This paper examines how science advice can provide policy recommendations in a trustworthy manner. Despite their major political importance, expert recommendations are understudied in the philosophy of science and social epistemology. Matthew Bennett has recently developed a notion of what he calls recommendation trust, according to which well-placed trust in experts’ policy recommendations requires that recommendations are aligned with the interests of the trust-giver. While interest alignment might be central to some cases of public trust, this paper (...) argues against the significance of interest-alignment to meritorious public trust. First, political bodies and citizens can have a basic kind of well-placed recommendation trust in science advice based on an all-things-considered judgement regarding the possession of relevant competencies, responsible conduct, and a proper institutional design. Moreover, scientists’ policy recommendations can be seen as open-ended and as dynamic proposals that enable inter-institutional reasoning and political deliberation. Finally, by providing conditional recommendations, scientists can expand the scope of feasible policy options from which political bodies can choose, thus making the condition of interest alignment even less significant to the trustworthy provision of recommendations. (shrink)

This paper examines the conditions of trustworthy science advice mechanisms, in which scientists have a mandated role to inform public policymaking. Based on the literature on epistemic trust and public trust in science, we argue that possession of relevant expertise, justified moral and political considerations, as well as proper institutional design are conditions for trustworthy science advice. In order to assess these conditions further, we explore the case of temporary advisory committees in Norway. These committees (...) exemplify a de facto trusted and seemingly well-functioning science advice mechanism. Still, this mechanism turns out to poorly realize some central conditions of trustworthy science advice. From this we draw three lessons. Firstly, it remains crucial to distinguish between well-placed and de facto trust. Secondly, some conditions of trustworthy science advice seem more significant than others and there are thresholds for realizing each condition. Thirdly, not only does the institutional design and organization of science advice matter more than often recognized; the trust and trustworthiness of the broader social and political context and institutional environment make a difference as well. (shrink)

What is the state of play for science advice to the government and Parliament? After almost ten years with a prime minister’s chief science advisor, are there lessons to be learnt? How can we continue to ensure that science advice is effective, balanced, transparent and rigorous, while at the same time balancing the need for discretion and confidentiality? In this article, we suggest that the hallmarks of good science – transparency and peer review – (...) can be balanced against the need to provide confidential advice in an Aotearoa New Zealand context. To complement the advice to the prime minister, an expanded role for the Royal Society Te Apärangi would support public and parliamentary understanding of science and science issues relevant to policy. (shrink)

Since its founding in 1863, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has occupied a special niche in the complex ecology of advice-giving in the United States. Established as a small, private organization with special responsibilities and obligations vis à vis the American people and government, the Academy has expanded considerably in the past century and a half and now releases, through the National Research Council (NRC), its operating arm, more than 200 reports per year, on topics covering nearly the (...) entire range of science, engineering, health, and education. The development of the organization, its basic ethos, and its evolving structures and processes can be seen as examples of what Herbert Simon called procedural rationality : the pursuit of reasonably good solutions to complex problems based on appropriate deliberation. (shrink)

Policy-makers often rely on scientists to inform their decisions. When advising policy-makers, what should scientists say? One view says that scientists ought to say what they have a high credence in. Another view says that scientists ought to say what they expect to lead to good policy outcomes. We explore a third view: scientists ought to say what they expect to make the policy-makers’ credences accurate.

A consistent claim from governments around the world during the Coronavirus pandemic has been that they were following the science. This raises the question, central to this paper, of what and whose knowledge is or should be sought, which is being side-lined through the choice of particular framings and discourses, and with what consequences for the creation and implementation of evidence-based policy to tackle wicked problems. Through the lens of Fricker’s epistemic injustice, I problematise the expertise that has guided (...) the COVID-19 response as epistemically narrow and argue that counteracting a monolithic culture of expertise requires tackling the structural inequalities in the systems of knowledge production to diversify the social and epistemological foundations of science. Drawing on Post-normal Science (PNS) theory, I suggest that the expertise needed to respond to the challenges of a post-COVID world is one that embraces greater pluralism, avoids groupthink, challenges the accepted orthodoxy and helps us revert old models and rigid path dependencies that so often neglect the lived realities and demands of those left behind. This can only be realised by overcoming epistemic injustice and embracing epistemic democracy in the practice of evidence-based policy. (shrink)

