ABSTRACT
Philosophers are paying increasing attention to the role that the values of the public can and should play in science. In particular, there is debate about the extent to which democratic values should inform scientific value judgments. This debate raises the question: What are the capabilities and limits of social scientific techniques for identifying democratic values in the first place? I evaluate a variety of social scientific techniques, discuss their strengths and weaknesses with respect to the project of identifying democratic values, and argue that there is a tradeoff between data that represent the public's values and data that can meaningfully constrain scientific value judgments. This complicates the idea that appealing to democratic values can legitimize scientific conclusions, because typical conceptions of legitimacy involve both representativeness and constraint.
Readers may be interested in these Handbook chapters as well: Inmaculada de Melo-Martín, “FDA Evidentiary Standards and the Need to Attend to Stakeholders' Values”; S. Andrew Schroeder, “Scientific Knowledge as a Public Resource: Arguments and Challenges for a Democratic Approach to Values in Science”.
