An Intermediate Approach to Value Management

The epistemic projection approach (EPA) is an intermediate approach to value management in science. It recognizes that there are sometimes good reasons to make research responsive to contextual values, but it achieves this responsiveness via the careful formulation of a research problem in the problem-selection stage of investigation. EPA is thus an approach that could be acceptable to some parties on both sides of the debate over the value-free ideal. Independent of this, EPA provides practitioners with concrete guidance on how to make research responsive to contextual values. This is illustrated with an example involving air pollution. Readers may be interested in these Handbook chapters as well: Matthew J. Brown, “Recent Arguments for the Ideal of Value-Free Science”; Bennett Holman and T. Y. Branch, “Reflecting on Responses to the New Demarcation Problem.”