I address options for providing scientific policy advice and explore the relation between scientific knowledge and political, economic and moral values. I argue that such nonepistemic values are essential for establishing the significance of questions and the relevance of evidence, while, on the other hand, such social choices are the prerogative of society. This tension can be resolved by recognizing social values and identifying them as separate premises or as commissions while withholding commitment to them, and by elaborating a (...) plurality of policy packages that envisage the implementation of different social goals. There are limits to upholding the value-free ideal in scientific research. But by following the mentioned strategy, science can give useful policy advice by leaving the value-free ideal largely intact. Such scientific restraint avoids the risk of appearing to illegitimately impose values on the public and could make the advice given more trustworthy. (shrink)

The field of science and religion is undergoing a transition today requiring assessment of its past movements and identifying its future trajectories by the next generation of science and religion scholars. This essay provides such assessment and advice. To focus efforts on the past, I turn to Ian Barbour's own stock taking of the field some forty years ago in an essay entitled “Science and Religion Today” before giving some personal comments where I argue that much (...) of the field has traditionally focused on the conversation between Christianity and the natural sciences. At present, however, we are beginning to see that the future of the conversation lies beyond the dialogue between the natural sciences and Christianity. I suggest that the future dialogue will and ought to expand in several directions: into non-Christian religions and theology, into the human sciences, into science and technology Studies, and into the humanities more broadly. (shrink)

It can be challenging to introduce the philosophy of social science (PoS) to students in the social sciences. Noting the lack of literature providing guidance to the prospective PoS teacher, this paper outlines several pieces of advice on how to engage social science undergraduates in the subject. This advice centres on showing the relevance of the PoS in academia and beyond, reducing complexity and presenting only a few contending PoS perspectives. It is also proposed to use (...) textbooks with caution or avoiding them altogether, illustrating how PoS assumptions are embedded in contemporary social research and showing the connection between the PoS on one hand and research questions, methods, and theory on the other. Finally, the importance of showing students how they can make use of the PoS in their own work and teaching the subject in a ‘hands on’ manner is emphasized. (shrink)

“The play's the thing,” according to Hamlet . Stephen Hilgartner agrees, and he has taken the notion of performance—public drama—and used it as an extended metaphor and analytical tool to explore ways in which scientific advice is generated, how advisory bodies seek to present themselves, and how they achieve credibility.Hilgartner focuses on three reports from the 1980s of the National Academy of Sciences that deal with diet and health. These were not typical reports, for they generated huge controversies that (...) swirled around them. The reports' potential influence on doctors and patients, on the food and agriculture industries, and even on parents who admonish their children to drink their milk and eat their vegetables was also huge.Like most NAS products, the three reports were written by committees. The authors of the first one managed to fend off critics. The second was, to use Hilgartner's theatrical term, virtually “upstaged” by its critics. And the third was never published at all. The draft of this report, a 1985 study that dealt with recommended dietary allowances for foods, proved so disputatious that the effort was canceled by the president of the academy. All three cases are interesting and well presented, but the cancelled RDA report naturally has the most dramatic interest and is the most instructive.Credibility is the central issue in scientific advice. Even a body as august as the National Academy of Sciences cannot assume that its advice will be accepted at face value by policymakers, the public, or the scientific community itself. Hilgartner examines the techniques the academy used to enhance the credibility of its reports. These techniques included the literary structure of the publications as well as the maintenance of a sharp distinction between the “front stage” and “back stage” components of the advisory group's “performance.” Backstage, in the committee's deliberations, there may be sharp disagreements, but out front, the report is presented to the world as the product of consensus. Sometimes, however, these stage management techniques fail and internal dissension emerges into public view. Hilgartner's account of the saga of the RDA report illustrates how leaks and “unauthorized performances” effectively killed the report.Hilgartner carries the theatrical metaphor well beyond what one might expect in a scholarly book on science policy. In Chapter 4 he takes the academy's announcement canceling the 1985 RDA report and recasts it in explicitly dramatic form—a ten‐page script for a play entitled “A Letter from the Chairman: A Play in Three Acts,” complete with stage directions and a Greek chorus. Surprisingly, it works. While it may never be performed on Broadway, “A Letter from the Chairman” effectively makes Hilgartner's point. The episode illustrates how the academy, faced with a breakdown of its regular procedures, managed to portray the report's cancellation as “completely normal, … a logical consequence of the situation, not an aberration” .From my own standpoint as a political scientist, I might have liked a bit more emphasis on the interests the various committee members represented. Hilgartner acknowledges the roles vested interests play in the controversies that surrounded the three reports, but in maintaining his focus on information management by the academy, he fails to devote much attention to them. Similarly , he does not deal at all with a key category of scientific advice—that rendered privately by scientific advisors to policymakers.These are minor criticisms, however. On the whole this is an interesting and well‐written book that contributes a unique and valuable perspective to the literature on scientific advice given to the public. (shrink)

ADVICE TO THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS. INTRODUCTION. 'HE French Revolution is at last not plishment universally acknowledged, beyond contradiction abroad, ...

