IISER MOHALI

Abstract:
Science and Society is a vast domain. The course content at IISER, Mohali, gives us a glimpse of that domain. In this essay, I focus on Science as a practice that produces knowledge. This way of presenting it is somewhat incomplete. After all scientific knowledge production has happened through millennia. And positing it as a practice opens it up to at least two kinds of scrutiny. First, in what way practice in science ensures knowledge. Second, the practice sometimes falters and the result is a failure to produce knowledge. Inquiry into this second aspect clarifies for us what is called as epistemic values that practices failed to abide by. I will briefly enumerate some examples of these values in the context of underdetermination and thereby inductive risk that accompanies any scientific practice. However, I narrow down my focus even more and explore one class of scientific practices that inform research in the pharmaceutical domain. It is in this domain that the interplay of values is particularly explicit. Two kinds of values epistemic and non-epistemic are explicitly appealed to work out a notion of ethically adequate scientific practice. I will suggest, without arguing, the prescriptive force of these values arise by indicating how these are tied to a somewhat more abstract ethical tenets we come across in Immanuel Kant’s writing.