Responsible Research and Innovation: Experts, values and judgements

Expertise, judgement and values are huge topics in philosophy, psychology and the social sciences in general. I am no expert on these issues. However, I believe that the new Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) agenda imposes a duty to reflect on these notions on those who, like me, are supposed to ‘implement’ RRI within large …

Harry Collins on gravitational waves

About 10 days ago a team of scientists at the South Pole made, it seems, a new discovery related to the Big Bang, inflation and gravitational waves. I quickly penned a blog post about this in which I looked at how this discovery was framed through the use of various metaphors. While writing the post, …

The values of science as a cultural institution

In the context of discussions about a controversial essay by Steven Pinker, entitled ‘Science is not your enemy‘, I came across a blog post by Jon Brock which mentioned two blooklets that were new to me. They were written by the famous scientist and science communicator Jacob Bronowski. One was The Common Sense of Science …