CFP: Values and Pluralism in the Environmental Sciences: From Inferences to Institutions

Submission deadline: July 15, 2020

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Call for Papers for Special Issue in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences

Philosophers of science continue to enrich our understanding of the roles that values play in the reasoning, practice, and institutions of science. This special issue will focus on the environmental sciences, a mosaic of fields ranging from restoration ecology to forestry to climatology, unified by their attention to the relationships between humans and their habitats. It is a field that revolves around understanding environmental systems and ameliorating environmental problems, aiming to support the provision of natural goods and provide guidance to policymakers deciding how to regulate individuals and industries. Environmental sciences and management are pervasively laden with non-epistemic values, and so provide fertile ground for analyses of coupled epistemic and ethical values. A sustained survey of the field can surface a number of paradigmatic questions with implications for science and values more generally. How, for instance, should environmental scientists define the boundaries of an ecosystem under investigation? Through what processes and practices can we determine which and whose values ought to inform environmental science, and at what stage in scientific practice? How should we manage conflicts between different values? And how could or should the institutions supporting environmental sciences and environmental management be organized to adequately represent divergent values? Contributors are welcome to explore other questions that will advance scholarship on how the ethical, social, and political do and should inform environmental science, management, and associated institutions and industries, as well as general questions on doing science in a pluralistic society that can shed light on environmental sciences.

We encourage philosophical as well as social scientific investigations of the roles that values do and should play in the environmental sciences. Interested authors should prepare full manuscripts for blind review according to the author guidelines established by Studies in History and Philosophy of Biology and Biomedical Sciences and available here. During the submission process, please select “VSI: Values in Env Sciences” as the Issue Type.

The special issue is in part a compilation of invited papers from Doing Science in a Pluralistic Society, a colloquium hosted by the University of Dayton in March 2020. Information about the colloquium is available online, and though not required to contribute to the special issue, we welcome potential contributors to attend the colloquium. If you have any questions about either the colloquium or the special issue, or would like us to review a 300-word abstract before you prepare your manuscript for submission, please contact the editors:

Zachary Piso                                                    Viorel Pâslaru

University of Dayton                                       University of Dayton

[email protected]                                      [email protected]

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