How to Assess the Epistemic Wrongness of Sponsorship Bias? The Case of Manufactured Certainty

Abstract

Although the impact of so-called “sponsorship bias” has been the subject of increased attention in the philosophy of science, what exactly constitutes its epistemic wrongness is still debated. In this paper, I will argue that neither evidential accounts nor social–epistemological accounts can fully account for the epistemic wrongness of sponsorship bias, but there are good reasons to prefer social–epistemological to evidential accounts. I will defend this claim by examining how both accounts deal with a paradigm case from medical epistemology, recently discussed in a paper by Bennett Holman. I will argue that evidential accounts cannot adequately capture cases of sponsorship bias that involve the manufacturing of certainty because of their neutrality with respect to the role of non-epistemic values in scientific practice. If my argument holds, it further highlights the importance of integrating social and ethical concerns into epistemological analysis, especially in applied contexts. One can only properly grasp sponsorship bias as an epistemological problem if one resists the methodological tendency to analyze social, ethical, and epistemological issues in isolation from each other.

Epistemic errors in students’ four fundamental operations of whole numbers: a radical constructivist grounded theory (RCGT) approach

“…In this sense, non-epistemic errors can be one's non-judgmental and non-circumstantial errors that are aleatory in nature, whereas epistemic errors are due to uncertainty in a model or process during problem solving (Beven 2013;Kozak 2017). Epistemic errors can further be associated with epistemic wrongness due to insufficient information or false beliefs, and lack of epistemic justification (Leefmann 2021). In this way, students' mathematical errors can be understood in terms of epistemic and non-epistemic errors.…”

How to Improve Research Funding in Academia? Lessons From the COVID-19 Crisis

“…Moreover, from the perspective of the general public, industry research is always questioned because monetary interests might influence it. Sponsorship bias-a tendency of researchers working in the private sector to align their results with the interest of their funders-has been widely discussed in philosophy of science (e.g., Holman and Elliott, 2018;Leefmann, 2021). Some authors even go as far as opposing intellectual property in life sciences (Brown, 2008).…”