Workshop „History of Scientific Policy Advice“

Recent discussion and debate on scientific policy advice has focused on the possibility – and difficulty – of establishing accepted standards of quality in a highly complicated field of activity, with numerous participants and varied interests at stake. The aims of this workshop are (1) to consider the ways in which quality standards for scientific policy advice have changed over time and have varied in particular contexts of application, and (2) to analyse such long-term processes of change in the context of deep alterations on the relations of science and politics as well as changing criteria of scientific “objectivity.”

Discussion at the workshop will be based on the following basic assumptions:

1. An understanding of the cognitive contents and epistemic status of sciences requires contextualizing the languages and the research practices of the sciences and studying changes in each over time.<o:p></o:p>
2. In turn, sustainable analyses of scientific policy advice based on the criteria of epistemic and social robustness will depend upon close studies of what counts as epistemically or socially robust in different contexts of use over time. <o:p></o:p>

For practical reasons, exploration of such historical issues in the workshop will be limited to the 19th and 20th centuries, and primarily to parliamentary democracies.
The contributors share the ability and willingness to synthesize results from multiple case studies in order to broaden the scope of the analysis. Participants include: Tal Golan (history of science and law, University of California at San Diego); Volker Hess (history of medicine, Humboldt University of Berlin); Justus Lentsch (sociogy/science studies, University of Bielefeld, co-ordinator of the Research Group “Scientific Policy Advice in Democracies”); Theodore Porter (history of science, University of California at Los Angeles); Wilfried Rudloff (political science, University of Kassel); and Peter Weingart (sociology/science studies, Speaker of the Research Group “Scientific Policy Advice in Democracies”). Workshop organizer is Mitchell Ash (historian of science, University of Vienna).

The workshop is a joint effort of the Interdisciplinary Research Group “Scientific Policy Advice in Democracy” of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the Working Group “Science in Contexts of Application” at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Bielefeld.