Models of democracy in social studies of science
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Science and Technology Studies (STS) offers contrasting normative visions of how to democratically manage the relations between experts and larger publics in contemporary liberal democracies. This lack of uniformity has not stopped advocates of participatory politics from implying that to be anything other than staunch defenders of ‘the public’ is to be illiberal and undemocratic. But if we turn to political philosophy, part of liberal democratic theory is the attempt to theorize how deliberation might include limits to public discourse. This paper treats the debate between Sheila Jasanoff and Brian Wynne, on one side, and Harry Collins and Robert Evans, on the other, as representative of opposing normative sensibilities within STS. Jasanoff and Wynne claim that widespread deliberation is the democratic means for protecting publics from experts who colonize public meanings. Collins and Evans caution that a failure to draw distinctions between publics and experts, or politics and expertise, undermines expertise and is impractical for democracy. By relating both of these approaches to prominent positions and traditions within political philosophy, I aim to illuminate different senses of democracy. Jasanoff and Wynne appear to have the normative upper hand, but only because their approach dovetails with a politics of identity, which is widespread in contemporary political discourse. However, it is an unsatisfactory view of the grounds of public discourse. I argue that Collins and Evans work within a different tradition, that of John Rawls and liberal egalitarianism. Explicating these links helps to disrobe the implication that Collins and Evans are anti-democratic in their effort to impose restrictions on public engagement with expertise.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.087 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it