main reasons that led to the rise of Germany from the ruins of the Second World War as well as the State of Malaysia, which moved from developing countries to the second world countries by changing the plan Colleges and institutes of universities. In 2020, Malaysia will be among the developed countries. In these countries, higher education, vocational training and training are viewed as a basis for life supplementation and are seen as a major means of improving and upgrading society. If we are to explore the dimensions of education in the 21st century, one of the pillars of education is learning for action, Usually involves the acquisition of skills and the linking of knowledge to practice as an essential part of the training and rehabilitation of the individual for practical life. Hence, such new trends in linking educational preparation to work have been imposed by the labor market and the working life in its new forms. Production and service facilities, The advanced, assumed graduates who can be employed and absorbed can contribute to the development of competitiveness, to provide innovations and creations to achieve the competitive advantage of the enterprise, and to improve production and productivity based primarily on the acquisition and application of knowledge. Gamerdinger reveals that the new technology does not accelerate the possibilities for sound economic policies and increasing global trade, and this requires strategies to develop work related to the development of human performance, and in order to face the state of chronic unemployment globally, education policies are headed towards the so-called reverse conversion as many graduates of specializations Literaries choose vocational and technical education in technical and community colleges. Unemployment in the Arab world carries certain characteristics that must be taken into account when developing the solutions available to them. The most important of these characteristics are: Unemployment is a youth phenomenon. Weak professional experience available to the unemployed. Lack of targeted planning for the labor market. The large gap between the outputs of higher education for youth and the requirements of the labor market. The most important recommendations aimed at enhancing the role of universities in Iraq are: 1 - the operation of labor graduates of technical and technical institutes in the industrial field in order to promote them and eliminate unemployment and increase the hard currency as an important category of Iraqi society, which contributes actively to the renaissance of the country. Linking the Ministry of Industry and Commerce with the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research to be managed by the Minister of Education alone. The Ministry is keen on the funds of the Iraqi people and contributes to the development of the industrial and commercial sectors with the help of professors and university students. 3 - the need to match the needs of the market and education outputs to reduce unemployment, in addition to the vocational education has become an urgent need at this stage to keep pace with the needs of life in society away from the negative view of this education. 4 - Increasing the number of technical workshops and providing them with the means of material in order to provide the university student maximum desired learning. Enhancing the role of higher education in building a broader partnership and cooperation with various other community institutions (public, private and private sector). 6 - Re-admission plan in universities by making the number of admissions in scientific colleges more than the number of admissions in the humanitarian colleges. 7 - Attracting foreign investment companies to invest natural resources in Iraq such as phosphate, natural gas, oil, oil shale, uranium, silica and geothermal energy for the recovery of the economy and the trend towards domestic consumption.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
pp. 420-425 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Shvaiba

Scientific knowledge of the historical future requires methodology. And methodology is the application of ideology in scientific research in General, and in research of social processes in particular. For example, religion is always an ideology. It is an illusory ideology. Illusory not because it cannot be as described by the religious ideal (that the ideal is unattainable). For Man, as for his creation — God — there is no unattainable and cannot be. Religion is illusory, not in the sense of an ideal, but in the sense that it cannot be and become in this way, through faith. Religion creates and strengthens (fixes) the ideal but proceeds from the fact that the ideal created by man is a creative force. But God is not power. It’s just a representation of human power. And what the person who created it expects from God is a human goal.


Author(s):  
Ilya T. Kasavina ◽  
◽  

In the philosophy of science and technology, scientific progress has been usually considered in a logical-methodological way, namely, from the point of view of the capacity to solve problems, the theoretical and empirical success of a certain theory or scientific research program. These are the concepts of K. Popper, I. Lakatos, and L. Laudan. They are opposed by historical and sociological ap­proaches to the development of science by T. Kuhn, S. Toulmin, and P. Feyer­abend. The article proposes a variant of the second approach – socio-epistemo­logical and, in particular, value interpretation of scientific progress shifting the focus of the discourse on scientific progress to the world-view and ideological circumstances of the development of science not only as knowledge, but as a form of culture and social institution. There is a polemic with the thesis by A.L. Nikiforov about the dominant pragmatic need for science and the primacy of its applied results, as ifthe modern achievement of which science has al­legedly fulfilled as well as the purpose prescribed to it by F. Bacon, and even ex­hausted its progressive potential. Criticism of the position by A.L. Nikiforov is based on an alternative view on science, which follows from a different interpre­tation of the New Times scientific revolution and the purpose of science in gen­eral. Scientific progress is seen in the creation by science of a new image of the world, new ways of communication, new moral guidelines, the design of new ways of social order. Such a science does not fit into the narrow, logical-method­ological criteria of scientific rationality. However, it is precisely this culture-forming, socio-cultural function of science that allows us to talk about science as an enterprise that contributes to social progress and, if progressive, it is precisely because of this circumstance.


Author(s):  
Peter van der Veer

This chapter discusses secularism as a political project with its own utopian elements. Secularism refers to the growing importance of scientific knowledge that is not constrained by religious authority. Religion is sometimes taken to be an obstacle for scientific progress and secularism demands its removal for the benefit of societal development that is guided by scientific discovery and technological innovation. Secularization was seen by sociologists as an intrinsic and inescapable part of the modernization of Western society, with the assumption that this was something all societies had to go through. An alternative to post-Weberian arguments in sociology about religion and secularity is offered by theories that emphasize individual, rational choice in religious markets.


Author(s):  
Sulan Wong

It is argued that patents encourage scientific development, benefiting society by creating useful products and services that improve the quality of life. However, by granting exclusive rights of exploitation, patents create situations in which they interfere with the exercise of the freedom of scientific research. This work examines five scenarios where this problem can be seen and the utilitarian function of patents is questioned. Firstly, the effects of research funding in the definition of the lines and research objectives are observed. Secondly, the anticommons is studied, as it is a situation where excessive fragmentation of ownership in scientific knowledge may prevent its use. Thirdly, broad patents and their implications are examined. Fourthly, the deterrent power of patent litigation, which creates an unexpected business model, is analyzed. Fifthly, secrecy is looked upon, as it is encouraged by the logic in which the patent system works.


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