Graduate students often lack concrete advice on publishing. This essay is an attempt to fill this important gap. Advice is given on how to publish everything from book reviews to articles, replies to book chapters, and how to secure both edited book contracts and authored monograph contracts, along with plenty of helpful tips and advice on the publishing world (and how it works) along the way in what is meant to be a comprehensive, concrete guide to publishing (...) that should be of tremendous value to graduate students working in any area of the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

As many other countries, Austria was hit by the Corona pandemic by surprise. After a swift initial response, the continuing crisis laid bare deficiencies. This article investigates an unconventional intervention starting in March 2020: an ad-hoc body set up by scientists and policy makers in the unfolding of the initial Corona crisis, without official mandate and resources. The “Future Operations Platform” was an embodiment of the lack of science advice infrastructure in Austria. Yet the puzzle that the article (...) wants to explain is: why did the platform remain a place of deliberating scientific evidence in an inter- and transdisciplinary manner for three years? Three factors are investigated in detail: the specificity of the Austrian institutional landscape; the functioning of this partial organization; and the motivating factors to its members. Based on this analysis, the article concludes with what can be learned about policy structures in Austria, and the role of expertise in (post-) pandemic societies. (shrink)

This article compares two science advisory organizations: the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES), with a special focus on how their respective policy systems absorb the knowledge delivered for use in decision processes. The science-policy processes of these two organizations differ in important respects; ICES delivers highly specified knowledge to a specified uptake mechanism, while the IPCC produces unspecified knowledge for an unspecified uptake mechanism. Since both environmental (...) governance areas are criticized for lack of needed action, a comparison is of interest asking how this might relate to the organization of science advice. As theoretical resources for this explorative comparison we utilize two approaches from the field of science and technology studies: the co-production approach, which focuses on the entanglements of scientific and political processes, and the systems-theory-oriented multiple-worlds model, which assumes a clear difference in institutional logics between the scientific and the political field. Since the IPCC has been critically analysed by several studies utilizing resources from the two approaches, we contribute with new insights by bringing in ICES, which is a much less studied organization exposing a different science-policy structure. One important finding is that the two theoretical approaches focus on different aspects, exposing ‘links’ and ‘integration’, both of which we argue are important for analysing and assessing science advisory organizations. Moreover, these aspects can be advantageously integrated into a single theoretical framework. (shrink)

The literature addressing bias and fairness in AI models (fair-AI) is growing at a fast pace, making it difficult for novel researchers and practitioners to have a bird’s-eye view picture of the field. In particular, many policy initiatives, standards, and best practices in fair-AI have been proposed for setting principles, procedures, and knowledge bases to guide and operationalize the management of bias and fairness. The first objective of this paper is to concisely survey the state-of-the-art of fair-AI methods and resources, (...) and the main policies on bias in AI, with the aim of providing such a bird’s-eye guidance for both researchers and practitioners. The second objective of the paper is to contribute to the policy advice and best practices state-of-the-art by leveraging from the results of the NoBIAS research project. We present and discuss a few relevant topics organized around the NoBIAS architecture, which is made up of a Legal Layer, focusing on the European Union context, and a Bias Management Layer, focusing on understanding, mitigating, and accounting for bias. (shrink)

The norms and values of Post-Normal Science (PNS) are instrumental in guiding science advice practices. In this article, we report work in progress to systematically investigate the norms and values of PNS through a structured review. An archive of 397 documents was collected, including documents that contribute to the endeavour of ameliorating science advice practices from a PNS perspective. Action and structure-oriented viewpoints are used as complementing perspectives in the analysis of the ethos of PNS. (...) From the action-perspective we study how prototypes of norms and values are reflected upon in negotiations of normative issues relating to science advice. From the structural perspective we study how interrelated prototypes of norms and values are presupposed in prescriptions, proscriptions, and goals for science advice practices. Through this analysis we identify a plurality of interrelated prototypes of norms and values. Finally, we propose an acronym that integrates the analysed plurality of norms and values. As a mnemonic and communicative devise we call this ethos TRUST (Transparency, Robustness, Uncertainty management, Sustainability, and Transdisciplinarity) and propose TRUST as a nexus for future reflective negotiations of ambivalences in post-normal practices of science advice. (shrink)

This paper engages with two compelling challenges to physicalism, each designed to show that the nature of experience is elusive from the standpoint of physical science. It is argued that the physicalist is ultimately well placed to meet both challenges.

