Values, Pluralism, and Pragmatism: Themes from the Work of Matthew J. Brown

Jonathan Y. Tsou · Jamie Shaw · Carla Fehr

Jul 2025 · Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science Book 347 · Springer Nature

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338

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About this ebook

This book offers eighteen original historical and philosophical essays focused on values in science, scientific pluralism, and pragmatism. These themes have been central in the work of Matthew J. Brown, and the book frames these topics through an engagement with Brown's broadly ranging work on values in science. The themes of this book are integrated and unified in the pragmatic and value-laden ideal of science defended by Professor Brown in his fascinating 2020 book, Science and Moral Imagination. Brown's ideal of moral imagination prescribes that scientists should recognize the contingencies in their work as unforced choices, examine morally salient aspects of these decisions, recognize the various interests of relevant stakeholders, explore and construct alternative options, and exercise fair and warranted value judgments to guide those decisions. The interdisciplinary essays in this volume engage with different aspects of Brown's philosophical research on scientific values as well as his historical research on figures such as John Dewey and Paul K. Feyerabend. With a fresh focus on topics such as moral imagination, inductive risk, and epistemic priority in various socially salient contexts (e.g., artificial intelligence, psychiatry, segregation research), this book is of great interest to a broad audience of researchers working in philosophy of science, philosophy of medicine, history and philosophy of science, and science and technology studies.

About the author

Jonathan Y. Tsou is a Professor of Philosophy, the Marvin and Kathleen Stone Distinguished Professor of Humanities in Medicine and Science, and Director of the Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology (CVMST) at the University of Texas at Dallas. His research interests include general philosophy of science, history of philosophy of science, and philosophy of psychiatry. He is author of Philosophy of Psychiatry (2021, Cambridge University Press), co-editor of Technology Ethics (2023, Routledge), and co-editor of Objectivity in Science (2015, Boston Studies in Philosophy and History of Science). He currently serves as a member of the Governing Board for the Philosophy of Science Association.

Jamie Shaw a Postdoctoral Fellow at Leibniz University Hannover and a Sessional Instructor in the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at University of Toronto. His research interests include philosophy of science, history of philosophy of science, social epistemology, and philosophy of science policy. He is co-editor of Interpreting Feyerabend: Critical Essays (2021, Cambridge University Press), and a co-editor for numerous special issues in journals (Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for History of Philosophy of Science, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science). He is currently working on a book (University of Pittsburgh Press) on the new topic of philosophy of science policy.

Carla Fehr is an Associate Professor and the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at the University of Waterloo. Her research interests include feminist epistemology and philosophy of science, socially relevant philosophy of science, scientific pluralism, and philosophy of biology. She is a co-editor for numerous special issues in journals (Synthese, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly), including issues devoted to the topics of socially relevant philosophy of science and feminist analyses of artificial intelligence. She is a founding editor of the journal Feminist Philosophy Quarterly and the first (interim) Director of the Consortium for Socially Relevant Philosophy of/ in Science and Engineering (SRPoiSE).

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