Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Physics has long been regarded as a paradigmatic example of a value-free scientific discipline. Although philosophers of science have come to accept the possibility that other scientific disciplines may be laden with moral and political values, indeed, physics has typically been seen as an exception that remain untainted by these kinds of considerations. In this talk, I challenge this picture of science and investigate the ways in which even the most abstract theories of contemporary physics may be laden with moral and political values. My strategy is as follows. I first use a case-study from the early history of particle physics to show that scientific theories are laden with what Thomas Kuhn called “epistemic” or “theoretical” values. After that, I argue that the values at play in my case-study are similar in nature to moral and political values, and that this lends plausibility to the claim that physics is laden with moral and political values as well. I conclude with a few suggestions as to how to further investigate this claim by drawing from other case-studies and from the work of various authors in the literature on science and values.