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are interactive tools used to assist in one’s choice of a party or candidate to vote for in an upcoming election. They have the potential to increase citizens’ trust and participation in democratic structures. However, there is no established ground truth for one’s electoral choice, and VAA recommendations depend strongly on architectural and design choices. We assessed several representative European VAAs according to the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI provided by the European Commission using publicly (...) available information. We found scores to be comparable across VAAs and low in most requirements, with differences reflecting the kind of developing institution. Across VAAs, we identify the need for improvement in (i) transparency regarding the subjectivity of recommendations, (ii) diversity of stakeholder participation, (iii) user-centric documentation of algorithm, and (iv) disclosure of the underlying values and assumptions. (shrink)

One recent problem in philosophy of science is, “Ought a methodology be construed, not merely as an instrument of appraisal, but also as a source of advice to the practising scientist?” Imre Lakatos and John Worrall, among others, have answered the question in the negative. Alan Musgrave disagrees. In a section entitled, “Appraisals and Advice,” in [9], Musgrave attempts to give us a deductive argument in support of his claim that methodologies should be construed as giving (...) class='Hi'>advice. After briefly explaining the plausibility of the claim, I shall present Musgrave's argument in full, and then examine each of his premises. I will try to show that his attempt to answer the above question in the affirmative raises some interesting questions, and which must be answered if his venture is to succeed. I should add, that if my objections are successful against Musgrave's attempt, it would be a Pyrrhic victory: I am neither an inductivist nor do I think that the answer to the question should be in the negative. (shrink)

‘Scientific advice to politics’, the ‘nature of expertise’, and the ‘relation between experts, policy makers, and the public’ are variations of a topic that currently attracts the attention of social scientists, philosophers of science as well as practitioners in the public sphere and the media. This renewed interest in a persistent theme is initiated by the call for a democratization of expertise that has become the order of the day in the legitimation of research funding. The new significance (...) of ‘participation’ and ‘accountability’ has motivated scholars to take a new look at the science – politics interface and to probe questions such as "What is new in the arrangement of scientific expertise and political decision-making?", "How can reliable knowledge be made useful for politics and society at large, and how can epistemically and ethically sound decisions be achieved without losing democratic legitimacy?", "How can the objective of democratization of expertise be achieved without compromising the quality and reliability of knowledge?" Scientific knowledge and the ‘experts’ that represent it no longer command the unquestioned authority and public trust that was once bestowed upon them, and yet, policy makers are more dependent on them than ever before. This collection of essays explores the relations between science and politics with the instruments of the social studies of science, thereby providing new insights into their re-alignment under a new régime of governance. (shrink)

The president’s science advisor was formerly established in the days following the Soviet launch of Sputnik at the height of the Cold War, creating an impression of scientists at the center of presidential power. However, since that time the role of the science advisor has been far more prosaic, with a role that might be more aptly described as a coordinator of budgets and programs, and thus more closely related to the functions of the Office of Management and (...) Budget than the development of presidential policy. This role dramatically enhances the position of the scientific community to argue for its share of federal expenditures. At the same time, scientific and technological expertise permeates every function of government policy and politics, and the science advisor is only rarely involved in wider White House decision making. The actual role of the science advisor as compared to its heady initial days, in the context of an overall rise of governmental expertise, provides ample reason to reconsider the role of the presidential science advisor, and to set our expectations for that role accordingly. (shrink)

