Science, values, and society: themes from Helen Longino

On the occasion of Helen Longino’s talk at the University of Iceland on the 8th of October 2025, we are organising a mini-workshop on themes from Longino’s philosophical work on the 10th of October 2025. This will be a half-day workshop, with lunch, and Longino will be in attendance.

Helen Longino has been one of the most influential contributors to discussions of the role of values in science, the nature of objectivity in science, and the social nature of scientific knowledge. Through classic works like Science as Social Knowledge (1990) and The Fate of Knowledge (2002) to more recent work on behavioural sciences, Longino has brought to the fore the positive and negative ways in which values influence, contribute to, and constrain scientific inquiry. Science is inherently social and the values that shape scientific inquiry are not to be neglected, playing an important role in the very possibility of objectivity in science. This workshop aims to bring together scholars working on and drawing from the work of Helen Longino.

10th October – Workshop

Location: Stapi 107.

Address: Hringbraut 31, 102 Reykjavík, Island.

Each speaker will have up to 30 minutes to speak, leaving at least 15 minutes for discussion. 

• 10.00: Arrival and coffee.
• 10.30: David Rojas Lizama (University of Edinburgh)
• Extreme weather events and underdetermination: reflections on values in attribution science from Longino’s view
• 11.15: Laida Arbizu Aguirre [Online] (University of the Basque Country)
• Denialism and the Fragility of Scientific Objectivity: Extending Helen Longino’s Social Epistemology
• 12.00: Lunch at the university.
• 13.00: Kristina Bogdan (University of Vienna)
•  Interaction as an ontological category: Was it missing?
• 13.45: Adham El Shazly (University of Cambridge)
• Shared Inquiry & Attunement
• 14.30: Closing remarks.