Underdetermination and Overconfidence: Constructivism, Design Thinking and the Ethics Politics of Research

Abstract

‘Ethics on the laboratory floor’ is, at the same time, the triumph and reductio ad absurdum of constructivist accounts of scientific practice with their implied decisionism, if not voluntarism. It is the triumph of constructivism, as its insights are no longer thought to undermine science and its quest for reality or truth. Having exposed the myth that science follows for the most part, a collectively binding logic of research as envisaged by Karl Popper, as well as Thomas Kuhn, we now fully appreciate that scientists make choices. And these choices may carry the signature of prejudice or ideology, private interest or aesthetic preference, ethics or politics. The ‘science wars’ that revolved around the apparent abandonment of an image of science that speaks truth to power (Sokal 1996) have given way to a ‘love fest’ that celebrates the openness of science, for example to ethical consideration (cf. Nordmann 2007; Nowotny et al. 2003). But here, the proximity of triumph and reductio ad absurdum comes in. On the one hand, we celebrate the possibility of ‘midstream modulation’ of scientific practice where social scientists and philosophers induce reflectiveness about the relative environmental merits of using this material or that in a laboratory experiment (Fisher and Mahajan 2006). On the other hand, we thereby perform a vanishing trick which is very welcome to science policymakers: by fostering the illusion that our scientific and technological future is an aggregate of decisions on the laboratory floor, one arrives at a policy landscape where responsible innovation means as much as making sure that researchers are prudent and that citizens are well prepared for what it is to come in the future.