Reflecting on Responses to the new Demarcation Problem

There is a general consensus in the philosophy of science that values play a legitimate role in scientific reasoning. Given this, the debate has turned to the New Demarcation Problem, that is, what differentiates the legitimate from the illegitimate value influences. In this chapter, we first provide a summary of the paper that originally proposed framing the legitimate/illegitimate distinction as a demarcation problem. Following this we review initial attempts to solve the problem and where they appear to fall short. Next, we discuss higher level critiques that argue that the problem itself needs to be reformulated in some way. We close with a lesson for the future direction of the debate drawn from the original demarcation problem. Readers may be interested in these Handbook chapters as well: Kirstin Borgerson, “Critical Contextual Empiricism”; Stephen John, “Transparency in Science”; Tarun Menon and Jacob Stegenga “Democracy, Consensus, and the Value-Free Ideal”; S. Andrew Schroeder, “Scientific Knowledge as a Public Resource: Arguments and Challenges for a Democratic Approach to Values in Science.”