Celer

Andrew Wakefield was funded by some people suing vaccine manufacturers to publish some extremely damaging research. With a sample size of twelve people, he “found” that the Measles-Mumps-Rubella vaccine caused autism, kicking off the modern anti-vax movement. In most places where I spend time, anti-vaxxers are an easy target. They’re not just wrong: they’re harming people. And when we desist, it’s because we realize that spending time mocking people who are obviously wrong is bad for us (here’s Scott for an example). “You need to do your research”: Vaccines, contestable science, and maternal epistemology is a fascinating article because it’s a sympathetic view of the “critical, postmodern, and feminist perspectives on science and knowledge production” by anti-vax mothers. The author has a Ph.D. in Communications and an MA in English Lit, Critical Theory, and Women's Studies: she's sympathetic to their concerns and, when she talks about multiple sources of knowledge and contesting scientific explanations of the world, is familiar with a compatible intellectual tradition. And with quotes from her article, I’m going to try to demonstrate just how divorced reasoning processes can be from outcomes by showing how people can land on very familiar views that I expect many of my readers to share, while also drawing from painfully bad epistemology. Epistemic status: this is a qualitative study with a sample size of 50 people. Worse, it’s someone sympathetically reporting these mothers’ framings to an audience, instead of giving us access to the raw data. Take everything here with several grains of salt. > Participants in this study lacked confidence in the quality of much published research on this topic in light of traditional scientific standards. > > Arguments maintained the ideal of expert knowledge but challenged particular claims to expertise > > Arguments from participants were not based in a contention that participants had the right to be included in the techn