Abstract

I am very grateful for the thoughtful and illuminating comments of Linda Alcoff, Sharyn Clough, Marianne Janack, and Charles Mills on my Hypatia paper. Together, they raise several related questions about the status of value judgments and the roles they might legitimately play in scientific inquiry. Two common concerns relate to the proper scope of the legitimate use of value judgments in science, and whether there are significant differences between value judgments and factual judgments with respect to their revisability. Let me take up these common questions first.