Woody, AndreaLawson, Justin2023-01-212023-01-212023-01-212022Lawson_washington_0250E_25047.pdfhttp://hdl.handle.net/1773/49741Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2022In recent years a growing literature on science addresses the problem - some may even call it a crisis - of science’s public legitimacy (Douglas 2009, Oreskes and Conway 2010, de Melo-Martin and Intemann 2018). Analysts in this literature see in such media phenomena as climate change denial, vaccine hesitancy, and resistance to public health and environmental measures more generally a growing trend of public doubt over well-established, consensus generating scientific research. Each of these analyses has its own diagnosis of the problem and its own suggestions for the solution, which explicitly or otherwise usually includes a clarified understanding of the way science works and the way that it interacts with society and politics. The present dissertation seeks to add what seems to me a missing alternative among these accounts by focussing on just one of the common case studies in this literature - public response to climate change. I take as my point of departure the framework for discussing this set of issues offered in the values in science literature and exemplified by Heather Douglas’ (2009) account in Science, Policy and the Value-Free Ideal. That framework presupposes a distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic values and asks what role the non-epistemic values do or ought to play within science’s internal activity. The aim of the dissertation is to challenge an overlooked sister dichotomy to that between epistemic and non-epistemic values, namely that between social and political values. Challenging the dichotomy with respect to science means challenging the view of science as an autonomous, free social association whose proper function is to operate independently from political institutions and political interests. Challenging a clean separation between science and politics reveals a complex borderlands (to borrow a metaphor from Phyllis Rooney 2017) between the social and the political. The dissertation offers some tools for navigating these borderlands beginning with an old philosophical ideal coming from Karl Popper, coming out of the progressive era and the era of early experiments in Communism. That ideal, I argue, offered a social democratic view of the role for science in politics and a view of science as responsible to society through democratic institutions rather than a view of science as autonomous. Following another vein of thought from that era and from Popper, I conceive of infrastructures as politically organized social experiments which can be more or less scientific in character. These tools help me to address what I consider a problematic tendency in the literature on climate denial to claim that climate science became politicized in the late 20th century with industry-sponsored attempts to undermine the conclusions of the IPCC (e.g. Oreskes and Conway 2010). Such narratives overlook the fact that the data and monitoring network upon which the science depends were developed under the auspices of a political organization - the UN - beginning in the 1950s. Narratives such as Edwards (2006) which portray this as an era in which the network became an infrastructure and ceased to be a free association are more attuned to the complex entanglement of science and politics. The aim of the final chapter is to offer an alternative historiographic analysis which pays closer attention to the role of political institutions through funding, appointments and other government activity which provided the conditions for conducting scientific research on climate in the mid 20th century. I focus on the research team led by David Keeling for measuring and calibrating CO2. The tools developed in the dissertation allow me to make some normative points about the democratic legitimacy of the science-led effort to challenge the hegemony of fossil fuel energy infrastructure on the basis of its connection with climate change.application/pdfen-USnoneClimate changeInfrastructurePoliticalSocialValues in sciencePhilosophy of sciencePhilosophyScience historyPhilosophyThesis