I offer a theory of advice. The theory has two parts: an account of the nature of advice, and an account of the quality of advice. In Sect. 2 I defend this definition: Advice: P advises R to X iff P communicates about X-ing to R in a manner that intentionally presents X-ing as worth reasoning to by R. In Sect. 4, I defend a tripartite account of the quality of advice: the standards relevant to (...) whether advice is good concern rational agency in general, the advisee’s particular situation, and the topic of the advice. These accounts of the nature and quality of advice are superior to extant alternatives on the basis of both descriptive adequacy and absurdity. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the defection of nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo from Britain to the USSR in 1950 in an attempt to understand how government and intelligence services assess threats deriving from the unwanted spread of secret scientific information. It questions whether contingent agendas play a role in these assessments, as new evidence suggests that this is exactly what happened in the Pontecorvo case. British diplomatic personnel involved in negotiations with their US counterparts considered playing down the case. Meanwhile, the (...) press decided to play it up, claiming that Pontecorvo was an atom spy. Finally, the British secret services had evidence showing that this was a fabrication, but they did not disclose it. If all these manipulations served various purposes, then they certainly were not aimed at assessing if there was a threat and what this threat really was. (shrink)

Recent research in ethics education shows a potentially problematic variation in content, curricular materials, and instruction. While ethics instruction is now widespread, studies have identified significant variation in both the goals and methods of ethics education, leaving researchers to conclude that many approaches may be inappropriately paired with goals that are unachievable. This paper speaks to these concerns by demonstrating the importance of aligning classroom-based assessments to clear ethical learning objectives in order to help students and instructors track their progress (...) toward meeting those objectives. Two studies at two different universities demonstrate the usefulness of classroom-based, formative assessments for improving the quality of students’ case responses in computational modeling and research ethics. (shrink)

Scientific claims implicitly invite criticism. While we might expect that challenging an epistemic authority in religious circles would be seen as an illegitimate activity (e.g. heresy) and met with suppression, challenging an epistemic authority in scientific circles is supposed to be a legitimate form of engagement, and should (ideally) be met with reasoned argument based in empirical evidence. Given this implicit invitation to challenge scientific claims, and the sweeping knowledge claims often made by today’s scientists, it is hardly surprising that (...) people outside narrowly defined scientific communities (i.e. science’s “public”) often challenge the truth of scientific consensuses. The scrutiny of scientific claims by non-scientist members of the public is quite understandable and in many ways unobjectionable, given the role that science advice increasingly plays in our society’s governance structures and public policy making. As scientists increasingly play policy-maker, they become doubly subject to public criticism: first as a scientist making substantive claims about reality and second as public-interest decision-maker making important decisions about public policy. Thus, for the scientist’s social role as epistemic authority to remain justified, public criticism of science should ideally be entertained and answered by practicing scientists. (shrink)

Advances in technology have not only given rise to many important questions in bioethics but have also made the whole subject something of an ethical minefield. Bioethics now involves practices that give rise to ethical dilemmas in such diverse fields as medicine, biology, and even physics and chemistry. The success and future potential of scientific research in bioethics has contributed to the growing perception that science has a kind of hegemony over modern life, and this brings with it a (...) temptation to make scientists the gurus of modern culture, to look to them for answers to all human problems. (shrink)

During the coming decades, life scientists will become involved more than ever in the public and private lives of patients and consumers, as health and food sciences shift from a collective approach towards individualization, from a curative to a preventive approach, and from being driven by desires rather than by technology. This means that the traditional relationships between the activities of life scientists – conducting research, advising industry, governments, and patients/consumers, consulting the public, and prescribing products, be it patents, drugs (...) or food products, information, or advice – are getting blurred. Traditional concepts of the individual, role, task, and collective responsibility have to be revised. This paper argues, from a pragmatic point of view, that the concept of public responsibility can contribute considerably in delineating new gray zones between the various roles of the life scientist: conducting research for governments or industry, giving advice, prescribing and selling products, and doing public consultation. The main issues are where new Chinese walls (not Berlin walls) need to be built between these activities, thereby increasing trust between life scientists and the public at large, and how to organize research agendas and to decide upon research topics. (shrink)

The policy decision to recommend the vaccination of children against COVID was a controversial one - a controversy that Guibilini and colleagues characterize as stemming from expert disagreement. I argue that scientific dissent was not the primary issue here - rather, this is a problem of a persistent ambiguity concerning what standard needs to be met for the vaccination of children to be justified - which potential benefits should we take into account, and for whom? I trace the decision-making process (...) in both the UK and the US to draw this out, and then consider some of the key ethical questions we need to consider when adopting a standard of justification. (shrink)

