Normativity of Methods

From Sustainability Methods
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This sub-wiki is dedicated to deliberations, open questions and new ideas about science. Often, these highlight how the choice and application of scientific methods and the interpretation of scientific results relate to values and norms, the philosophy of science and the general question how science relates to the 'real world'.

Normativity can be defined as any form of evaluation by humans. Some things are evaluated to be better than others. Normativity of methods hence deals with the question of evaluation of methods by entities such as disciplines, scientific communities, cicil societies, schools of thinking etc, and we try to link these reflections with a post-disciplinary agenda. In philosophy normativity is often associated to actions or mental states and the question what we ought to do, which is naturally linked to ethics. We consider the choice of method within science to be normative because of the question of knowledge production, which is a normative choice. The choice of method and any preference for a method is a normative choice.

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