ABSTRACT
How should democracies engage with complex engineering and science decisions? Many philosophers have advocated for a more just and fruitful connection between science, engineering and society. Philosopher Philip Kitcher (2001) created a conceptual model—well-ordered science (WOS)—for how science and engineering should decide on their goals. However, while several models of the relationship between engineering and democracy exist, very few have successfully utilized these models in practice, leaving the practical connection between science and engineering unchanged. Indeed, Kitcher argues that we do not have sufficient social science techniques to enable democracy to guide engineering and science. One key challenge is how to understand what everyday citizens would want science to achieve if they were sufficiently informed, in an unbiased way, for their views to become salient in decision-making contexts for engineers and scientists.