In response to political pressures arising from controversial science policy decisions, the United Kingdom (UK) government conducted a review of its biotechnology governance framework in 1999, identifying best practices of open government and creating strategic bodies to adopt them. Drawing from empirical data on the context and nature of the open government framework, this paper argues that the framework may be interpreted as elasticizing objectivity. Value-neutral scientific objectivity is essentially 'stretched' into a pluralist objectivity that purports to represent a (...) spectrum of interests without privileging any, allowing the policy culture to retain its legitimating objectivity and authority. Governance implications of this analysis are discussed. (shrink)

The pathway from scientific knowledge (based on data, models, and forecasts) to societal implications and policy advice is a perilous one. The shift from "is" to "ought" may be slippery in terms of climate, biodiversity, regulations, and business. Yet, what is to be done if one's research discloses that fellow humans are unwittingly carrying out destructive actions on a large scale? If they are unaware of the dynamics within which they are (or are in danger of becoming) imprisoned, is (...) there then not an ethical obligation to respond beyond the scope of one's given role? This dilemma lies at the core of the issue of science-based activism, which the life and work of Jorgen Randers in many ways epitomizes. The best means of understanding science-based activism can be found in exploring Randers' steps, as this festschrift does. [Jorgen Randers (born 1945) co-authored The Limits to Growth in 1972 and its sequels in 1992 and 2004. He is a Professor of Climate Strategy at the Norwegian Business School in Oslo where he works on climate and energy issues, system dynamics, and green growth. Randers was President of the Norwegian Business School/BI 1981-89, and Deputy Director General of WWF International 1994-99. He chaired the Norwegian Commission on a Low-Emission Society which reported in 2006. In 2012, his work 2052 - A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years was published.] [Subject: Science, Ethics, Environmental Studies]. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper examines the interaction between economic models and policy advice through a case study of the U.K. government's Panel of Independent Forecasters. The Panel, which met for the first time in February 1993, was part of the government's response to the policy vacuum created by its departure from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. The paper focuses on the policy recommendations made by the Panel and their foundation in economic models. It is argued that, because of their ambiguity, (...) economic models do not provide an “objective” basis for policy making. Rather, they provide a level epistemological basis for debating the various social, political, and moral theories that can be used to frame economic policy. The paper concludes that although economic models often serve to depoliticize economic issues, they also have the potential to do exactly the opposite — namely, repoliticize them by connecting economics to wider social and moral debates. (shrink)

We often need to have beliefs about things on which we are not experts. Luckily, we often have access to expert judgements on such topics. But how should we form our beliefs on the basis of expert opinion when experts conflict in their judgments? This is the core of the novice/2-expert problem in social epistemology. A closely related question is important in the context of policy making: how should a policy maker use expert judgments when making policy in domains in (...) which she is not herself an expert? This question is more complex, given the messy and strategic nature of politics. In this paper we argue that the prediction with expert advice framework from machine learning provides helpful tools for addressing these problems. We outline conditions under which we should expert PWEA to be helpful and those under which we should not expect these methods to perform well. (shrink)

This article investigates an overlooked aspect of the life and work of the Viennese child psychologist Charlotte Bühler. Known for directing a department of child psychology at the Vienna Psychological Institute, Bühler intermittently lived in London from 1934 until her emigration to the United States in 1940. There she established a wide network of connections in the fields of child psychology and progressive education, provided training to several child psychologists, opened a child guidance centre, and dispensed advice in the (...) parenting magazine The Nursery World. The growing interest in and exploration of the psychology of children in interwar and wartime Britain was marked by significant theoretical divergences and conflicts, but investigation of Charlotte Bühler’s time in London elucidates how the field also developed through the interplay and interrelationship of different approaches, including those of the Vienna School of Child Psychology. (shrink)

The emergence of the global administrative sector and its new forms of knowledge production, expert rationality, and standardization, remains an understudied topic in science studies. Using a coproductionist theoretical framework, we argue tha the mutual construction of epistemic and legal authority across international organizations has been critical for constituting and stabilizing a global regime for the regulation of food safety. The authors demonstrate how this process has also given rise to an authoritative framework for risk analysis touted as ‘‘scientifically (...) rigorous’’ but embodying particular value choices regarding health, environment, and the dispensation of regulatory power. Finally, the authors trace how enrollment of the Codex Alimentarius in World Trade Law has heightened institutional dilemmas around legitimacy and credibility in science advice at the global level. Taken together, the case illustrates the importance of attending to the iterative construction of law and science in the constitution of new global administrative regimes. (shrink)