Bennett Holman

Industry is a major source of funding for scientific research. There is also a growing concern for how it corrupts researchers faced with conflicts of interest. As such, the debate has focused on whether researchers have maintained their integrity. In this article we draw on both the history of medicine and formal modeling to argue that given methodological diversity and a merit-based system, industry funding can bias a community without corrupting any particular individual. We close by consider

Abstract Private companies provide by far the most funding for scientific research and development. Nevertheless, relatively little attention has been paid to the dynamics of industry‐funded research by philosophers of science. This paper addresses this gap by providing an overview of the major strengths and weaknesses of industry research funding, together with the existing recommendations for addressing the weaknesses. It is designed to provide a starting point for future philosophical work th

In recent years the social nature of scientific inquiry has generated considerable interest. We examine the effect of an epistemically impure agent on a community of honest truth seekers. Extending a formal model of network epistemology pioneered by Zollman, we conclude that an intransigently biased agent prevents the community from ever converging to the truth. We explore two solutions to this problem, including a novel procedure for endogenous network formation in which agents choose whom to t

Abstract “Female sexual dysfunction” is the type of contested disease that has sparked concern about the role of the pharmaceutical industry in medical science. Many policies have been proposed to manage industry influence without carefully evaluating whether the proposed policies would be successful. We consider a proposal for incorporating citizen stakeholders into scientific research and show, via a detailed case study of the pharmaceutical regulation of flibanserin (misleadingly marketed as

I consider the claims made by medical ethicists that funding by pharmaceutical companies threaten the integrity of medical research and the claims of philosophers of science that evidence-based medicine can provide a sound epistemic foundation on which to base medical treatment decisions. Drawing on both game theory and medical history, I argue that both medical ethicists and philosophers of science have missed crucial aspects of medical research. I show that both veritistic and commercial aims

Post-truth politics has led to a number of prominent reflections on the extent to which the basic tenets of STS (social construction, the symmetry thesis, etc.) must be amended (Briggle 2016; Latour 2004; Sismondo 2017a). Alternatively, others have argued that the basic principles of STS should be maintained and the similarities of STS with post-truth should be embraced (Fuller 2016b; Woolgar 2017). After first critiquing other scholars read on post-truth politics, I argue that one of the centra

Agent-based models have played a prominent role in recent debates about the merits of democracy. In particular, the formal model of Lu Hong and Scott Page and the associated “diversity trumps ability” result has typically been seen to support the epistemic virtues of democracy over epistocracy (i.e., governance by experts). In this paper we first identify the modeling choices embodied in the original formal model and then critique the application of the Hong-Page results to philosophical debates

The field of research policy has conducted extensive research on partnerships between industry and academics and concluded that such collaborations are generally beneficial. Such a view stands in stark contrast to the literature in the philosophy of science which almost wholly finds such collaborations corrosive to scientific inquiry. After reviewing the respective literatures, I propose explanations for these polarized views which support the claim that both disciplines have only a partial vant