Date:
Location:
“Imagining Responsibility, Imagining Responsibly: Reflecting on Our Shared Understandings of Science”
Attend this event via Zoom (advance registration required)
Speaker:
Matthew Sample, Senior Research Fellow, Program on Science, Technology and Society, Harvard University.
Contact:
Paul Sherman
paul_sherman@hks.harvard.edu
Co-sponsored by the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.
This event is online only. Please click the "Read More" link for full instructions on how to attend this seminar.
Chair:
Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.
Remote Access Information:
To join by computer:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSduDex5bm5Oa9lp6z30zBOKxcodi171rmBi-rF6BQH-h681LA/viewform
Please note: This event requires registration by noon on Friday, September 11 to receive the meeting link and password.
Abstract:
If we cannot define science using only conceptual analysis or empirical description, then sometimes we must rely on imagination to provide suitable objects of inquiry. As extensive work in STS shows, imaginaries frequently fill this role and provide a cognitive space between real world practice and conceptual abstraction, bridging social structure and creative human agency. I apply this insight to academic inquiry that is centered on science, contrasting recent philosophical theory by Heather Douglas with academic case studies in technoscience. While the philosophical debate on“values in science” presumes barriers that shield scientists from many moral obligations, scholars of technoscience show how responsibility can be diffused across a network of practice. In both instances, the imaginaries under consideration may prevent scientists from being held responsible. This consequential dynamic between mind and social order, I argue, has urgent methodological implications; it demands an ethics of imagination in which philosophers of science and other critics of science hold themselves accountable for their choice of idealization.
Speaker Bio:
Matthew Sample, PhD, is a philosopher of science and technology and Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard Program on Science, Technology, and Society. His research targets the intersection of technoscientific practice and ethico-political ideals, with recent projects on neural engineering and personhood, the political dimensions of neuroethics, pragmatism in AI ethics, and the moral considerability of multicellular engineered living systems. He is currently managing editor for the STS&Crisis project (crisis.stsprogram.org) and tweets @elevatorwords.
