‘Berg’s Center for Ethics Presents Talk with Dr. Heather Douglas
The Muhlenberg College Center for Ethics will host Dr. Heather Douglas on Thursday, September 23rd, 2010 in the Miller Forum of Moyer Hall at 7pm. The event is free and open to the public.Wednesday, September 15, 2010 11:45 AM
Heather Douglas, a member of the Governing Board of the Philosophy of Science Association, will discuss her book, Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal. Dr. Douglas combines science and public policy and studies how together they impact the philosophy of science. This work focuses on the role of values in scientific reasoning. Through her studies, Douglas declines the beliefs that science is a field where scientists are not impacted by moral and societal values. She presents her audience methods of distinguishing between “real science” and “junk science.”
Douglas investigates how the nature of scientific research has positive implications for how scientific knowledge is used in policy decisions in government. She is interested in how the movement of scientific philosophy became the discipline of philosophy of science. This year she is working on how to weigh complex sets of evidence from multiple disciplines for use in the policy process, developing an explanatory approach, and comparing it to other approaches.
Douglas received a bachelor’s degree in physics and philosophy at the University of Delaware. She received her Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1998. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, supported by the National Science Foundation.
This talk is part of a year-long series of events, Science and Sensibility: Studying Nature as a Human Endeavor, directed by Dr. Bruce Wightman, Professor of Biology.
For more information on the series, please visit http://www.muhlenberg.edu/main/aboutus/cfe/
