A militant rationality: epistemic values, scientific ethos, and methodological pluralism in epidemiology

Abstract

can be considered as a search for a scientificethos. Its author, Nicolas Lechopier, is a professor at the Claude Bernard University ofLyon-1 (France), and formerly (2008–2009) a postdoctoral fellow at the University ofSao Paulo (Brazil) in the Thematic Project “Origins and significance of technoscience:on relations among science, technology and society”.Merton’s classic formulation of the scientific ethos as a set of norms, “univer-salism, communism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism (...), expressed inthe form of prescriptions, proscriptions, preferences and permissions” (Merton, 1973,p. 268-9) lies behind the author’s considerations on ethics and science. This ethos, a“habitat” where scientists share a common set of epistemic and ethical values and thesame goals for science, presupposes that a demarcation can be made between good andbad science, and it provides conditions for scientists to reach consensus in their judg-ments of the epistemic worth of certain hypotheses. The author’s own account of scien-tific ethos goes beyond Merton’s; it rejects the separation of epistemic and ethical values,and contextualizes any demarcation between good (authentic) and bad (pseudo-) science.