Epistemic Due Care in Evidence-Based Policy

The Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF)´s Resident Research Group “The Epistemology of Evidence-Based Policy: How Philosophy can facilitate the Science-Policy Interface” is holding its third workshop. The workshop is titled “Epistemic Standards of Due Care”. It will deal with the question of what it means to hold beliefs responsibly and what standards of epistemic due care are appropriate in the context of public policy. While this question is increasingly attracting attention in philosophical circles, this is still an emerging field of research in epistemology and much more so in philosophy of public policy. The workshop will therefore address the following questions:

• What are the epistemic obligations of different agents involved in Evidence-Based Policy?
• Which different roles and responsibilities for knowledge producers (researchers), knowledge users (policy makers) and knowledge brokers (intermediary organizations) can be identified?
• What are policy makers epistemic obligations to be ‘in the know’, to avoid potentially harmful ignorance and to have enough information for responsible action?
• How do scientists and policy makers act responsibly in a socio-political environment where certain groups of people have been discredited or taken less seriously in their capacity as ‘knowers’ and certain types of evidence feature less prominently in policy-making?
• Policy-making is a group-based process: how does knowledge have to be distributed in a group for the group to be able to act / adopt decisions based on that knowledge? How can groups know or fail to know certain things / adopt certain beliefs?
• How does the epistemic environment impact policy-makers and when is such impact problematic?

To answer these questions a broad range of experts and scientists from the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities will come together and use insights from research and theoretical reflexion.

All interested are invited to participate, but registration is requested.

For those who wish to participate online (via Zoom), please register at the following link: https://uni-bielefeld.zoom.us/meeting/register/u50rf-yvqj8pHNRvQY24nONSyXnf3nAa_3Wz

For those who wish to participate on-site, please email the research group's coordinator Dr Ricardo Kaufer at [email protected]