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Can Governmental Support of Philosophy of Science Research be Justified?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Robert J. Baum
Robert J. Baum*
Affiliation:
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
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Extract

In recent years, for a variety of reasons, increasing numbers of philosophers of science have been looking to government agencies as potential sources of support for their research. While their main concern has been with specific matters such as the amount of money that is actually available from various agencies, for the kinds of work they want to do, it must be recognized that there are numerous theoretical questions that are necessarily associated with the pursuit of government funds, including the basic question raised in the title of this paper. Although these theoretical questions are important, and may even comprise part of the subject-matter area of philosophy of science: (for reasons to be specified in section 2), to the best of my knowledge they have not been discussed to date in any public documents.

Type
Part VIII. Funding, Research and Philosophy of Science
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1976 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1976 , 1976 , pp. 288 - 312
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

*

This paper was written during my tenure as Director of the National Science Foundation's Ethical & Human Value Implications of Science & Technology (EHVIST) Program, a position which I held from August 1974 to August 1976. Many of the ideas in this paper developed out of this experience, which included the coordination of the funding by a variety of federal agencies of research projects involving philosophers of science. However, the ideas expressed are entirely my own and none of the positions taken in this paper are necessarily those of the National Science Foundation. I should like to thank Rachelle Hollander, Fred Suppe and Stephen Toulmin for their encouragement and their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper.

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